I'm going through everything working on documenting stuff for a (much) larger post about the way the game is currently setup for speedrunning, but I wanted to share this while I'm working on that.
Nobody mentions this in their guides here, but as part of my aforementioend larger post I just re-installed the game and used the instructions in the guide(s) here and the main thing that's missing that nobody mentions is the dependency on G4WL.
The main problem with getting RE5 to run is that the G4WL installer that's included with the game (redist/gfwlivesetup.exe) will not work. When you launch the game, the BH5AE_install.vdf (source | depot) file will try and run the default gfwlivesetup.exe installer. This will fail since it's an online version of the installer and you'll get this error message:
If you look at the log files the setup created, you'll see this line:
(12:46:43) Download http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=201788 failed [Code:0x800c0008]
This is because the file that gfwlivesetup.exe installer is trying to download is no longer available from Microsoft.
To get around this, you'll need an offline version of the installer, which you can download from PCGamingWiki here:
Microsoft Games for Windows - LIVE 3.5.95.0
This package contains the following official downloads packaged together for convenience:
gfwlivesetup.exe
gfwlclient.msi
xliveredist.msi (renamed from XLiveUpdate.msi to xliveredist.msi to enable detection by gfwlivesetup.exe)
wllogin_32.msi and wllogin_64.msi (this installation step is skipped automatically on Windows 8 and later)
Also, I'm not sure why there's two guides that just reference each other, but they could easily just be consolidated.
- Why your game doesn't say 1.1.0 in the bottom right hand corner of the title screen
- How to update the game so it says 1.1.0 in the bottom right of the title screen
This guide also mentions you could replace one of the dll files the game uses, but that's not reccommended as you're not actually resolving the dependency.
What to do if your game isn't opening after a fresh install.
Obviously there's a million ways to fix any problem, but personally I don't think that telling people to download and replace the game's files with ones from someone's Google Drive is the solution. This is just one part of a much bigger problem I have with the way things are setup for RE5 speedrunning.