Downloaded, installed, launched,. and... nothing. Screen goes blank for some time, no sound, nothing but blackness, then the desktop returns. Further attempts at launching result in the same thing... screen goes black for awhile, nothing else happens, then the desktop returns.

EDIT: Windows 10 64-bit Professional Edition. MSI gaming laptop with CPU Brand: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10980HK CPU @ 2.40GHz and DirectX Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super with Max-Q Design, 64GB ram, 2X2TB SSD running in the RAID format that makes use of both drives simultaneously (as opposed to making one redundant).

Did you try extracting the DX11 wrapper to the game's 'system' folder and running the game from GOG's Link?

What? I don't know what "running the game from GOG's Link" means? Sorry.

And I'm not seeing any DX11 wrapper. Did my download not work properly? I'll download it again and try again.

Thanks for responding, sorry I didn't see it until now. Installing this game back when I posted this resulted in screwing up my other Gothic games. Neither Gothic 1, nor Gothic 2, would run after I installed this, when I had previously been playing both for months. I went from Gothic 1 to Gothic 2, was almost finished with Gothic 2 (I had killed all the dragons but the last one) and that's when I downloaded this game and installed it thinking I wanted to give it a look since I was thinking of this game after Gothic 2.

When it screwed up my ability to play either Gothic 1 or 2, and wanting to complete 2, I tried a system restore to a point prior to installing Archolos. This resulted in a fatal error of some sort where my computer would no longer boot and my only option was a complete reinstall of Windows. That's right, had 1 dragon left to complete Gothic 2 and then lost it all.

I have since reinstalled and replayed Gothic 2, finished it all the way this time (funny little conversation at the end of the credits that I had somehow missed the previous times I beat the game, probably because I didn't wait for all the credits to roll. Just mentioning that for anyone reading, there's some funny lines at the end of the credits at the end of the game between you, Diego, and I think the other voice was Gorn but not sure).

Anyway, so now I want to try Archolos. But I'm not finding any setup guides to help, and, as stated in the OP, this wouldn't run last time I installed it but will try again right now. It would be nice to know if one has to add the stuff like playerkit or systempack or union or whatever like I did with 1 and 2, but since this is a 2021 game I thought it would be fine but guess not and I'm not finding any info on what to do to get this to run.

Hey this time it installed and started up right away, no issues whatsoever. I haven't yet done the mapping of keys to my controller yet to be able to play so I haven't gone "in game" yet, but the game starts, music plays, main menu comes up just fine. Last time I got nothing but a black screen then back to desktop.

So, is this game "ready" to play? Or does it really need a little loving first? Playerkit, union, whatever? Or perhaps a DX11 wrapper? Is one available somewhere? I'll do a search and see.

Looks promising so far. Except... no effing manual. I hope it's similar enough to Gothic 2 that I won't feel completely lost.

Hopefully I can experience this for the very first time. This 2023 play through of Gothic 1 and 2 were probably about the 4th or 5th time for this, but I've never even seen a you tube of this. Have no idea what to expect but that's sort of part of the fun, right?

Well, that didn't last long. Obviously this game has issues.

Went in Options just to change the resolution from 1280X760 to 1920X1080. That was the end of this game working. Now I can't even get it to come up and change back. Went in the ini file and manually changed the resolution to 1920X1080, restarted and no go again.

Guess you get what you paid for right? This was free IIRC, so though a total loss it wasn't a loss of money.

Maybe I'll try the Steam version and see what happens.

Okay, reinstalled it, this time just not messing with resolution and leaving it at whatever it was (not 1080p). Set up my controller. keys worked, game comes up...

then when I say NEW GAME..............that's it. The end. Entire machine is locked up and only restarting helped (ctrl-alt-del brought up the task manager to close it, but the mouse wouldn't work so... shut down and restart).

Tried again just to play intro.... fail again. screen goes black, I hear voices but definitely not in english so I had no idea what they were saying, but once again, only way to get out of the black screen was shut down and restart again.

Nope. Done with this.

All I meant was that you can add the DX11 wrapper to the game. Since Archolos is a Gothic 2 Mod, it should run just as well as Gothic 2 runs with the DX11 wrapper. You can see in the game directory that they have some files prepared for the DX11 wrapper.

If you are running the game normally (without installing the wrapper) and you are having problems, you can just edit the 'gothic.ini' file located in the game's 'system' folder and change that resolution from there.

As far as I know, there is no need to add anything like Union to the game, it's all set up.