Sometime late in 2023, Northgard stopped running correctly on my system. If I start either from a desktop shortcut or from within Galaxy, I get a "Northgard.exe" task in the task manager, but the window never opens. I have to close the program from the Task Manager.

This behavior started with one of the recent content patches, sometime late in 2023.

I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling, repatching, and renaming/deleting various INI and setup files in the install directory, under the suspicion something that the install is writing somehow got corrupted, but nothing seems to affect the issue. This has been happening through the last several patches (i.e. the software has been patched several times since the initial failure, but the failure persists, so it seems nothing in the more recent patches has affected the issue.)

Any suggestions?

I only have Northgard without dlcs and tried it and it works still.
Used version 3.3.16.36098_(64bit)_(70504)
Maybe try using the sdlboot.DAT file to run it in opengl is what i do, you have to drag the .DAT file onto the exe to run it in opengl.
Or tell what kind of system you have.
Am on windows 10.

I'm running it on Win 7. I haven't tried OpenGL (I think the option is greyed out in the "Additional executables" menu entry under the "More" tab next to the "Run" button in GOG Galaxy), but I'll look into that.

edit: just tried the OpenGL version (the option was greyed out apparently because I had a crashed copy of Northgard already running in the background) and it doesn't seem to do anything different: I get a copy of Northgard.exe running according to the Task Manager, but the game window/graphics/sound never starts up. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

I don't know if this has anything to do with that what i think but maybe it's steam using win 10 only and gog and the Northgard developers switched to win 10 after dropping support for lower windows version because of that but that is just my guessing.
It could also be just a resolution problem or a program is interfering with northgard. But i don't really know.
Or they just messed up another build configuration.

Similar problem:
https://northgard.featureupvote.com/suggestions/518588/cannot-start-a-game-northardexe-window

Per GoG's product page, Northgard is still supported on Win7. GoG Galaxy switched to Win 8 minimum at some point, so I don't know if that has anything to do with the problem. Shiro Games' website has no technical information that I can easily find regarding Northgard, so it's not easy to tell if they've changed the minimum system requirements for the game. But I suppose it's possible that that has happened and is the reason for the game not starting.

Regardless, I mostly play the daily/weekly challenges, which require Galaxy to access, so if Galaxy is no longer supported then I'm screwed as I don't intend to upgrade the OS on this system to anything past Win 7. Perhaps it's time to consider setting up a Linux game box.

So I actually just bought the game and I've got a similiar issue.

When I try to launch the game, it immediately crashes and then even disappears from GoG Galaxy. When I then try to launch the game through its .exe, it reappears on Galaxy and immediately crashes again.

I have no idea what's going on or what to do about it, does anyone happen to know of a fix for this?
I tried reinstalling it (had to do that through the .unins file rather than through Galaxy, as that process just failed), I tried verifying the files (again, failed process), I tried uninstalling the one DLC I bought with the game and starting the game without it - I even fiddled around with admin mode and compatibility options, but nothing seems to work.

Went and bought the game on Steam to compare and that version runs just fine - what gives?