I downloaded Wiz 8 to revisit and the game won't launch. I have uninstalled and reinstalled numerous times with no luck. What gives?

Edit: I copy-pasted the Wizardry 8 directory to the root of the C: drive. The game will launch and allow me to create new characters, but as soon as I continue to the game itself, it drops me back to Windows.

I have the very same issue. I have a windows 10 machine, and I downloaded the game through the gog galaxy launcher thingy.

1 Windows will not allow programs to run from the root drive... make your path C[ or D] Games ... don't use the programes folder

That sounds like the video sequence triggers the crash,
navigate to Wiz8InstallDir\data\flics and rename the containing folder [intro] to something different.
You will miss the short summary of events before the actual adventure starts,
but Wiz8 has no later in game video sequences and the endgame screen is a static pic,
so you can at least play the whole game. Hopefully;)

Make sure that it's running in a resolution your monitor can display. You can modify the settings by going to the game folder and running the nglide_config application.

The only way I could get it to play the opening video is by having WIndows apply compatibility mode. You can enable compatibility mode by right clicking the Wiz8 application, going to the Compatibility tab and running the compatibility trouble shooter. Mine runs it for XP SP3.

To be fair, even having it in a compatible resolution doesn't seem to help once it starts going wrong. I had it set at a variety of correct resolutions and always got a video error when starting up.

It seems to be down to an interaction between setting graphics with 3Dsetup.exe or 3Dvideo.cfg and setting them with nglide_config.exe. In my experience, doing anything with the first two (which are linked as the latter is the config file that stores the settings made with the exe) can bring up problems when you then make other settings with nglide. With my current fresh installation, the supposed settings in 3Dvideo.cfg are all default stuff yet the game is actually running in 4K thanks to nglide.

For anyone else with this problem, if that doesn't help, try the widescreen patch. The UI gets stretched and that really bothers me but others might not mind as much. It did get the game to work when all else failed, though, even when it was giving me BS about "unsupported resolutions".