Well, it worked on my system without problems,
The 156k files (causing the long installation duration on some systems) have nothing to do with the installer quality, but with the game design. The installer can't do anything about that.

What was the error displayed when your bluescreen happened? (it can also be looked up in the windows events after reboot)
As you said, it can have all sorts of causes.

A bluescreen is always a hardware or driver failure. The installer apparently does something one of the two can't handle on your system.

It worked on others systems as well, but not on everyone's, and this is important. I wouldn't say there was even a small indication that my PC is at fault - so far, I haven't been able to identify anything.

There was no BSOD in my case, but there was an inordinately long installation process. The installer is 23 MB in size - the largest I have seen on GOG - the window got stuck on my desktop for the first couple of minutes, with four processes (two main setup and two .temp). Additionally, there were two suspicious non-nullable null-values set in the installer, the extraction of some files belonging to Galaxy to a temp folder and the list could go on.

I'm not ruling out anything, and whether it's the large number of small files or something else entirely, GOG is aware of this problem, and others are experiencing it. Unless it gets investigated and fixed, it makes no sense to speculate, or hang on to the game.

However, I'm curious: what are your system specs? And how long did it take you to install the game from start to finish?

AMD 5900x, 64GB RAM
Windows and temp drive on an older SSD ~3GBiPS max, 40 GB free
Installation drive Sabrent SSD ~5GiBps max
Installers on a NAS with ~110MiBps max.

I run the installation in the background while I was doing the dailies in ACV, so I don't have a exact time, but it was less than 15 minutes for sure (it was finished, when I was done with the dailies).

Anyway ...
Currently - out of curiosity - I am running it on my handheld with just one SSD. And yes, it does act a bit strange.
First it seemed to be stuck for about 5 minutes, no disc and WLAN activity at all, then it started installing, but only runs with about 30MBps,
Again this could be related to the insane amount of files and every file being extracted and moved separatly.

I already had this game on Epic. UNINSTALLING it also took several minutes - on both my handheld and my PC.

edit: just dropped to 5MBps.
This game's file structure is beyond reasoning. And I thought TFU2 with 30k files was nuts.
There is one other game, a VN, that has a size of ~200MB, but the installed game takes 1.2GB due to the number of files, that might be the only game on GOG organized worse than GoW. A solution was to install it into a uncompressed zip-file :)

I want to buy this, when are you fixing it !? You want my money or not GOG !?

Sounds very much normal to me with any bigger game as even when using Galaxy installing games that require a lot of disk space and/or have many files to spread around tends to take some time setting up the underlying folder/file structure before actually downloading and installing anything at all. Hell, I have similar experiences like that with bigger installs on Steam/Epic as well. *shrug*

Can't see a bluescreen since I'm on Linux, but I've been able to install the game on 2 separate PC's without issues.

I unpacked the game contents manually using Innoextract and took around 30mins on HDD's of all things. For me it appears that due to the large amount of files, the extraction speed was the same between both machines (one with Ryzen 5800X while the other an old i7-3770)

Far as gameplay goes, the game plays fine so far. Didn't encounter any issues to speak of.

Fair enough. I guess you just didn't happen to read the same threads or at least the same posts I read in this subject.

To be fair, while I did mention that these new installers are worse (for us customers) I wasn't involved in the threads that reported such findings. I was just another reader but I trust many of the knowledgeable Gog users that were stating their experiences and investigations, and corroborating that of those users I did not know.
Good to know. I might get it down the road, and I expect I'll have a Linux machine by that point.

As I've learned from DirtyRolando, support has escalated this issue, so there's at least a chance for an upcoming fix.

Thank you for your answer! :-)

It's interesting how different our experiences are. I never had such a long installation time with any of my games, let alone applications, and I do have several with at least 70GB+. Most of those on Steam and Epic, and a small number on GOG, to at least be able to compare times it usually takes versus how much it should take at most to install content. ~45 minutes was decidedly too much - let alone 4 hours!

That's the case, yes. I haven't read about installers and related problems, so I wasn't aware that something has changed for the worse. The only thing I've become aware of was startup issues having to do with a check for the presence of Galaxy.

This is one reason i really really wish games would stay in the 4-20Gb range. Preferably being able to extract in ram, rebuild, and then discard as it goes. But if it's in that many chunks...

To which i'd say ignore the gog-installer and get a cracked version of the game instead, the rar/iso files will all be continuous chunks at least.

Actually just had a thought; Would be a faster if say you allocated 100Gb to a FAT32 drive, and then use that as your temporary folder instead; NTFS and other features make it slower, and could be a 'lot' slower with that many files involved.

I've just installed the game and I had no bluescreen or lockup but it took a solid hour to finish. I used the offline installer. The green bar was at 100% after half an hour or so but it stayed there for the entire rest of the time...