This is a game, right?
Not a disk defragmenter, antivirus tool, or spyware.
So it shouldn't need admin rights to run.

When I installed Crysis via GOG Galaxy 1.1.2, everything looked as if it went fine, and requiring admin access at installation time is OK - that's the normal thing.

But when I started the game, it asked for admin rights.
I tried to start it from Galaxy, from the CrysisLauncher (same result); then I tried the Crysis64.exe/Crysis.exe files in Bin64 (which crashed).


Did I do something wrong at installation?
Which executable do I need to start, or option to use, to launch the game with a regular user account?

No it's not ;-) But don't forget, that this game was released in 2007 when most gaming PCs were Windows XP and the users usually got admin rights by default. Only tech savvy people created separate user and admin accounts for security reasons. With the same year and the release of Vista things changed in the Windows world. From there on also consumer Windows was treated like business PCs and the separate product lines (95/98/XP and NT/2000) vanished. Thus security and rights management became a much bigger issue for consumers and restrictions rose tremedously. A lot of older games weren't prepared for this, hence still requiring for admin rights to run properly. There are a lot of games here on GOG, that'll have trouble to work until you start them as admin. I don't know which little aspect in Crysis demands for rights elevation, but it's nothing unusual for games of that period. I have to admit, that I don't like granting such access either, but it's part of the price we have to pay for older games on newer machines. In a few years we won't have to bother anyway, because these titles will all run in sandboxed virtual machines, like today's DOS games.

Long story short, nothing wrong with your installation. Many GOG games need admin rights on newer Windows to be able to run.

I think Windows Vista is the reason that launcher wants to run as admin as Vista would not allow me to even look at settings without using admin rights.

A reason to run Crysis in DX9 mode? How about having this new game (Crysis) and this new computer (with Vista) with a new "powerful" graphics card.... that gives you 10-20 frames/second. Those who had Windows XP automatically had the game run in DX9 but I had Vista and a GPU supporting DX10.1 so DX10 it was. Of course, many years have passed now and few gamers, me including, do not have a graphics card as weak as a Radeon 4870 now. A change to DX9 mode let me finish the game back then.

No Vista here anymore.

I played Crysis in 2008 on Vista, and I would remember if it was asking for admin rights that's for sure, since it's something I never accept.

I found why the launcher is asking for admin rights, that's because GOG has set the RUNASADMIN compatibility layer on it. To remove this, right-click on the launcher => Compatibility => Modify all users' parameters => Uncheck "Run as admin".

And btw, the launcher doesn't require admin rights for Crysis Warhead or Crysis Wars.

Admin rights not needed to play OK.

The only reason for that GOG launcher needing admin rights I could concieve was Vista being picky and not letting the launcher do its thing otherwise.

There was an update to the Crysis launcher; version is now 1.1.1.6156.
It still crashes. Same problem as described above.

You can still launch it by making a separate shortcut, but starting from Galaxy results in immediate crashes.
Next time you fix something, can you please replace the link to the crashing binary with a link to the working one?
Thanks.