i find this to be a great game but gog should have fixed a lot of problems with this game not the users so this is how i fixed it (it may still not work but this is what worked for me when you get to the launcher and press play then you get a splash screen that will stay there for a moment and then disappear it's supposed to have small yellow text with things like charging weapons this happens because the opening cutscene is crashing the game to fix this is how i got it working go to C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Distant Worlds Universe and type in the search bar Startup.in Open the Startup.ini in a text editor (like: Notepad) and change: playmovie 1 to: playmovie 0 (i used notepad for this bit) if your game doe not start after this you going to need Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 4.0 I installed this first - DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010) DirectX needs to go into C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Distant Worlds Universe it will install a box where you can paste C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Distant Worlds Universe into this is important as it will dump a load of files into it the Distant worlds file i got this knowledge from this forum https://www.gog.com/forum/distant_worlds_universe/launcher_ok_but_program_does_not_start i have windows 10 version 10.0.22000 build 22000 so idk if this works with other windows 10 versions or windows 11 hope this helps
