the game ran great had no issues with anything. 4 days pass since I last lanched it and now it refuses to launch, just get a black screen then CTD no error code no anything. and when I do get it to run I try to switch it to fullscreen and it freezes there. now I cant get in the game at all and it's heartbreaking. I was having so much fun playing this D:

Are you using Galaxy?

Maybe a dumb question, but have you already rebooted your PC? Some people make extensive use of hibernation and reboot their computers very seldom.

Maybe an update has triggered a bug.

did you open the task manager, end the process and then try it again?

Wait, this can have impact on performance?

When i open the task manager the game stays on screen and only the taskbar appears and it wont allow access to the taskmanager itself since the game is still running frozen in place :/ sadness that this happend out of nowhere.

Yes, but mostly due to bugs. For example when a program suffers from a memory leak, it uses more and more memory over time. If it's only a minor leak, you won't even feel it with nowadays huge RAM, but if such a program or service runs permanently in the background or fails to close properly, more and more RAM will be blocked unless you reboot your PC. That's only one possible effect, another could be services or drivers that don't respond well to hibernation in general. There are badly written drivers, mostly for peripherals, that tend to lock up after revocation and there are many more possible complications. Generally it's a good a idea to reboot your PC once a day to always start working on a clean slate. This costs some time, though. (In an extremely humid climate, it's sometimes better to keep the system running all the time or to use a hibernation mode that keeps the fans running, to prevent condensation and thus corrosion.) I'd download the latest patch manually form gog.com, try to run and apply it and see what's happening. Maybe something broke and reapplying the latest patch fixes it. I don't trust Galaxy (beta) on this, yet.

do you play the game on full-screen or bordless? I've heard people had trouble when the game was in bordless mode. Every time I log in I need to change to full-screen since for some reasons it goes to bordless.

Very much so, and not just for bugs effecting the game. If you're going to start a gaming session it's always best to do a reboot, so as your system is refreshend and in a clean(ish) state. Even if you do a shutdown it really only hibernates (on win8.1 and 10).

Also worth noting you should do it once a week or so in general, for the same reasons. Windows still dosen't clean up after itself properly so do a restart clears alot of left over junk and reset resources

Did you make any changes to hardware, drivers etc. ? If it used to work fine, then there ought to be something that caused the sudden problems.

I'm with DeMignon on this -- your best bet is probably to manually update the game, and try deactivating updates via Galaxy, or run it without the client entirely.

Executable path should look something like this: The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\x64

That's how I'm running the game ( via a shortcut to the executable ), since I don't trust, nor like Galaxy either. :D

Worst case, reinstall the game but keep your save games, and just try playing without Galaxy, until that thing works properly.

Let us know whether any of this works.

I HAVE THIS SAME STUPID PROBLEM! What triggered it for me is that I tried to up some graphics settings, such as grass density from High to Ultra, tried to go play the game and everything went black and froze. I had to do a hard restart of the computer too, and when I tried to start up Witcher again, nothing.... just a dumb black screen. I almost don't even want to play Witcher anymore, cuz this has killed so much hype. Game has been unplayable for 2 days now..........

Try rename the Galaxy.dll (located in "The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt/bin/x64" folder) to something else like Galaxy.dll_bak, and then run the witcher3.exe in the same folder. You will get an error message, and shortly after the game should start.
I uninstalled Galaxy completely after I installed the game, needs a lot more work.

I have found that this only needed to be done once in my case, after quitting the game I re-named the file back to the original to stop the annoying error message on start.

Another thing you could try is deleting your user.settings file (located in "my documents/The Witcher 3"), but make a backup in a different location first, and the game should re-build a new one.

Hope it helps!

I have made no Hardware changes of any kind. and this issue seems to of come out of the blue >_<

I've been able to run the game from the executable 2 times now and the third time when I tried switchng to fullscreen I Couldnt tab-out to the task manager so I was forced to reboot my PC.

If I go to the option and play with the fullscreen/unlimited settings it seems to freeze when I try to apply the changes, but if I leave the game as is and try to play it hangs, CTD and somehow the game keeps running no image but the audio isplaying like nothing has happened.

I just wanna ride around exploring and maybe lose some hands of gwent.

for anyone wondering I don't know if it makes a difference I have a GTX970 16gb ram and FX8350