Please stop flooding this thread with this stupid drama bulls**t and get back on topic. Use the chat function for that stuff. Thanks.

Agree, AB2012 has some good construction criticism posts for GOG. Even though I disagree with him on something, I’m positive he dislikes me. Lol. His posts are pretty informative.

Edit: BrianSim of all people should know high rated post mean nothing on GOG forms. You only need two or three thump's up to get high rated post. Lol

Idk why GOG even has it. It should be like reddit or YouTube were you see the number thump's up you received. But spam probably would just return.

Thank you for updating F.E.A.R.! Can you please add cloud saves like you did for the rest of the games in the Preservation Program.

At this point it seems like we either let GOG live and accept at least some of the problems because they barely get by financially as it is (and staff deserve time off naturally; can't be here 24/7), or we encourage GOG should just shut down and we can be free. You can shout "Fire" but if everyone is too busy with other stuff, naturally nothing will happen. That said, I'm not saying GOG shouldn't change some priorities and focus on fixing Dragon Age and some similar things, but certain things like the forum staying the same and slow downloads may just be par the course unless GOG somehow ever makes it big financially.

Pretty sure the slow downloads are because of the budget CDN they use because, again, they barely get monetarily.

from 3 months ago (note that I didn't actually read it myself):
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1hktl31/cdactionpl_major_layoffs_at_gog_employees_shed/

top comment: "TL;DR, GOG is having a hard time making a profit. Which, unfortunately, is probably always going to be true for a service that most people associate with old games. If they're aware of it at all."

Maybe this thread is worth a browse for people:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/cd_projekt_strategy_and_development_of_the_company_financial_results_suggestions_by_armchair_ceos/page36

The staff probably feel a need to keep chugging along and prioritize what will make money for the current quarter and keep the lights on. Far from ideal but that may just be the unfortunate reality.

I know it's obvious but GOG just doesn't have Steam money to make vast improvements. But if you want to compare it to an even smaller service like Zoom-Platform or FireFlower, fair enough.

Agreed but I wanted to respond. Sorry :P

I kinda like some of the dorky staff-hosted videos they've put out regarding some of the Preservation Program releases. I'll take an actual person--thick accent or no--over an AI voice any day.

Silent Hill 4 getting retooled like this is such a huge win - I think GOG should've paraded this around a bit more, honestly. I think this makes the PC version the definitive one... after 20-odd years.

Eh? I can assure you, I don't dislike anyone here yourself included. :-) Not even sure why I'm talked about here as I haven't even posted in this thread. LOL.

I do get frustrated when GOG come up with a Great Idea (tm), ends up breaking something chasing "the Fad of the Day on a shoestring budget", but then rather than making at least an attempt to fix it, just dumps it and walks off. So I 100% agree with Brian (and know full well many other regulars do as well) that the first step in Game Preservation is for 3rd party stores (like GOG) to at least not add more of their own bugs (and fix them when they do).

When GOG slip up, they simply need to acknowledge it and fix it, not just let it be another abandoned problem left to rot. People get "tired of hearing" griping about problems, yet people will gripe harder the longer problems go unfixed and they feel like they aren't being listened to. GOG desperately, desperately need to fix these communication skills as the notorious endless silent treatment / 'radio silence' is by far the root cause of much discontent here vs "Hey guys, we're aware of this issue and are looking into it".

I think it's 5, though all the high rated posts in this thread asking for GOG to fix what they broke is probably more indicative that a lot of people here just want broken games fixed than some social media thing. ;-)

I explained in this thread the Dragon Age Origin problem in technical detail so I won't repeat all that. The over-griping on DAO isn't just about that game, it's a healthy reminder that despite "Game Preservation" somehow being misinterpreted here as "I want every game to run out of the box for everyone with 1-click", at the end of they day PC's aren't consoles.

I've edited several hundred PCGamingWiki entries, and there's a lot of CPU-specific, GPU-specific, resolution-specific, OS-specific, etc, tweaks that need applying individually. Perfect example - the UI scaling fix for DAO comes in 3 versions : 4k, 1440p, Ultrawide. For Fallout 3, Intel iGPU's need this fix, but AMD / nVidia users don't. GOG cannot "preserve" one pre-applied fix for everyone and it's best to be honest about GOG's Preservation program limitations rather than engage in clumsy "over-tweaking".

Edit: For those interested, the definite fix for FEAR is EchoPatch. No idea if GOG have included that in their "preserved" version as I haven't had time to test, but if not then those serious about Game Preservation should download and back that up alongside their game. It's often minor Github projects like this, that's where all the real-world Game Preservation work is done beyond the PR pitch.

It was kind of a chain reaction, lol. Poor foad01 got mentioned in the post even though he wasn't participating in this thread. Then he used you as a great example of good criticism toward GOG. It's funny how that works. Thank you for not disliking anyone; that reflects how I feel.

I completely agree that GOG's communication skills are lacking and can be frustrating at times. It seems like one month GOG will improve their communication, and then the next month we hear nothing at all.


That's probably why I don't get too worked up about it. I understand, as you mentioned, that GOG cannot create a one-size-fits-all fix for every user. It's just not feasible in PC gaming, but I'm glad they're trying. They should be more transparent about the potential issues and acknowledge that not everything is perfect. It would be beneficial for them to collaborate with the community to address these problems. Aside from the Dragon Age issue, I've had a pretty good experience with GOG program; they've successfully made some games compatible with Windows 11 that didn't work before for at least. Overall, the program not bad, but it does come with its usual GOG hiccups.

Also, thank you for the link to the FEAR fix!

@GoG - would be nice of you to forward-engineer a game the simulates the reverse-engineering of an old game(s) by you.

^ Kinda hailing the Reverse Engineers at GoG^

So will GOG be injecting all the games with ecto cooler then?
(p.s. the film and short story are both kino)

GOG, with respect to Dragon Age Origins, I'm sure you locked the game to only two threads to solve problems in specific scenarios, and thus may be reluctant to undo the fix. And I appreciate that your focus is to make sure games run on today's operating systems and hardware.

However, surely there is a way to still cater for us users who have older CPUs. At the end of the day, if all GOG users need to spend money upgrading their computers, that leaves less money in the pot for them to buy GOG games. In cases like Dragon Age, where you know a fix is going to have unwanted consequences for some, can you not offer both versions? For example, create two shortcuts on the desktop pointing to the two different executables, or creating a .BAT laucher that let's the user choose which verson they wish to run, or adding an option in the installer where it can default to installing your preferred version but lets the user choose to override it where they prefer the version with unlimited threads, or at least 4 threads?

Part of the DRM-free philosophy is being able to have choices. This is an area I'd expect GOG to be able to excel in compared to other platforms.

Any confirmation that the Preservation Program did not break the new games added to it like it did with Dragon Age Origins?

I want to be sure before replacing my offline backups, since the preservation program is actually in risk of instead of preserving said games, creating new bugs on them and also breaking compatibility with mods.

Actually, thats good that GOG tells us which games are being added to the program... that way we can know which game not to buy here and which to preserve a version before the program contamined them.

Yeah, sorry for being that harsh guys, but Dragon Age Origins drama really turned me off with this marketing program.
Im mostly educated and polite when critizing you guys because I do respect the job you guys do a lot, but "One Fix To Rule Them All" DOES NOT WORK FOR PRESERVING GAMES, IT ACTUALLY KILLS THEM AND BREAK THEM.

Wasn't exactly this what happened with Sauron's plan to "fix Middle Earth" following Melkor's ideas?
Are you guys becoming Saruman, following his masters will?

Thank you very much for this @AB2012, I had no idea about this and was playing FEAR using some mods I've found on Moddb that do exactly what this project does on its own.

Did anybody tested if GOG's FEAR, now on "preservation" program, at least doesnt install the CD-Rom drm/freezes like antarctica because the exe tries to do whatever it tries to do?

I have reservations, for these preservations.

Maybe what we need instead is a game reservation program?
Like for the indians, you know?

It actually motivated me to buy a used physical copy of the ultimate edition, but I didn't realise it only actually contains the base game and the Awakening expansion, and all the smaller expansions were DLC codes :P Derpy derp.