removed... thought I had a solution...

Reporting in to atleast try to narrow this thing down ihave been playing since day one with the usual freezing and crashing as everyone else has been experiencing but atleast i could get a few hours here and a few hours there worth of game play.
That ended when i learned today of the new patch AND DLCs that were released for download. i never used galaxy did initial install and patching as well as the new patch and DLCs manually well as soon as i installed the new patch and DLCs today and went to open the game this issue appeared where it would run in background but nothing would really happened.
So i tried deleting the galaxy.dll and that only made the pop up window saying it didnt have galaxy blahblahblah so i put the galaxy.dll back in the x64 folder and tried something else. I still have the original .exe for the day one patch so i ran that and reinstalled the day one patch which i assume it deletes the newer patch and that did it for me i was able to open and play the game.
Now obviously there's an issue that must be addressed as this game is undeniably broken i just hope there's an official fix for this coming soon because this is really turning me off from pc gaming

gj

I too received this same error while starting Witcher 3 "Crash reason: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (3221225477), Error reading location 0xa63315e4"

However I was able to resolve it simply by installing the Windows Software Development Kit 8 for Windows 8. Download it from MS official website and install it:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/hh852363.aspx

Then follow the steps from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArAimZG0J70
Though the video is not in English, the steps are fairly simple.

One note: I am playing this game on Windows 7, so I already tried installing Windows SDK for Windows 7 but it didn help. Then on top of it I installed this Windows 8 SDK. I do not know if it is required to install both, so try it.

Another point, the installation of SDK was failing because I already had latest version of Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 installed. So you might need to uninstall it first, which I did as well to move further.

This is already posted somewhere but I couldn't find the actual poster. So thank you buddy for sharing this useful information and I hope you guys too find this info useful!!

Cheers!!!

I understand that I should remove the Galaxy Client, but when looking at the actual game files in the "Wild Hunt" folder, I don't see the .exe file that I expect to launch the game. By downloading with Galaxy, did I somehow tie Galaxy to Wild Hunt? How do I launch the game without Galaxy? I did get a Witcher icon on my desktop but it points to the Galaxy directory that I plan to remove.

If you have graphic card with no compability with DX11 forget about game.

Same problem as above:

Crash reason: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (3221225477), Error reading location 0xa93b15e4
Crashed Thread:

But with a slight twist:
Game purchased from cdp.pl in electronic version.

GOG Galaxy installed in Program Files.

Game installed on other disk partition.

19th May I was able to play.

From 20th onward Witcher 3 is crashing with above crash log every time I try to play.

I've reinstalled it once, verified using GOG Galaxy - no change.

Game is autopatched by Galaxy to current version.

Using Eset Smart Security.

Machine specs: AMD Phenom II X4 B40 , 8 GB DD3 Ram, Asus R7 250X GPU

Current graphic driver, current Windows 7

I had had the same problem. But I solved it! I have in my notebook two GPU. Good Radeon and integrated Intel card. So, I have turned off Intel card. Only it. Witcher is working!

I downloaded it from the Gog website and fully installed all the patches and deleted galaxy.dll and don't have galaxy installed. It still is doing that background application thing.

This is the only thing that fixed it for me.

My game worked fine since the launch until today.

I came from work, turned on my pc, got GOG galaxy update (the only thing that changed on my oc between yesterday when the game started up without any problems, and today) and when i started W3 it only ran as a background process, without anything actually happening.

I tried deinstalling galaxy, tried deleting galaxy.dll, reparing redistributable programs, and nothing seemed to work.

Only when I reapplied day 1 patch the game started working.

So many thanks for this solution, and I'm still 99% sure it's GOG galaxy that causes these startup problems.

Just to add that you will have to apply later patches after that because you wont be able to load your saves otherwise because they were made with newer versions of the game.

awsome ty

How do I verify game cache through GoG. Also when I try to launch the game I just get the witches 3 has stopped, my drivers are up to date can anyone help?