As of the latest title update, Cyberpunk will crash to the desktop almost immediately after starting it if it's not launched via the GOG Galaxy client. You can get around this by deleting a .dll file in the game's installation folder, but if you do, the Phantom Liberty DLC isn't recognized when you get into the game. This means that as of right now, Phantom Liberty is completely unplayable without being logged into the Galaxy client and having it running. I even completely uninstalled both Galaxy and Cyberpunk, and this behavior was the same after reinstalling Cyberpunk and Phantom Liberty using the latest offline installers.

EDIT: Putting the main Cyberpunk .exe into Windows 7 compatibility mode seems to fix it, at least somewhat. I was able to start the game and had full access to the base game and the DLC without Galaxy running, but it was a crapshoot whether or not it would crash at the start like it does without compatibility mode on.

EDIT 2: I figured out a more reliable fix, and this one should also make it easier to get the game working again in Linux and on the Steam Deck:

https://www.gog.com/forum/cyberpunk_2077/a_fix_for_the_crashing

Holy Hell, man! How in the name of all things sensible did you have the patience and time to figure this out? This is indeed the answer. The fucked up part is that Windows 7 support was dropped for this game. The other funny thing is that I'm getting spectacular performance from my 3090 with frame drops never going below 41 with max settings 1440p DLSS Quality Psycho Rt.

CDPR and GOG still fucked up big time. Everyone these days is using Windows 10...including them. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to play around and make it work. I'm also wondering if the performance bump is due to something CDPR did, or from playing in compatibility....but it's noticeable.

This was utter madness for me. I know that compatibility is a thing you typically do when troubleshooting, but I am just so burnt out and tired of doing this shit for games that should work on release. I can't even believe this is an issue considering that the whole point of GOG is DRM-free shit and nothing being online-only.

The steam forums and CPDR forums are utter madness at the moment, all most people suggest is that it's "the mods", even if your save is vanilla, or it's windows, or literally anything else instead of admitting that people are having issues on release and that it's not strictly a hardware or platform configuration issue.

The following is the crash error I was getting before this fixed it, it's utterly generic which is why I didn't paste the rest. Maybe someone else who's having this problem will find this based on the error.

Error reason: Unhandled exception
Expression: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xC0000005)
Message: The thread attempted to read inaccessible data at 0x209.
File: <Unknown>(0)

Version=1
EventType=REDEngineErrorReport
EventTime=0
ReportIdentifier=ffffffff-ffffffff-00000001-00000000
Sig[0].Name=StackHash
Sig[0].Value=0x0000000000000000
Sig[1].Name=ErrorReason
Sig[1].Value=Unhandled exception
...

I can't take credit for the .dll thing, someone else in a different topic here figured that out. (EDIT: Ha, it was you that figured that part out and posted it, I just realized that.) I did figure out the Windows 7 thing, though, so I'm pretty happy about that. It's not at all something that we should have to do, but at least it works for now. Yeah, a surprising number of people are suggesting it's the mods. I've never modded this game in any way, so I know for a fact that it isn't that.

Did you at any point make a support ticket, to acknowledge GOG on this issue?

Oh yes....you had better believe it. I made the ticket about 20 minutes after launch. I don't know what you mean by acknowledge though. You mean...APPRISE, my guy. I'll acknowledge that they are pissing me off though. Then they can acknowledge that they fucked up....again. lol

I ran the executable as an administrator and it didn't crash and gog wasn't running

I just tried this and it crashed in the same spot, unfortunately.

Yeah having to sacrifice stability in order to get a game running offline is unacceptable imo. Not really something I should have to be concerned about when I purchase from GOG.

Hopefully this gets sorted ASAP.

Hi there! Can you tell me the order, in which you installed them, please? I tried EVERYTHING! I can only play the normal 2.0 base game, no PL for me :(

Patch 2.0 -> Update Patch 2.0 -> PL

For me the game works fine only ONCE after booting (also no crashes sofar ingame). If I close the game and open it again I am getting the same crash (on cdpr logo) as everybody else with the same error message as mentioned above. After booting it works again. Its weird.

Right so if you have a corrupt offline installer, the game just won't install, it fails when it gets to the corrupt .bin file, so if the game installs it's not corrupt.

Downloading through GOG Galaxy will create a shortcut that opens Galaxy then opens the game, so sometimes you my not see it's been opened.

Running the game from the Launch Cyberpunk 2077 shortcut in the game folder will launch the game without Galaxy, this is where it won't get past the logo screens, if you have Galaxy open and minimized running the same shortcut will allow the game to load post the logos.

It's something in the PL DLC, removing the Galax64.dll results in a game that will open and run every time without GOG Galaxy even installed, but completely disables the PL DLC.
That in itself is strange as 1 dll shouldn't be the reason the DLC isn't working unless there's some form of DRM, if the DLL was a crucial for the game to run it wouldn't work at all without it..

For many like myself, the game runs perfectly with GOG Galaxy running in the background, but if I wanted that I would of just bought the game on Steam not GOG, I bought on GOG so I didn't need that extra layer of crap running as a overlay or in the background.

I too am unable to play the DLC after manual down load 2 times. So people please dont tell me my download is corrupt. I apply the DLC to the base game and the game freezes on launch. If i rename that galaxy DDL file I can play but the DLC is unavailable

win 7 compatibility mode only worked once for me, so I replaced Galaxy64.dll & GameServicesGOG.dll with the ones from version 2.
no ctd's so far & phantom Liberty works without the Galaxy client running. It looks like they buggered up the dll's.