So, apparently, when you're playing co-op, your friends do NOT get any XP or money. Although, YOU do get to eat the repair bill for the mech they borrowed. They can't bring their own mech. If you're looking for a great multiplayer experience, just pass on this crap. If you're all about single player, then it's probably worth a buy.

Also from what I'm reading it's not local/couch co-op; it's through an online server.

That is a massive downer with a 4 mech limit which would suggest you and your friends could play together.
Waste of controller support... must be made for consoles.

I wanted to say that you're being nitpicky on this, but when you look at AvP's page it specificly says Galaxy is required for MP & this game doesn't.

I don't see how Galaxy is DRM though. It handels online server connection, just like GameSpy did for dozens of games.

The biggest issue with Galaxy would be if GOG goes under then there's no more MP, like GameSpy. Do you mean LAN support or multiple players on one PC?

Now, that one is just a matter of requirements by now. You can thank Steam for that one. (But arguably it was inevitable, if it hadn't been them, it would've been invented / introduced any of the other platforms.)

To explain in an oversimplified manner... the game does not have it's own multiplayer code. The multiplyer code is only provided as a plugin, by <Steam / Origin / Epic / GoG>, which need a dedicated client with a friendlist for matchmaking to work, because that's how Steam did it, and what the games embraced as a standard. (Kind of like 3rd party controllers are all mimicking the Xbox controller protocol.)

The good side of it is, 1) this makes it easier for games to offer multiplayer, as the devs don't have to develop it, and 2) nor do they have to host the servers for it themselves, enabling even small devs to create multiplayer games. They just use <Platform>'s plugin that's provided to them, and don't have to deal with anything else. It's a puzzle piece that slots stright into the game. Multiplayer, done.

Now when a game gets released on a different platform, that puzzle piece obviously can't be taken with, and needs to be swapped out by the one of said platform for multiplayer to function. GoG didn't have one for the longest time, which is why games used to release on GoG without multiplayer support, at all. The puzzle piece simply didn't exist, and it left a hole.

This is the nature of outsourcing multiplayer infrastructure. It's cheaper and easier for the devs to do, but requires the player to be using a client as the game does not have accounts, friendlists, nor multiplayer code of it's own.

Steam invented it, it took off big time, and everyone else can't do anything about it but provide their own puzzle pieces to slot in, or alternatively, cut multiplayer alltogether. It's not been designed as a DRM measure, but as a service to game devs.

Some games do still have their own multiplayer code integrated to this day, like Factorio which will prompt you to create an account with the devs ingame, or Project Zomboid, which even provides a dedicated server for anyone to run. But they are rare, because it's more effort and costly to develop, rather than just... take that 3rd party puzzle piece and be done with it.

But one way or another, people always complain. Either it's "It needs <Client>" for multiplayer", or "It needs me to create an account to play". So again - you may thank Steam for that one.

In the end, should it be marked / explained more clearly? Yes, probably.

Oh, by the way if it wasn't clear which one this game falls under, it seems that MW5 is using it's own code (crossplay system) and you have to agree to a multiplayer EULA ingame for it to work. At least for GoG. Other platforms also support their native friendlists (the "puzzle pieces).

Sure, I understand the situation, but it's not something a consumer should have to be aware of in order to make a purchase.

The average gamer isn't a developer, and has zero idea that their game is going to have a vendor-lockin component required for the game to start a multiplayer session.
Therefore it should be clearly marked on the game store for the user to make their informed purchase. Anything less is more or less false advertising or misleading the customer.

Obviously these sorts of multiplayer lobby systems were designed with the dual intention of vendor-lockin with the added benefit of making development easier.
Xbox live back in the day was a tragic case, where many games became totally broken after Microsoft stopped support for Xbox live.

It's just one of the pitfalls of building third party proprietary software into your game. When the company that built that proprietary software stops support for that software, the future support for the game is also forfeit.
This is particularly a problem when that proprietary software dials home. Because as soon as the servers go offline, the functions of the game that do the dialling home simply stop functioning. It's perhaps not necessarily always a case of planned obsolescence, but it sure as heck does make your games obsolete once it happens.

Same PC same screen split to four quadrants; multiple xbox controllers. eg. local/couch co-op.
LAN is an issue of direct connection half the time; that is unless a developer specifically tried to use an online server/service as a form of DRM.

I agree with most of your assessment, however this one may also have a positive impact on future support. Granted, far as I know there are no examples for this as of now, since all of these services are still up and running and therefore, nobody needed to attempt this yet. But.

If you remember games like... Freelancer, for example. Which had their own server list built into the game, hardcoded. It took modders some effort to reverse engineer, and mod their own into the game, as to keep the multiplayer side of things running after the original service was canned. Take this, times basically infinity, since every other game does multiplayer code slightly different each time, and each one of those has to be reverse engineered. (Fair mention: All different services. Canning one won't mean other games also lose theirs. But then again, small games in that system are also more likely to be canned, and less likely to be preserved.)

There's probably still reverse engineering to be done when the puzzle piece plugin system stops working, but basically... only once, as the API is standardized, and should be fairly compatible with any other game out there using it. So someone could reverse engineer that once, and would then be able to offer a new platform themselves or at least a blueprint, to restore multiplayer capability for basically any game out there. At least, in theory.

It's definitely still worse than just having dedicated servers from the get go, because those will simply never go poof. But I'd assume it's a step in the same direction all the same, making it easier for a larger amount of games to be preserved and run by the community more easily, should it come to that. Still bad compared to the (costly) ideal solution, yes, but not the worst either, arguably maybe even better than it used to be for the scene in the past.

Asterisk:
With the dependency being a dependency by nature, and therefore all the annoying things that come with that fact as well - granted.

Seems I wasn't the only one to not see that the game cannot do anything multiplayer without adding a telemetry loaded client.

Been waiting since 2002 to finally play mw5, read the entire store page and zip - checked again, still zip - said about requiring gog galaxy to play coop or any such thing.

I specifically waited for the GOG release because I find steam and epic objectionable, only to get ... shafted, again.

Yes, I know, nobody cares. I don't even want my money back.

From now on, I will just assume you cannot do anything online in anything GOG if you don't think playing a game is worth having a client that is crammed with telemetry, enabling features I don't want and don't care about.

Seems I am no longer a gamer online. I'd hoped a company started by people who were right next to the actual stasi would give people the option to not have to put up with that crap just to have some fun, but I guess not. They learned their lessons well and joined the corporate progeny of that group.

edit: The shame of all this? All PGI had to do to avoid this is just allow direct connect games over the internet. That *was* standard, but I guess it gives the players too much control.

edit2:
I used to wish gog would get the mechwarrior series. Now I pray they don't, if they're going to be like this. :(

Which would require them to write their own multiplayer code. And, last time I checked - that's exactly what they did. As far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong here, Galaxy is NOT required to play multiplayer in MW5, since the only multiplayer that's supported in GoG's MW5 version is the Crossplay (meaning, you can for example play with Steam players). None of this functionality is provided by GoG, far as I know PGI didn't even allow for an option to DO use the multiplayer functionality of GoG themselves (which would be provided by Galaxy).

The game shows you a popup (an EULA to agree to I think), to use PGI's Crossplay multiplayer system. This is pretty much equivalent to the way Factorio, for example, handles things I think.

Why are you chewing out GoG for any of this...?
I didn't play multiplayer myself just yet, so again, please correct me if I'm wrong.

I've done the four missions to unlock co-op and the only thing it does when you hit the button t o connect to the server for coop is say "failed to login to online services" and I don't see anything at all in the game for inputting a login our anything of the sort. In fact, there's zip in the settings that I've seen for anything like that.

I don't have galaxy (or anything else like it) installed, in fact, I've never even downloaded it. I'll bet you have it installed. I expect it would be a pain in the butt, but I'd say temporarily disable it, or uninstall it, and see if the coop works.

If my info is correct, having Galaxy or not is irrelevant to this discussion as I already said.
MW5 has it's own system. As long as you agree to MW5's EULA window that pops up ingame, I think you have an icon in the top left corner when you're in your dropship. You click on that and use the ingame IDs of your friends to invite them into your game.

All I can find on the topic of this error is, how every player has to restart their MW5 if one of them gets this error, for it to start working again. If after that your game is still, consistently unable to connect to PGI's servers, check your firewall I guess? Point being, you're still barking up the wrong tree. GoG got nothing to do with any of it. Any errors you might get with PGI's own coop system are not a fault of GoG's.

Also, no, I don't have Galaxy 2.0 installed on my system, either. Nor anyone to play MW5 coop with. All I got here is Google / Bing / Duckduck. You should try it!

I have Galaxy installed but it's been my experience if I run a game directly w/o Galaxy running nothing changes except no achievements, sync, etc. I've also had games installed manually & pointed galaxy to the folder and then it recognized it. I just tried it with Cyberpunk 2077, Battletech, and Project Warlock. All worked w/o Galaxy running (had task manager running on one screen while playing game on other) & Battletech's MP worked.

If I had a GOG copy of MW5 I'd put it on the kids computer & see if I can do coop together w/o galaxy, but I have the Epic version.