Hi Everyone,

I was wondering if any of you have your games running off a USB or MicroSD card.

I want to be able to put a game on a USB and play it on my main PC at home and then just take the USB with me on trips and continue where I left off.

Is it possible to make games, at least the ones bought from GOG completely portable without having to install on some directory on a specific PC?

Of course it's possible. :D

Depends on the game. Jagged Alliance 2 should be playable from a USB stick, even if you never installed it on that particular machine. Other games may refuse to play like that though and require entries in the proper places (user folder and/or registry).

Should be able to run a lot off usb - so long as the usb stick is fast enough. Depending on the game however, older ones can be difficult to get running anywhere, and newer ones tend to be hooked into pre-requisites and the registry. So you will find a fairly large scale of effort. I have Diablo running off USB at the moment, fast stick runs great. Also I have portable apps on the same pendrive.
I would just try it, install to your normal desktop, then copy to pendrive and run on another machine.

For those games that require registry locations, there's no way to run them in portable mode?

In specific, I'm trying to house The Witcher 3 in a USB. Well the game I'm trying to keep on a USB is The Witcher 3.

That's a fairly new game so I'm not sure If I need to keep a registry location to run that.

Other games I'm thinking about include Kingdom Rush and No Man's Sky.

Are you just trying to save installation space on your portable device this way? Reason I am asking, (and I am sure you've considered this, but...) I have just used a usb to transfer save and possibly profile files from my desktop, and downloaded them to my laptop when travelling. Of course this requires you to install the full game on all devices you plan on playing it. Also, I should think, that even if successful in running games like Witcher 3 and NMS from a storage device, there would possibly be real slowdowns and stuttering in play that way?

I would say you have pretty much no chance of running something like Witcher 3 off USB at the moment. It requires a shedload of computer power, loading textures, processing and such like. Even if you were to get it running on USB you would notice a fair bit of a performance drop, even if it was just down to the read speed of the USB stick, although theoretically USB 3.1 might just be able to compete with HDD speed.
As a secondary, I would imagine that you would need C++ extensions, physx, and other drivers also installed on the drive, plus all the reg-entries.

Why do you need to out of interest, is it to play on multiple machines?

Should be possible with some games, but like other have stated it's going to depend a lot on what the game writes to the registry and such. You also would not want a microSD or anything using flash memory. This memory is slower. You would want a portable external hard-drive for sure.

Well, I'm planning on keeping the full game on the USB and then transferring the files over to the computer so that I don't have to deal with slowdowns. But because everything is in one folder, saves included, it makes it easy to transfer everywhere. Well to address the first comment, I would really just keep the entire game files on the USB in a folder and then transfer that folder to the device I'm playing and run it off their. This way, I don't deal with slowdowns.

However, my main concerns is my progress. I want to keep everything in a folder and USB so that I can easily take my game, and it's progress, on the go and use it across the systems that I'm using at the time.

Since I'm constantly around because of the nature of my work, I would like to make some progress on my laptop and then transfer my progress to my home PC when I get back and play it on the best quality.

So I totally understood everything you just said but for those who don't understand a single thing you just typed, can you further elaborate/explain?

*grabs pen*

Ah, I see. So best plan would be to keep a backup of the installer files on an external drive. You can then install them on any machine you have the rights to do so. You could also keep a copy of your save games - have a look at this post:
http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/41753-Witcher-3-saved-game-file-location?s=b8b036520eeae16fe622fd770c857d3a

For location of save files. You should just be able to copy off the folder and copy it to any machine which has W3 installed.

So I totally understood everything you just said but for young people, can you further elaborate/explain what a pen is?

I have to admit, It would be nice to have this feature ;)