Hi everyone,

this is an observation, combined with questions, mainly aimed at those people who do not use Galaxy (or, like me, very reluctantly).

I took a break of a couple of months off offline gaming. MMOs still have a strong pull on me sometimes *g*.
But once again, after a burst of a couple of months playing only one game, it starts to get boring. Also, related, due to the stupid winter weather, my old copper 6k DSL line becomes unreliable. And while improvments in that regard are on the horizon, that is still quite some time off.

That in front, to show that i am not an "offline evangelist" ;) You might also call me a hypocrite :p And yes, i own quite a number of Steam games.

What pulled me back to GoG where a couple of updates to games that i played back then, but have not finished, or just want to play again.

1. Stardew Valley 1.4
2. Divinity: Original Sin 2
3. Pathfinder: Kingmaker

These three games alone though show the sorry state that the offline installers are in.

First, the way how few back patches are available for download. Especially Pathfinder was a big culprit there shortly after release, with several patches *per day*. Kudos to uploading them all, but only keeping the last 4 was ridiculous. Miss one tiny, less than a megabyte patch by not checking every two days: Download the whole crap again.

Another special, which brought me to make a post about this *again* is Stardew Valley. Again, kudos for even providing them since the game is only a bit more than 500 MB, but has anyone from GoG even looked at the version numbers? Besides the ridiculous length of the version number (i know, GoG cannot change that), they do not even match up! So each of those patches is useless.
These are Stardews patches:

1.3.32.3 to 1.3.33
1.3.36.241109 to 1.4.361914464
1.4.362026040 to 1.4.362073756
1.4.1367430508 to 1.4.2.369585252 (latest)

Nothing of this lines up and can be installed. If you can only provide crap like that, just leave it be...
For Stardew it fortunatly almost does not matter due to it's small size.

And for those asking: Why not use Galaxy?
I do, but only reluctantly, with any service set to manual and Galaxy not starting automatically. I do not use it to start games, and if i do not start it manually it keeps quiet. Which seems to work so far. But the Pathfinder download (without counting the DLC, which are downloading now) was still 22 gigabytes...

Now after my rant, for those that are still here ;) my question: Are other games affected by the same behaviour? Or have i just picked three bad examples?

I almost never get new games. For older games I have never seen anything like this as they dont often get patches. Unfortunately however it has often been the case that the offline installers were outdated. So if you want the newest version you need to check this and you cant trust the often incomplete version logs on GOG. Best way to research is to look at Steam page version number and GOG forum posts. This may also be helpful: Games that treat GOG customers as 2nd Class v2

^ Those rapid release incremental updates can get annoying but today it's also why I wait for larger, more complex games to be "completed" before buying (and have long stopped being a "release day beta tester"). Larian are great developers but as we saw with Divinity Original Sin 1, it took about 12x patches, then an Enhanced Edition re-release then a few EE patches before it was truly "finished". I was not surprised to see the same with Divinity Original Sin 2.

As for Stardew Valley - patch 1.4 was a pleasant surprise but many people aren't rushing to upgrade because it broke a lot of those SMAPI mods and many people are waiting for full compatibility before upgrading.

As for other games, This War Of Mine is one example where the game became noticeably buggier once they released the "stories". Don't Starve is another one where I don't like or want the "Hamlet" DLC (which introduced some new bugs). It isn't here on GOG yet, but if it does come I'd rather still have the option of re-downloading the last non-Hamlet version.

I prefer offline downloads to Galaxy too, but examples like this are why I no longer automatically delete older backed-up installer versions anymore and instead put it into a "known good version" archive folder which is easy to revert to, due to lack of ability to re-download older installers. I agree 100% that GOG should provide a drop-down choice of older offline installer versions to re-download (even if they hide it in a sub-menu for "power users") especially for games with an "ongoing development" spread over years.

Yes, there should be a feature where you can download any released version of a game. There are some games (can’t think of one here specifically,but Diablo 2) you may want a specific version, perhaps also for modding.

One prime example of this is galaxy.dll. This has now been added to almost all offline installers with recent updates, effectively adding spyware into the installers, as, for example, Fallout New Vegas will no longer run without this dll. As these are offline installers, something specifically requested by those of us who do not use galaxy, nor likely want anything to do with it, this is a real kick in the teeth and highly damaging to GOGs image.

So yes, being able to download a specific version is highly desired, however increasingly unlikely as GOG move more towards pushing not only client friendly customers, but anti client customers towards using their client.

There are some wish list items for it,
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/let_us_play_older_versions_of_the_games_we_buy