HELP! I've been playing Gothic 2 for awhile now, and am nearing it's conclusion. Have been playing for over a month without issue Since I was getting toward the end, I decided to install The Chronicles of Myrtana, Archolos. (It's a dlc like technically an add-on to Gothic 2 I think.)

Anyway, I couldn't get that to run (just get a blank screen) but now, I can't play Gothic 2 anymore!!!!!

Nooooooooo, I've got like a hundred hours in! All of a sudden I get pop up boxes saying something is missing. (Screenshots). WTF? Is it possible that installing CoMA borked Gothic 2?

Oh man if I've lost all of this............

And now neither does Gothic 1 run!!!!

WTF???????????? It had to be related to the install of The Chronicles of Myrtana Archolos. Had to be. I noticed when I installed it that it also installed "new" 2013 something Microsoft related... some kind of redistributables or something or other I can't see it any more because I uninstalled them to trying to fix the issue but it didn't fix it.

WTF is going on????????????????????????????????????????

You won't lose anything unless you manually delete the saves

Those errors are tied to Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables - re-install that.

Yeah, I just did reinstall the 2010 version (which was what was installed when I first installed Gothic 1 and Gothic 2. But the Chronicles of Myrtana installation also installed the 2013 version.

So I uninstalled the 2013 version. Then reinstalled the 2010 version (or repaired it maybe... maybe I should tell it to remove and then reinstall. I'll try that...

Yeah, give it a try.

Or you could try the 2015 version, maybe that will get both games going.

Nope. Didn't help. I have uninstalled Chronicles of Myrtana. I have uninstalled the 2013 Visual C++ redistributables and then removed the 2010 version, and then reinstalled the 2010 version.

Nothing. Neither Gothic 1 or Gothic 2 will run now. Both get the same pop up.

And I can't find system restore anymore to see if I can do a system restore to yesterday before I messed with Chronicles of Myrtana.

Goddammit this is beyond infuriating. How the fuck does installing one game muck up others?

Here's an all-in-one Visual C++ pack, just extract it somewhere and run the batch file:

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/visual-c-redistributable-runtime-package-all-in-one/

No, the game isn't just asking for any version of the Visual C++ Redistributable, but for a specific version.

Your error messages mention VCRUNTIME140.dll and MSVCP140.dll. The "140" part is a version number.
I think you really need to install the 2015 Redistributable. Please try that -- it should be an easy fix.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145

If it's a specific version of a runtime that removed another version, that could be a problem

HOWEVER, If you add the runtimes to the binary directory same as the binary of the game in question, it will look at those first before going to system32. Few years ago the 2015 runtimes or something were giving issues so extracting and putting all the dll's in the same directory solved it.

But assuming a single dll is missing, you might be able to download that specific dll and put it in the bin and go from there.

It's problems like these, where i think a base OS read-only mountable image similar to SquashFS or an ISO, and a second mounted image with a pre-isntalled game and all dependencies and updates ready to go would be so much easier, then having to do all this extra troubleshooting and fighting.

Another bit of advise:

Those Visual C++ Redistributable packages can and should ALL remain on a system. They are used by many many games and applications. Manually uninstalling one of them causes a lot of unexpected trouble...

As you noticed, when installing a new game/ application, the needed redistributable is also installed.
But it is more like a double-check: "Is it already installed? If not, do it now."

The different versions go fine alongside each other. For example, on my system I have versions 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2019 installed all at the same time!

edit:
In your case, you need the 2015 version to run Gothic 2.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145

But you might need to repair / replace the other versions (2010, 2013) that you have uninstalled in the meantime...

To be honest I've had very few problems with them. Whenever I do a new Windows install, I install the lot (as listed in above post) the same time as I do hardware drivers and everything just seems to work, even when reusing already installed game files (from a secondary partition / drive) without "properly" reinstalling them. A read-only Windows partition would bring plenty of problems by itself vs old games that are hard coded to write stuff like "Indeo" codecs to C:\Windows\System32 (without which you'll get missing cutscenes / crashes in old games), not to mention the registry needs to be both writeable and on the Windows partition for thousands of applications.

And now I've lost my PC.

I'm on this old ass laptop now because after trying to just reinstall the redistributables, that didn't work, so I tried to do a restore point (from earlier today before I installed Chronicles of Myrtana. During that process, it would not restart. It kept saying we've run into a problem and will now restart your computer. Over and over again. I then clicked on advanced options, and the only options I had were to reset the PC either locally or from the cloud.

A complete and total reset. And who knows if the PC will work after that. And even if it does, I've lost everything.

I am so close to just giving up on this fucking thing called life.

All I fucking did was install a new fucking game.

fuck fuck fuck fuck

Yep. my PC is dead. It won't boot locally or from the cloud. Can't even reset it.

I hope you can solve your issue mate.

By my understanding you do not need to uninstall a version of Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables.
Personally I have all necessary Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables years versions (2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2019, etc) installed and they do not present any problems with each other.

--edit: Only now I saw AB2012 post.

--edit.

Many games require specific year Redistributables, and by my experience, having all of them installed is best for old/semi-old gaming.

The VCRUNTIME140.dll and MSVCP140.dll missing error is a common issue with some old games in which the game can't find their root/system path to read them from the C:\Windows\System32 (if im not mistaken) directory.
An issue which can be solved by placing MSVCP140.dll (or any other .dll dependency) inside the game root (or binaries/bin) directory for it to read.

Im sorry you're facing such a troublesome headache because of this! :(
Hope you can solve it. Good luck!

Yep, a complete and total loss. Every fucking thing.

The only way I was able to get it to boot back up was to reset it to factory settings and do a complete reinstall.

Lost everything. All my games installed. All of my games saves. Everything.

Pretty clean desktop now. The only thing on there is the recycle bin and Microsoft Edge.

There is a bunch of crap back in my taskbar though. All of that MSI bloatware that I had previously deleted.

Loss of everything over simply installing a game. Unfucking believable.

I'm not sure I have the drive or heart to start over again. I really don't. If not, then thanks to everyone for everything.

I do have one last code to give away, so I'll just post it here, backwards to fool the bots. It's Fallout 4, and again, it's backwards.

Fallout 4 code - backwards
FEB9D-C9AE9-BACFF-9F61A

Thanks again for everything everyone. Best wishes to all of you.