I was perusing through my game backups when I noticed there are patches of previous versions of one of my games and an installer of the latest version. I was wondering how these patches work?

Like say if I had an older installer of a game v1.1 and some months pass by that v.2 is released of the game. There would be patches for 1.2, 1.3, etc. Would I just use these patches to install over my v1.1 game offline for them to work? So this basically allows me to save bandwidth of having to download the entire game over again and install offline?

I'm just trying to make sense of how it works. This is just my thought process of what it is.

In my experience, if you miss A SINGLE patch between your installed version and the latest, you will have to download the whole game again, which is the latest version on GOG.com.

To clarify, the patches usually only ever update from say 1.2 to 1.3. Some games can recieve several patches in a week. The system is only suitable for old games really. There should be a pull-down menu with older patches or something but seeing how most everything is so wonky here, I expect nothing.

In my experience, it's the other way... you only ever need the latest patch. But maybe it depends on the game. I just download the latest installers anyway and clean up once in a while (gogrepo.py)...

In my experience, it work like this.

And the worst part is, sometimes GOG provide bad patch file or skip one patch file, then you have to download the whole full installer up to 50 GiB.

thanks everyone for the clarification. haha this makes patches a bit cumbersome if you don't have every single patch. Kinda sounds counterintuitive. Like, the latest patch should be the only thing we need.

You don't, of course, need to download every patch or release. I mean your not playing all of your games all at the same time and need all of them to be Bang up to date? A lot of patches are language patches, or small bug fixes etc. And with newer games which are being updated constantly it's better just to wait for a time and download the full installer at a given point when you want to play it.

Cumulative patches are the best but they are troublesome to make. Some developers do them, others do not.

It seems to depend on the developer/publisher. Some provide incremental patches that can update from any or many previous versions, some provide standalone patches that update only from one previous version (not any previous version), and some provide no patches at all, but just an updated main game installer.

I think at this point the assumption is that if you are playing a game which receives updates often (be it a multiplayer game, or an in-dev or new game which is still actively updated by the developer), you should be using Galaxy as it auto-updates your game installation with delta updates. The standalone offline installers are mainly for archival purposes, and the assumption is that when you install a game using them, you will most probably be staying with that version and will not be updating it while you play that game.

At least that is how I do it. I usually install a bit older games anyway which are not receiving any updates anymore, and stay in that same version throughout the whole playthrough. If I would be playing an in-dev or multiplayer game receiving critical updates daily or weekly, I would certainly play it through Galaxy instead, just so that I don't have to try to keep track of incoming updates and that I am fully up to date. Even with cumulative patches, there quite often seems to be some breakpoint, ie. it can update only starting from certain version, not any previous version or installation. It might e.g. be that the changes are already that vast at that point that the cumulative patch would be almost as big as the whole installation. Or there are some other major changes, like the whole architecture of the game had changed in between.