I just clicked on this thread to see the complaints about GOG misinterpreting "isometric" again. I was not disappointed! XD

As far as I'm concerned, any update is questionable. In fact, the game that made me question developer updates was Heretic Kingdoms: The Inquisition, which had a final game update with the same version number as the previous one, but the new one not only no longer works completely correctly on Linux/wine, but invalidated all of my hours of saves, and I have no way of reverting to the old any more because it is no longer available and I didn't retain the old installer and the old installed game has become corrupted. At least that happened long enough ago that if I ever regain interest, I'll just start over from scratch rather than try to remember what I was doing. At least when Fallout or Daggerfall had patches back in the day, they provided tools to update saves if necessary.

People do remasters/remakes all the time, especially recently. Most happen without hordes of users complaining about it, like with Beamdog (and yes, I was one of those hordes). It seems hypocritical to give a free pass to one while complaining about the other. Not that I haven't done so myself.

Well, the thing is, it's a problem to be selling customers obsolete & incomplete versions of a game which most of them don't want & wouldn't buy if they knew there was a better & complete version available.

The Beamdog situation is totally different. The analogy doesn't work because it's comparing good devs who did right by their customers (meaning, the "Shadows" devs), with bad modders (meaning, the Beamdog modders) who pull dirty shenanigans with their customers. That's apples & oranges.

With Beamdog, they are adding their third party mods to already-completed games, and then removing the original from the market and doubling the price of the game in order dubiously to coerce their customers in buying their over-priced & unwanted mods simply by way of giving them no choice not to do so.

And moreover, most customers don't want Beamdog's mods, and instead prefer the original game before Beamdog touched it.

But those things are not not the case with "Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms" vs. "Shadows: Awakening." Most customers of those games, who understand what happened with them, are happy now to play "Shadows: Awakening" only, as they realize and accept that the older game has now become pointless to play. And there is no coercion going on with the "Shadows" devs. And the "Shadows" devs did not merely make a mod for the game and then double the game's price and remove the original in order to force people to buy the mod.

Having said that, I can understand why you are interested in having the obsolete & incomplete "Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms" version be preserved on the market for historical reasons. But in that case, at the very least, then GOG should add a big neon flashing sign right to the top of its store page, that make the fact crystal clear to every potential customers that they are browsing an incomplete & obsolete version of the game.

With no warning on the store page itself, they have no way to know that they are inadvertently buying an undesirable version of the game (unless they have googled these issues, which many customers probably haven't done).

Frankly, I think the term has been misused from very start. There are very few actual isometric games.

I miss the gog-mixes. Back then, I could easily locate all isometric games on gog with a single search.

Anyways—here's some isometric stuff that's absent from the sale:

Alien Shooter 2 reloaded
Dungeon Keeper
Into the Breach
X-Com: UFO Defense
Invisible inc
Little Big Adventure 2
Jupiter Hell

What do you mean? As I see it, pretty much all games known as isometric are isometric; it has a very distinct look which is hard to miss. (EDIT: Okay, I have to admit that this sale has a surprising lack of isometric games. So I guess the word has been misused, or have been expanded when applied to games)

Yes, Games Farm, Kalypso Media Digital, or whoever has the rights should ask gog to warn users about the old game (gog shouldn't just add notes discouraging sales without the publisher's approval, though). That would probably be a better idea than including the old game as an extra.

disclaimer: I bought Shadows: Heretic Kingdom because I liked Heretic Kingdom: The Inquisition (at least until they did their final update), without any knowledge of the situation. I first became aware of the situation when Awakenings was announced, and of course I am perfectly happy with the resolution (free game), even though the new game doesn't work at all for me in wine (yet; I haven't put any effort into it due to backlog).

Zombie Shooter too; I'd recommend it at <$2.

Fallout 1- Tactics are more isometrics of course.

In proper 3 dimension perspective like modern games. There is no technological excuse to be using isometric perspective in 2020. If you like that perspective more power to you, but it is an antiquated perspective that really no longer needs to exist and its mostly now just pandering to nostalgia of the time when it was a bridge between 2d and 3d

What happens with RWarehall, he is ill or something like that? no more his references in sales?

For me, he was very important to know the new low discounts.

Well, that solves your stocks dilemma.
And no doubt there will be a Prepper game soon, nothing to worry about.
Also, they say Contagion (2011) movie gained a sudden burst of popularity over the last days. Not sure how does it help though ...

This again?

No, perspective choice has nothing to do with graphics but it has alot to do with being the best fit for this kind of games, gives player the best overview of the situation - why do you think new XCOM is still in isometric?

All the special animations for kills and skills are just an eye candy, majority of the time camera stays in the isometric position.

That´s exactly what darktjm tried to tell you as well.

Isometric graphics can look beautiful as well. Disco Elysium and Pillars of Eternity II are more visually stunning to me than any modern 3D game, which are also unlikely to age well in 10 years. By comparison, many isometric games like Age of Empires, Commandos, and Planescape: Torment still hold up using higher resolution mods after 20 years.

Jupiter Hell is definitely using a 3D engine with perspective. You can easily see it in this screenshot -- compare the would-be-parallel vertical lines on the far left and far right of the image.

This is strictly true, but I think only because the resolutions of computer displays back in the day precluded (for practical purposes) the use of precise isometric angles. The approximation used was always a 2:1 ratio (two pixels across to one down), which gives us (pixel aspect ratios notwithstanding) an angle of arctan(0.5) == ~26.6° from horizontal, which isn't far from the 30° we need for true isometric angles. I believe that the intention would have been to present something as close as was practical to isometric graphics, so while strictly speaking it ought to have been called dimetric, it doesn't bother me to refer to those games as isometric.

Conversely, there is no such intention in a great many of the games which seem to get the label nowadays, so such labelling irks me.

It particularly irritates me that GOG wilfully misuses the term, because isometric graphics are an important part of computer gaming history (not purely historical of course; but mostly). To many of its customers 'Good Old Games' was in significant part about gaming history, and we do actually care about these things. I think GOG should care about these things too, but at this point it really is abundantly clear that, when it comes to this particular piece of terminology, they do know but they simply don't care.