The first time it happened was on Arnika road during combat with some would be thieves. Second time was when I was talking to an NPC in Arnika (can't recall her name - but she's one of the ones behind a counter).
Oddly there's no error message or anything. It just shuts down to the desktop.

Not too big of a deal, because I've been playing for hours - and it's happened only twice.

Just worried about it nose diving during a bigger (more important scene/fight).

Anyone seen this? Or got suggestions? It's vague as Hades I know, but if it gave some kind of crash error, I promise I'd share. :)

EDIT: And to be clear, no mods, no third party character editing or anything. Straight up WIZ8 from GoG, characters unmodified in any way.

My experience is different because I'm playing a very modded game--Dodd's Mod, played win the 1.28 fan patch. But the crashes with no error message are the same.

I recently switched from an older Windows 10 pc with no crashes at all to a new Windows 11 PC with lots of them.

I just started a new game after updating drivers to see if that helped. I was fine in the monastery but started crashing in Arnika, just as you did.

Here's all I know from observation. The crashes are more likely t o occur in combat, and the longer the combat, the greater the chance of a crash. I've also noticed audio irregularities, like repetitions of small bits of dialog or slightly distorted music for a note or two. I don't remember whether this is true in the vanilla game, but in 1.28, there is a setting that allows you to play without sound. I've tried this and found that it reduces crashes but does not eliminate them. My recommendation is to save frequently, so you don't lose too much progress if you do crash. When you crash, try playing the same battle without sound. Usually, that gets me through all right.

There is a setting in he fan patch that provides for fastest combat speed without audio delay. That also reduces crashes, I assume because if the audio hangs, the game keeps going, and if it triggers another audio event while the earlier audio is hung, that sometimes resolves the problem.

Because I'm playing modded, it's more difficult for me to report the issue to GOG, which may assume it's the modding that is the issue. But SirTawmis, if you haven't already reported to tech support, you might consider that. Maybe the GOG flokss can come up with a fix.

My guess is that the wiaardry 8 community is fairly small, and the people I know who play aren't on Win 11 yet. I think the problem will grow as more old computers wear out.

Maybe try changing the graphics setup?

You can try running 3dsetup.exe (or something like that) from the Wizardry 8 folder. If that works, you might try different graphics settings. If you can't run that, there's a CFG file you can edit with a text editor. Perhaps changing those settings might prevent a crash.

I find that setting the graphics to Direct X7 works reasonably well for me on Linux (though on my mini PC I have to use xrandr to set it to "Full Aspect" to avoid stretching, and I haven't figured out how to full screen the game under Wayland).

Also, if you get a dialog box that mentions that an assertion failed, that means you triggered a bug in the game code. In that case, try to avoid the situation that caused the crash.

crash to desktop tends to be ram so;
is Galaxy or wiz8 installed in c program files?
is the wiz8exe manually set to run as admin?
is there some 3rd party anti-v jumping in to helpfully protect you from playing your game?

These are all good suggestions. I've tried every graphics setting (and every audio setting. There are no dialog boxes with error messages.

Neither Galaxy nor Wiz 8 is installed the program files folder.

The exe file is set to run as admin. I've also tried compatibility settings to no avail.

I've whitelisted all appropriate files with my AV, and logs reveal no AV intervention.

I've also updated all drivers to the latest version.

Since the problem didn't exist in my Windows 10 PC and only began with the new, Windows 11 unit, it's logical to assume that some difference between the two is causing the problem. However, the only relevant differences I could find were Windows 11 game mode (which doesn't make a difference) and the audio enhancements setting under sound (which doesn't make a difference, either. If anyone knows of any other relevant difference between them, that might help.

In theory, running in compatibility mode ought to fix a Windows versioning issue, but there's clearly something here that isn't addressed by compatibility modes.

There were reports of game issues in general after Windows 11 rollout. In theory, the latest version addressed those. That means this is something more specific to Wiz 8. Sigh!

no its just all old games and the fact Microsoft doesn't like software they can't have control of

You could be right about that, but I will keep hoping for a fix, anyway.