I felt far more restricted by D:OS2’s armor system. Freeform classes sound great on paper, but it also means you kind of naturally end up at a spot where you’ve got everything instead of making meaningfully difficult choices in classes or multiclassing. Learning abilities from books leads to a lot of money bottlenecks and leveling decisions that I didn’t care for. The way that the combat usually doesn’t have any chance to hit, but then does very occasionally, makes missing an attack feel like bullshit rather than a calculated risk. I’m also looking forward to whatever they do next, maybe even a sci-fi interstellar RPG, but I hope they don’t go back to the Divinity well too often for RPG mechanics.
I can’t say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on Steam, but there are times where Steam’s DRM has caused annoyances for me when trying to play offline on Steam Deck that I would not run into with side loaded GOG games, which I detailed in another comment here.
Airplane mode is not offline mode. I found that out explicitly this year due to how Ubisoft’s launcher interacts with playing offline in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Offline mode is found from the Internet menu in the Steam Deck interface and is very much not the same thing as just not having an internet connection, as much as that would make sense.
I didn’t break any game data. This is an OS level feature, and it just does it sometimes on boot. I’m glad you’ve never been inconvenienced by these things yourself, but this is the intended functionality.
The beginning of D:OS2 felt like a cheat code to get more BG3 after I’d already finished BG3, but as time went on, I found that everything from RPG systems to pacing of combat/non-combat is leagues better in BG3, to say nothing of the production value that’s obviously better in BG3. Still a good game, but the improvement between each of their RPGs is immense.
Nope, this is something different. I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode, but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough. Fortunately I was on an Amtrak with Wi-Fi, but I shouldn’t have needed to do that. As far as I can tell, the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen, and once again, I shouldn’t have to plan ahead for being offline.
Well, that’s not true either. I hate this trend of developers only relying on the platform-provided servers for multiplayer, but you have to find a game with LAN. That limits your selection a lot, but I for sure played Star Wars: Episode I - Racer from GOG in LAN without talking to their servers at all.
I’ve traveled domestically and had the Steam Deck randomly decide that the games I preloaded need to be authenticated again because I didn’t explicitly put the device in “offline mode” before traveling. A GOG game sideloaded through Heroic would just work.
Are you sure? I haven’t played any of Sony’s games on GOG. From reviews, it looks like Horizon still sends telemetry if you’re connected to the internet, but I don’t believe it’s gotten the remaster update that mandates PSN. I could be out of the loop though. I do know that GOG caught flak for allowing Hitman 2016 on the store, which is technically playable from start to finish without an internet connection, but the connection to their server gates all sorts of extras, so the customers rebelled and got it removed.
It is for sure more complicated, but you have to weigh that against actually owning the thing you buy. Also, I forgot a step in setting up Heroic launcher. You need to also go to the Wine Manager section and download the latest stable version of Wine-GE. It’s pretty straight-forward, but you’ll need a version of Wine to play Windows games.
Download Heroic Launcher from the Discover app in Desktop mode and add it as a non-Steam game. You can log into your GOG account there. In a best-case scenario, which is more often than not, you just hit download, and you can play the game on Steam Deck.
But sometimes it doesn’t work like that. Steam will often bundle dependencies with your download, like DirectX versions or Visual Studio runtimes. To get these working, you’ll need to run “winetricks”, which can be done on a game-by-game basis from within Heroic, and then install the dependencies you need. To find out which dependencies you need, if you had trouble launching the game in the first place, you can check SteamDB and see what other “depots” the game has. This resolves the problem about 99% of the time, if there’s a problem at all. In one case, Phantom Fury, I was unable to get the same compatibility with the GOG version that I was with the Steam version, and I don’t know why. Also, at this point in time, I don’t think you can rely on cloud saves working, and you might need to rely on a solution like SyncThing, but it looks like cloud saves working reliably via Heroic is imminent, if it isn’t already since the last time I checked.
No, but saving the industry is their “hook”, if not explicitly stated as such. I know that every game I buy from them will be impossible to take away from me if I backed up the installers first.
I’d certainly love to hear that they’re at least turning a profit. It’s my default store now, but given the ambiguity of what I’m buying in the multiplayer space, and the lesser experience I get as a Linux customer, they’re not making it easy.
This sounds like it would just end up speedrunning Steam’s refund system. Plus, I don’t think it’s desirable for the seller. If they feel their game is worth some price, but a bunch of people know they can bully other developers into a race to the bottom, that could easily be a negative feedback loop.