I played this on my original Xbox, then 360, then even Xbox One! It is a classic and is loads of fun! I got the GoG version recently to play it on PC at a LAN party and it is wonderful to behold. The game is exciting, easy to learn, and hard to master. Bot support is good which allows for endless replayability on your own or with friends! The online is officially back and as fun as ever! You can also play online with easy to find and helpful communities of dedicated fans and casual players alike on unofficial servers. This game especially shines if you need a LAN party game for up to 64 players (with bots to fill in at any point).
I've now played this game for about 30 hours and can confidently state that it is the best realistic NASA style space sim I've played to date. It's a lot of fun to play, with endless goals and ways to play. I see a lot of complaints, especially here on GoG about "spyware" and EULA and whatnot... This game is offline. If you have the EULA so much and are so paranoid that the game will use spyware to take data from you, just play in a VM. Honestly if you are so tech savvy to understand how spyware works then just use that savvy to install linux in a new partition or even a new drive to put all your spyware EA games and No Man's Sky. For any normal people, don't sweat it and run in controlled folder access without running the game on administrator privileges to see if it even so much as saves a file. The GoG version, upon purchase, gives you the download for the original version of the game, beefore any of the spyware scandal. It then gives you access to the separate patches and updates that have taken place since. If you are honestly worried, just play the original version by Squad and don't download the patches. Great game.
I love this game, I've played it since it came out. I loved the disc when I had it, I love the GoG version, but now I love the Steam version even more. It's a very close to perfect game, but the difference playing through Steam is simply compatibility. It plays online, it is modable, workshop downloads, and has a living community of players. Unfortunately, these are all things the GoG version lacks. This version is perfect for LAN parties, and still retains all the in-game features. But, beyond that, the Steam version and it's recent patches, fixes, online, and even new content has made the experience far superior. I wholeheartedly suggest buying this incredible game. However the experience may be dampened buying through GoG. Unless your intention is to illegally give the offline installation files to your friends for a LAN party. And even then, to play with more than one person, it's much more fun in Galactic Conquest, for which I suggest the Multiplayer Conquest mod on the Steam workshop which allows multiple players per faction in Galactic Conquest mode. Not to mention that the GoG version of the original game has a game breaking error that many many people experience which didn't allow them to even run the game, and that GoG support could not fix for anyone. I found the solution in the Steam discussions; simply rename the sweaw.exe to swfoc.exe I don't know why this works, but it does.
