I dislike that games I enjoy dont get the good treatment I feel they deserve. But sometimes, gaming is a crap shoot, due to the plethora of titles to juggle. After enough time passes, older games draw less money.

That is the problem. Money is the motivation. Less money equals less care.

Like dumping old people in a "retirement home". Compare the facilities with paying old folks to the poor people versions. Its ghastly in poor people buildings....or maybe this is just how the US rolls?

Simply because folk still want them.
Just as folk have for many decades scoured shops for second hand copies of games on disc, despite most of them no longer working on latest Windows, not out-of-the-box anyway.

And I am sure GOG hope the DEV/PUB will eventually update them.

This is why many of us hang onto our older PCs with older versions of Windows, or as some do, just use them with a version of Linux.

So the games still have value, just they might require some effort from you to keep up with latest OS, if the DEV/PUB aren't doing that.

And because GOG still sell them or did sell them, you have a range of customers here who might be able to help you get the game working if you can't.

Just think about the many old games out there, that are not legally sold by anyone. Many folk are forced to turn to Abandonware sites, when in many cases they would rather not. Owning a game is half the battle, getting it to work on newer OS can be the other half of the battle.

It's an awkward compromise. It is possible to get the Gothic's to work, but often requires some effort to tweak. Why can't GOG do everything for every game? Because sometimes different fixes can be required (eg, different OS versions, different GPU's especially mobile (eg, Intel Xe / Arc lacks native hardware DX9 rendering and has to emulate DX7-9 via a DX12 wrapper inside the Intel Driver) and may need different settings / different wrappers vs nVidia / AMD GPU. Pre-packaging community patches can also be awkward when many of them go far beyond compatibility tweaks or may have competing patches. Eg, for Diablo you've got DevilutionX (true to original, mostly compatibility tweaks) vs Belzebub (changes a lot more including adding new classes, skills, spells, etc). For Thief HD texture packs, you've got the HD MOD (a "darker" art style) vs ERGSAN (original art style AI upscaled).

There is no "right" answer in trying to pick one (of several) possibly competing patches then force that onto everyone by pre-packaging it in the name of "convenience", it's always best to give users the choice. Having a "clean base game" also makes it easier to troubleshoot patches (as in when trying to help someone mod an already pre-modded pre-packaged install and they get in such a muddle it's best to say "OK, stop. Let's start from the beginning. Wipe everything. Clean install the base game, now let's take it from there...". The downside is, people may have to put in the effort to install it themselves. Realistically though, if you play enough old games (or mod Elder Scrolls titles) you'll end up needing to learn to do that for various titles sooner or later but it is a useful skill-set to learn regardless of the 'convenience' of wanting GOG to do everything.

Let's not forget GOG, who is selling a product, must ensure any "community" patches it wants to use are both authorised by the game publisher, AND does not fall afoul of any other licensing or legal issues, or they'll be slapped with a takedown or potential lawsuits.

Some community package patches out there could contain backwards-engineered dlls or even directly pilfered and repackaged library files from places they don't have the rights to do so. They may fly under the radar or be politely ignored when they're offered freely to game communities to use, but once it forms the package of a sold game? Look out. That's when someone gets angry, and phonecalls/emails start flying.

I mean just look how shirty Daggerfall modders got when their mods ended up packaged in GOG's version because they weren't asked first? Never mind they offered their mods free online elsewhere, once GOG started using them they got antsy. And that's not even licensed material! Community patch devs have some concerns regarding what's in their patch, but they don't have much skin in the game because they're not selling it. If GOG sells something it wasn't meant to, it's in trouble.

I'm not indicating this happens a lot, or it's a high risk, but it is a concern on top of all the rest of the workload they have to do when patching a game themselves.

A reminder again Linux is another alternative for getting older Window games working and remain working without worrying about updates breaking anything.

Wow, another couple of days on this after the literal couple of weeks back just last year. That still blows my mind that the same guide with the same files in the same order on the same computer with nothing changing, except however many Windows Updates occurred between then and now yet last year flawless, this year nothing.

But, I found a new combination that worked. Don't know whether to edit my guide in the other thread with these new steps since... who knows how long this will last??? But now, once again, like last year. Game is running flawlessly. No more black screens, no more access violations, no more cussing so loud the neighbors had to call the police (okay, that didn't happen but I was cussing a lot and loud and it wouldn't have surprised me if some Sheriff's Deputy showed up and said "OldFatGuy, you've got to tone down the cursing"). IT JUST WORKS. I tried the Steam version too, as they have the basics now built in to the workshop (Union, Ninja, Community Patch, and DX11 Renderer). No dice there either.

Came back to the gog version and took these steps (just in case anyone else has the same issue)

1)Clean Install of Gog's Gothic 1.
2)DID NOT TRY TO PLAY as that would get me a frozen black screen, but went into the Gothic INI file and changed:
----a)Blood Detail 2 to 3
----b)enableMouse from 1 to 0 (to deactivate it)
----c)scalevideos from 1 to 0
----d)manually put in the resoltions at 1920 and 1080
3)Installed Union Primary Universal Patch
4)Installed Union 1.0m
5)Installed Ninja
6)Installed Gothic 1 Community Patch
7)Installed Gothic 1 Community PatchPlus
8)Downloaded and extracted to Gothic/System DX11 renderer.
9(Downloaded and extracted to Gothic/Data RiisisTexturePack

Hit Play, intro played flawlessly and the menu came up with G1CP on the lower left and Union 1.0m on the lower right, showing they're installed properly. Then went into Settings/Video, and on the DX11 control panel checked the HDR box (the game seems to dark with it unchecked, at least on my machine), hit NEW GAME, and POW, the initial cut scene played flawlessly, the loading screen came up flawlessly, and then there I was saying hello once again to my old friend Diego.

But I still feel strongly that if Gog can guarantee to new customers that the games they bought on new systems then they should be able to keep things up to date for old customers as well. I mean, if they figure out the problem for a new customer, some of that has to translate to others. At the very least if they're not going to continue to update their installation with needed fixes, they could at least offer a resource somewhere that they can put steps they've taken with new customers to get their game to run so that old customers could at least have some ideas as to where they can start.

EDIT: I forgot one step... After installing everything, if you want to experience the band playing in Chapter 2, you must scroll down to the end of the GOTHIC INI file and change the line that says "disabled=55" to just "disabled=" (get rid of the 55) (screenshot). This results in the band playing in Chapter 2 as in the original German (and I think Russian) versions. Or at least it did last year when I made that change. Obviously haven't gotten to Chapter 2 yet to see.

Well, there is a support article, though probably outdated, and on the game's support page there's a link to the issues fixed section of the game's PCGamingWiki page. That probably counts as a start.

That's great to hear! I'm really glad you were able to get it all working again. We regulars all know how much you love Gothic games, so we know how totally frustrated you must have felt with it falling over like that.
We heard you the first time 13 hours ago.

Just wanted to add that the "video scaling" option in the gothic.ini file when off will show videos in a small window but it's greatly improving starting of a Gothic game every time, the other thing is programs work in the background, should any of those give a notification it's breaking a game and need to restart. With all notifications off, and video scaling off, must admit it works right on. I'm not sure if I should expect some default options to be changed by the support, therefore threads like yours are essential for g'old games.

Off course. If you happen to be on consoles. As a matter of fact that's exactly what consoles are for, to accommodate precisely that type of expectations.

On PC they're rather meaningless since a few months of use upstream from a fresh OS install the state of the setup will be largely determined by who is using it and how and not so much by any type of hardware/OS similarity to that of any other setup.

You feel very strongly about a misconception entirely of your own making that came to be simply because you didn't understand the point someone else was making

Let's see if i can clear that up for you.

There is no distinction to be made between "old" and "new "customer when it comes to gog's availability and willingness to provide tech support to a user. The distinction ony comes into play if gog CAN NOT provide a solution to the user. In that case there's a distinction, at least in my mind there is, in terms of eligibility for a refund between someone who buys a game today and doesn't get one minute of gameplay out of it because they can't get the game to run and someone who bought the game 10 years ago, played it for hundreds of hours and now suddenly, for some reason, can't get the game to run anymore .

It's great that you got the game running again, it is, i know the game means a lot to you.

But i can't help wonder if your gaming life would be better or worse if someone sporting the rational you displayed on this thread would have gotten the game delisted from storefronts before you having the chance to buy it.

You'd think so? Maybe there are indeed too many loopholes for a reasonable expectation to be applied to PC gaming. In my mind, it just translates as when a program does not work on any windows 10,11 device it should not be offered for sale

I think exactly the same if we're talking about software.

But, for me, equating video games to just programs without any meaning to them beyond mere out of the box usability it's quite simply an impossibility.

I haven't had any problems with any of my games on GOG so far, apart from a few crashes. Apart from that, the GOG version works almost always better than the other versions when it comes to stability, bugs or other issues, such as DLC authorization issues in Dragon Age Origins or the fact that I don't have to use the EA App, which is slow and full of bugs. You can't expect the GOG team (which is probably small, since according to some news and rumors GOG is not very profitable) to always keep all games super stable, because it's very easy for Microsoft to sometimes break something during updates, same with AMD and Nvidia with their drivers, and it can be difficult to fix, especially without help from Microsoft, AMD or Nvidia. Besides, GOG is far from selling broken games. It's not like you can't play them without mods, like Fallout 3 on Steam for many years.

I can understand his frustration, but immediately calling for, "Make it work for me or don't sell it at all!" struck me as a bit thoughtless toward all the people that could get the game to work without any effort at all. So those people should be denied the game as well?

I'm not exactly clear on this part, but it appears to me that the problem he was having was in getting the game AND the fixes and mods to work the way they used to? Or was it just the game as sold on GOG?

The whole situation I'd say. It seems a pretty popular thing for GOG users to have to use all those community patches procured elsewhere just to get the game to run without crashing, so that's sorta a "out of the box" issue. But there's also some extras he installs which, while improving the experience, isn't necessary to get it to run. And after all that effort and finally getting it to run: bam, Windows updates made it all topple over again.

I'd say I would be pissed too, but I wouldn't dare to ask GOG to "fix or delist", 'cause a lot of the problems were on my end out of GOG's purview.