Hi, I got The Witcher 3 and have few questions wish answered.

1. Does Witcher 3 have achievements outside gog galaxy or do you have to run the game in galaxy to get those?

2. Is it possible to run nexus mods in the game in gog galaxy or do you have to get mods outside of galaxy?

bump-o

only in gog galaxy in so far i know

1) No, you must launch Witcher 3 from Galaxy in order for Galaxy achievements to work. The same is true with Galaxy game time tracking, however The Witcher 3 also has its own internal game time tracking that works separately from that no matter how you launch it, which is available from inside the game play menus.

2) Yes, you can install Nexus mods within The Witcher 3 however you might need to disable game auto-updates if any of the mods affect any of the game's distributed files in a manner in which Galaxy game verification would consider the files to be corrupted, otherwise Galaxy would detect the modified files as being corrupt and auto-update them to the "correct" non-corrupted versions provided by GOG which would break the mods and possibly even cause the game to not work. (It might not break anything either, but it could potentially.) It's generally always recommended to disable auto-update when using modded games just to be safe. You can manually update the games still, but should probably uninstall mods prior to doing so, then reinstall them later. If someone knows from first hand experience that their mods are compatible with updating a game however then this suggestion may not be something that is necessary. As a result, your results may vary on this, but at least be aware there could be problems with some modded games.

Sure? Had games installed and played without Galaxy running and later when using it to get the installer from a new game the archivements where shown. I almost never have Galaxy running when playing games.

I don't have W3 so I don't know if its different there.

It's possible it may be different now from when I played the game, but when I played it both achievements and game time tracking were really wonky. I launched the game via Steam for screenshots, FPS counter and video broadcasting usually and Galaxy never caught up with things more often than not.

Having said that, GOG has claimed to have fixed bugs in Galaxy related to both features so it might work better now. I still have missing achievements in The Witcher 3 however which I definitely have achieved though.

It's a real conundrum for me personally because when I'm playing a game like that I want things like screenshots and FPS available as well as some other features, and it'll be quite some time from now before Galaxy has those features and they're stabilized. Even then, something like video broadcasting is advanced enough that I don't expect we'll have anything like that for 2-4 years or more as they've got a lot more important things to roll out first and everything takes quite a long time to do. So I end up usually launching certain GOG games like Witcher 3 from Steam instead.

Almost all of my shorter or casual games I launch via Galaxy though, and in some cases can at least take screenshots using printscreen when it works. I can record videos with Raptr if I need to but not live broadcast them to my satisfaction, and I can get an FPS counter also with Raptr (I think) or with mumble if I have it running.

So Steam launching works best for me for games like Witcher 3, but with the potential that certain Galaxy functionality may not work right or might be wonky. It's been over a year now since I had significant testing on this though so it may not be as bad as it was before.

Does doubleclicking the W3 on the desktop not start the game directly? The clients are nice to keep patches and occasional refresh the installer archive but everything else; even just starting a game... eww :/

edit:
Most games I know have an ingame button for screenshot but should I jump between many games and do printscreens often in all of them I'd be on the lookout for a program/tool which does that too.

But usually... I just doubleclick and play; and then mostly one game for an extended period.

I don't launch games via gaming clients because the games don't work without the gaming clients, I launch games with gaming clients because I purposefully explicitly want to use a gaming client to launch my games and have gaming client features available that I wish to use.

All GOG games install, launch and run perfectly without the optional Galaxy client. I don't even need to test it because nobody is required to use Galaxy, and every game is downloadable without Galaxy and should work fine as advertised. As such, of course Witcher 3 will work if you run it from a shortcut on the desktop or start menu, but that doesn't give me the experience I am looking for personally.

Sadly, it has been my personal experience that most games do not have a screenshot function built in as a growing trend over recent years, so one is left having to resort to using the Windows printscrn key and hope that that works, and have to ALT-TAB out and paste the screenshot into Paint and save it and hope ALT-TAB did not hose and crash the game, or you have to use Steam client or some other 3rd party software to do screenshots. To the best of my knowledge and research as of about 12-14 months or so ago The Witcher 3 did not have any built in screenshot function that I could ever find anyway, nor do most other modern games I test out. I think the developers leave it out because they design for Steam and just leave it up to the gaming client to handle or some other 3rd party overlay management software.

Most _older_ games that predate gaming clients or were in the early years of gaming clients have screenshot capability built in though.

I think that one would be hard pressed to find a game that has built in video broadcasting to your friends and family built into it though, and that's something that I do like to use from time to time. There are 3rd party programs that can do that as well, but I already own one - it is called Steam and I already have it installed, so I just use it rather than have to use yet another 3rd party program that needs yet another online account. :)