Why does Valorant take so long to load?

Could be Riot Vanguard. The anti-cheat loads at system startup and sometimes causes delays when booting the game.

It usually depends on your PC’s disk speed — if you're still on an HDD, Valorant can take ages to load. SSD makes a huge difference.

For me, the long loading times started after one of the updates. It seems like Valorant’s patching system checks a lot of files before actually launching. Also, if you haven’t restarted your PC in a while, Vanguard might bug out and delay everything — a quick reboot sometimes fixes it.

Check background apps — things like Discord overlays or recording software can slow it down a lot.

It might not be Valorant itself but your internet. The game does some server sync checks at startup.

It’s a combo of hardware and Riot’s systems. If your drive is slow (especially older HDDs), loading assets takes longer. On top of that, Riot Vanguard initializes early and does some low-level system checks which can add extra seconds. If you're using a potato PC or lots of background tasks, it stacks up.

Slow disk + Vanguard checks + background apps = long loads. Reboot and SSD fix most issues