I ask because, I'm having trouble with Wizardry 8, (as in I cant get it to run at all), Icewind dale, a few others. I do want to play this, but if Windows 10 makes it nearly unplayable, I'd rather stay away altogether. I have Windows 10 Home edition currently.

I know this isn't especially helpful, but i can can confirm that Wizardry 8 and Wizards and Warriors run without any problems on my system (Win10), and i haven't encountered any new issues compared to my previous Win7 based system.

What are your specific problems that make the two games unplayable on your Win10 box?

I would guess with Windows 10 it is the missing files. There is a discussion in the Wizardry 8 forum about this issue causing the game to not start. The sad part is that it would be a really quick fix for GOG.

So with Wizardry 8, I actually have the original discs. I found about 30 great pc games on disc at a garage sale a few years ago. It ran fine on my computer at that time, which was Windows 7. I no longer have that computer, my current one has Windows 10 home. I've tried many fixes: compatibility modes, deleting the movie files in the game (just incase that was the hold-up), I've looked at forums including Steam for solutions. Some people say no matter what, Windows 10 wont run most of the 16 bit games. Interestingly enough, I can run Baldurs gate 1 and 2 just fine, Icewind dale will not work. Gothic 1 wont work, but Gothic 2 does. Its hit and miss. I'm willing to buy Wizardry 8 digitally, probably wait for sale, but not if I run into the same problems. I'm not nearly as technically proficient as many people on forums on like this, so any help/advice would be great.

Typically 2 things for a disc like this will cause issues. 1 is where you installed the game. If you installed it under program files then windows will move files to protect your computer.

2 is maybe directplay is not activated on your computer.

I too still have the original Wiz8-box somewhere lying around, but I have to admit I never tried to install it on both win7 and win10 so far, i always used the Gog version (easier, and even faster to install with current download speeds) . Same is true for Wizards and Warriors, but in this case i really cannot recommend trying to use the Disk version on either win7 or win10 at all since WaW is a buggy mess and you'll save yourself a lot of time and pain. Also Gog patched the mouse behavior making the game much more playable than the original version.

Concerning the "16 bit games won't run on win10" remark some random internet person made: this is partially true since Microsoft dropped 16 Bit backwards compatibility on 64 bit systems, but this is of no concern here since _all_ the games you listed are games designed for 32 bit Windows platforms, and should generally run on win10. Missing video codecs, like in WaW and not included older DirectX versions that are needed still may cause trouble on original disc-versions, also win10 has some stricter access restrictions especially in common folders like "program files" or "program files (x86)", so it seems general consent to install GOG games into a different folder. (like e.g. "C:\Games") on win10.

In general, common problems are addressed in versions you can download from Gog, but as abbayarra mentioned above, there seem to be issues with wiz8 and win10, at least for some people (not for me, for some reason).

So trying to answer your original question - would it make sense to buy the Gog version of wiz8? As far as i know, Gog is generally very generous with refunds, especially when you have trouble getting the game to run on your system, so the financial risk of trying it out is pretty low, worst case is you wasted a bit of your time but no money.

Edit: your original question probably was "should i buy this (Wizards and Warriors) on Gog", and to answer that: don't try the disc-version, save your time, try out the Gog version and refund if you still can't get it running. It is buggy but pretty fun, and worth the try, if you liked Wizardry 8.

It does install under program files. Where does windows move the files to when protecting the computer? Will changing that give it a chance of working? I do have directplay activated.

Windows doesn't move files, but might prevent applications from writing to this location when started without administrator rights. Older applications don't expect this and might fail trying to change configuration files which results in problems.

A way around this is to install the program to a different location, like e.g. "c:\games".

I have no problem with either Wiz8 or this game under Win10. With the new AMD adrenalin 2020 drivers, W&Ws really looks decent using Integer Scaling.