sacred 2 will not launch
when i press play nothing happens

Try supplying some information. What operating system? Did you enable direct play? Did you install everything outside windows folder I.e. C:/games. Did you try running the game without galaxy?
Also check out the game subforum as others may have had the same issues.

This is a common problem on (at least) Windows 10 related to the game's temporary files. You have to launch the game 3 times (kill it the first 2 times via Task Manager) and it will launch on the third time, creating the temporary files. Every time you run CCleaner, the temp files are removed and you are again forced to launch the game 3 times in order to play. This works 100%.

What a convoluted method... :P

If you know what the temporary files are, perhaps back them up (empty or whatever) and then offer it as a down download for a fix...

Sacred 2 works totally fine for me on Win10. I wonder if I should start worrying that it might stop working. ;P

Could happen. :P
Some games stopped working after a Windows 10 update, the only way to play them now is through a VM.

On a side note, not many like it but I'd love to see Sacred 3 on gog.

I refuse to use Windows 8 or 10, especially as i don't trust Microsoft...

Call me hard headed but oh well.

Alex Jones must have told him Win 10 was part of a plot to overthrow the government. :P

Actually it's far more that Windows 10 does things behind your back, resetting privacy settings, the updates, and the peer2peer updating that uses your own computer/bandwidth to update other computers (much like a torrent, except you aren't willingly doing it).

Let's not forget the malware tactics to get you to 'upgrade'...

I won't use win10 either. I ignored the free upgrade and have stayed with win7.

Relatedly, I have 8GB of ram on my machine, and trying to run a 4GB game, but can't because there's so much background process activity chewing up resources.

Plus...I accidentally installed Galaxy while installing the game (doh!). That put me over the top for sure, but even without it I just don't think 8 is enough.

If using Win 10, I found I had to set compatibility settings for it to run in Vista mode. After that, it seemed to launch just fine, but iirc I also had to disable desktop composition, or something along those lines....
Part of what you say is true. It does set things to default settings after each major update, but they've gotten so much negative feedback about it, that they're slowly fixing it so it doesn't do that anymore. The last major update didn't change any of my privacy settings, but did remove me from my homegroup.

The peer to peer updating afaik is not something that's done unless the setting is on? I might be mistaken. Then again, people say Windows 10 keeps apps open when you restart your machine, and it's never done that for me, either.

Because leaving registry entries alone is soooooooo difficult... They've only had the registry since Windows 95...

It's on by default, and the options to turn the stuff off is sometimes several levels deep and hidden in a way that's hard to find. And of course that doesn't mean windows will honor your requests. Like turning off updates, you can only 'defer' them temporarily, or so i last recall hearing back when Windows 10 was being pushed so hard.

The big thing of the p2p updates sharing was an issue especially with people with very limited bandwidth, not to mention i've heard of some gamers/streamers who's systems would grind framerates to crappy levels whenever the update p2p thing was working.

Right, I'm not disputing it, I'm just saying I don't have an issue with it, because the settings are at most, 3 menus deep. If you're an inexperienced pc user, sure, I could see an issue. As far as mandatory p2p, it's possible because sometimes my internet is crap, but when I do a speedtest, it resets itself so to speak.