I've been trying off and on for a long time to get Sacrifice to run on my Surface Studio and have encountered every single crash I've seen people mention here. It crashed at startup, crashed at character creation, crashed when loading a level and even crashed when trying to open the Options menu.

It seems to be related to my high DPI screen with a default resolution of 4500x3000. But by adjusting my desktop resolution and Sacrifice's compatibility settings, I was finally able to get into the singleplayer campaign. I only tested up until you first reach the Ethereal Realm, but so far so good.

Here is everything I did to finally get it working:

- Click "Start" and select "Settings"
- Select "System" and then "Display" and change the Display Resolution to 1920x1080
- Search in the Settings window for "Fix apps that are blurry" and then turn off "Let Windows try to fix apps so they're not blurry"
- Click "Start" again and search for "Turn Windows features on or off", then expand "Legacy Components" and enable "DirectPlay" (a restart may be required, and user tedeee suggested disabling and then reenabling DirectPlay in another thread if it's already enabled)
- Open the folder where Sacrifice is installed (default C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Sacrifice)
- Right click on Sacrifice.exe and select "Properties", then click on the "Compatibility" tab
- Check "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" and then select "Windows XP (Service Pack 3)" from the dropdown
- Check "Reduced color mode" and select "8-bit (256) color" from the dropdown
- Check "Run in 640 x 480 screen resolution"
- Check "Disabled fullscreen optimizations"
- Check "Run this program as an administrator"
- Click on "Change high DPI settings"
- Uncheck "Use this setting to fix scaling problems for this program instead of the one in Settings"
- Check "Override high DPI scaling behavior" and then select "Application" from the dropdown
- When you open Sacrifice, select "Direct3D HAL" when it asks for your Primary Display Driver

Note: You may need to click on "Change settings for all users" if you are unable to change some of the compatibility settings.

I don't know if all of these settings are 100% necessary. I fiddled around with it a bunch to try to find the bare minimum combination that would get the game to work, but I eventually gave up and called it good enough.

After I got the game running, I was able to use the in-game options to crank everything up to the maximum. Selecting "2048x1536 32 bit" from the Resolution options appears to override the 8-bit and 640x480 settings you turned on in the compatibility menu.

It doesn't work every time I start the game, but there are a few things that seem to help:
- Don't hit Esc to skip the Shiny/Interplay logo at the beginning
- Try loading Tutorial 1 before you do anything else, then quit the tutorial and try again
- Let the game sit for a few seconds when the main menu first loads. Doing anything too quickly seems to scare it.
(These may just be superstitions, but I have done these every time the game has actually worked.)

It's a pain having to reduce my screen resolution whenever I want to play, but Sacrifice is one of my favourite games so I'm just happy to finally be able to play it again. Hopefully this helps someone else do the same.

I was having similar issues on a Lenovo Yoga (specifically, I could start the game, but whenever I started a tutorial or campaign it would qui) and this worked for me!! Thank you so much for the walkthrough. I LOVED this game way back when and got it stuck in my head recently to play it again - would have been so bummed if I couldn't figure it out. Thank you!!