Hi

I have been having a problem with BOI: Afterbirth, Afterbirth + and Repentance, that when i start any of these individually they start and then crash unless i have internet connetion, then they start as normal. Also they work after that when i close internet connection. When i look at logs they say they can't get connection to timeanddate.com.

Thou BOI: Rebirth starts normally without internet connection.

I'm using linux and with wine + lutris.

So is anyone else having this problem or solution to this? Or is this just linux thing?

I actually had to install Afterbirth to test this and sure enough, blocking (or being unable to connect to timeanddate.com) makes the game launch a black screen and crash shortly after. This constitutes as always-online-DRM and shouldn't have passed GOG's quality control but here we are again.

It's bad enough we're treated like garbage with missing native builds and on top of that they're out-of-date. What a sloppy D in the face from the devs again... Too bad my refund period has expired already and I didn't catch this as I have only been playing the base game, which like you said works fine without the need to connect anywhere.

EDIT: Since I own Afterbirth on Steam too, I decided to try that out, and here comes the real kicker: it launches perfectly fine without even trying to connect. Soo, they f'ed something bad on the GOG build overall.

I've tested playing each different version of the game without an internet connection and I am not running into any issues. There is no always on-line DRM, the problem must lie elsewhere. I haven't tried running it through wine + lutris, so it may or may not be wine related.

Maybe it's related to how Wine handles errors in case the connection fails. Alas, it's beyond my capabilities to confirm this by debugging. I did see something about wininet.dll and connection failing.
Do you see the following error or something similar in your logs:

That might be the cause behind it, because that exact error is listed in the logs for everything but Rebirth without there having been any issues with the game itself. The error happens, but there have been no sudden crashes or odd behaviour when I ran the game without an internet connection.

Do you by any chance run the game via Galaxy, even without internet? Judging from some older posts with other games, Galaxy (or rather not using it) has caused issues for people before.

If I disable wininet.dll through Wine I get errors stating that loading Galaxy.dll failed since it requires that library so it's possible that this issue stems from Galaxy as well as it's Windows-only.

No, I don't use Galaxy. Fully installed it through the offline installers, as well. Games don't seem to like it when you remove Galaxy related files in general, but Galaxy itself is not required to play the game. It seems to need to need to be there in case you do install Galaxy to avoid compatbility issues.

I get the same issue starting the game on the steam deck. It fails to load offline. I did change the setting, "Steamcloud", in the .ini file to equal 0, or off, can't remember the exact settings to turn it off (why it's there on the GOG version I don't know), and that seemed to have fixed it for a short while. But that didn't last long as that no longer works. No idea why I can't load the game offline using Porton on the steam deck. Very strange.

This game is truly the gift that keeps on giving, and still no proper answer on the ticket I sent a month ago, su much for looking into it