why do nearly all gog games mess around with compatibility settings. i play dos games, old games and new games and there was only one game in my huge library where i needed to tick run as admin, for it to work properly. this was a ubisoft game so naturally it had to be complicated to figure out why it didn't work.

however gog games have all sorts of compatibility settings activated. normally i wouldn't mind but the thing is, it has a habit of backfiring. for example, in tomb raider one, there is the nasty habit of open windows (like windows explorer/browser) being below the taskbar. i managed to fix it by restarting the game and closing it, but if the games start to perform more serious issues that can't be recovered from, then thats a real problem. is there anyway to disable all compatibility settings for gog games without doing it manually?

I suppose that their tests showed that those compatibility tweaks would improve the gaming experience.

Are you sure that it is the compatibility settings that causes the misbehaviour that annoys you?

Some of those compatibility settings lead to interesting results when combined with different Windows updates and drivers, GPU drivers in particular. My guess is that GOG tests games on a somewhat representative number of machines and environments, and picks settings that make the game work correctly on most/all of them.

Compatibility settings will also have side effects like you've described for sure. If you find that a game works for you without any tweaks, you can safely undo GOG's configuration to your liking most of the time.

There are ways to programmatically set up compatibility settings for applications in Windows. Those settings are stored in the registry, so you can write a simple program to modify the entries corresponding to your games en masse. Another less fine-grained option is to use environment variables that control the compatibility layer; say you can wrap your game exes with launcher scripts that set these values before launching the game. Still, imho, these are not very suitable for automation, and it would be far less work to do it manually for the specific games that cause you problems.

I cant remove the compatibility settings in certain games e.g. witcher 3. Its greyed out. Any ideas?