NitzWalsh: Just got the Metro franchise bundle, and although I already owned these games on Epic/Steam the price of the bundle combined with the lack of drm was worth it.

One of the main reasons I like to get GoG games is that due to that no drm, I don't need to use a store's launcher. Just a shortcut to the .exe and go. However, for both Metro 2033 and Last Light (but not Exodus oddly enough), they refuse to launch using the .exe or the 'Launch Game' shortcut in the game directory. The .exe loads, then quits. Launching the game from the Galaxy 2.0 client and they load successfully.

Looking in the event Application logs, this error is generated when trying to launch from the .exe:

Faulting application name: metro.exe, version: 1.0.0.3, time stamp: 0x5411a479
Faulting module name: Galaxy64.dll, version: 1.121.2.0, time stamp: 0x5aac05e3
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000054763
Faulting process id: 0x0x4034

I presume that's the GOG achievements integration, but Exodus also has that same DLL and it can launch fine without the launcher.

I have also installed each from the Offline manual setup with no change.

Any ideas?

Pseudoman: I wonder if this is a dependencies issue? Maybe try reinstalling galaxy?

Do you get a good sha1 dump on that file?

Name: Galaxy64.dll
Size: 13376512 bytes (12 MiB)
SHA1: 7212a222e4c66e48564558d516928ae265d60f40

NitzWalsh: Thanks, this seems to be it. Haven't re-installed Galaxy yet* but once I uninstalled it I tried to launch them, and now they load without it fine.

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone.

*Update: Re-installed Galaxy, same issue. Last Light and Metro 2033 will only launch through the Galaxy client as long as it's installed, when it's uninstalled they launch through the .exe just fine. Weird.

Geralt_of_Rivia: Could it be that the game still uses an old Galaxy dll that has the crash bug on firewalled localhost access? More info here.