The Cloud loses things, and when I played Witcher 3 on Steam several times I realized that after playing it offline two more times that a lot of detail was left out of the Cloud saved games. The Cloud is neither as secure or reliable as the server farm owners would like you to think.

If any of you can tell me if there is a bootstrapper for this game that I can create a desktop shortcut to play the game offline you will have my eternal gratitude. Steam does this and it would be nice if GoG would do this also. GoG seems to be more professional than Steam and this would save them a lot of time trying to sync saves when people have high capacity hard drives. The content is truly more robust when you save it to your own drive.

Download the game via offline installers and it'll save to your pc

Single-player, yes.

If you use GOG's Steam-like Galaxy client (and you don't have to, you can just download the installer exes, through your browser), you may need to specify not to use cloud-saving; I'm not sure.

...That's kind of the point of the whole "DRM-free, client-optional" ethos. No, you don't need to be online, nor do you even need to have Galaxy installed for single-player (or even for multiplayer, for a lot of games); you'll simply miss out on the Galaxy-based features (achievements, playing-time logging, and, yes, cloud saving) without it.

I think there is (or used to be) an option for games in your Galaxy library to add or remove desktop shortcuts (which I'm pretty sure also launch Galaxy along with the game by default, but if you edit the "target" line in the shortcut's properties, you should be able to stop that from happening).
Of course, you could always just find the correct executable file in whatever folder Galaxy installed the game to, and create a shortcut yourself, too. : )

Yep, that option exists.

You do realize cloud saves are a backup of the saves on your drive? Not saves that are only in the cloud?

I've never understood how that works. Isn't the idea that if something were to happen with your local saves(somehow they are deleted), that they would automatically be downloaded from the cloud? My uneasiness with this way of doing things is this, what happens then, if the system gets confused and simply overwrites your saves. Or is that impossible, as long as you have saves in the save folder?

On Steam at least, if your versions in the cloud differed from your saves on your HDD it gave you the choice of which ones to keep, showing you the timestamps. So in most cases you'd want to keep the newest ones.

One of the drawbacks is that you can't 'just' delete your save files manually (in explorer). I tried that with XCOM since I'm a horrible savescummer and had 100+ saves and deleting them ingame was rather slow. So I deleted all the saves in the folder. But then the game just happily downloads them back to your HDD because, well, cloud saves. It only registered the deletions for the cloud if I did it ingame.

Interesting, I guess that's one way of avoiding misunderstandings. Pass the decision to the user. I never knew that's how it worked, I wonder if GOG does the same thing.

Yes, it works exactly the same. I had that happen with a couple of games when my internet was down after playing so it couldn't sync. Next time I booted them up with an active connection Galaxy prompted me about which save files to use.

As others have said, offline DRM-Free installers is pretty much GOG's "killer feature" over Steam (certainly for single-player games).

Hover over your username at the top -> Games -> Click on desired game -> Underneath "Download & Install Now" (Galaxy), there's another option called "Download Offline backup Game Installers". Depending on how large / small the game is, you could have one or multiple files to download, but click on them to download them to wherever your browser's Download folder is, and once there double-click to install like any other program download via a web browser. They'll then wok without Galaxy and all the Cloud save, etc, stuff.

As for where the local saves will be stored, it varies from one game to another, but PCGamingWiki is a good resource that details save / config locations.

On that note: Did anyone here ever noticed how very few games let the user choose a directory to put savegames in? I wonder why. It's a function present in even the most basic text editor....

I don't have Galaxy installed no more, but even if you use Galaxy, there's an option inside Galaxy to just use it as a downloader for the offline backup game installers. If you do so, Galaxy downloads the install files, you can use the install files to install the game and inside Galaxy there's also an option to disable cloud saves for games run with Galaxy.

Plenty of options there.

My most favourite option is the GOG Downloader though, even though it's no longer supported, it still functions, usually: https://www.gog.com/downloader

Playing games offline without having to worry about always-online DRM and clients demanding that I log in is literally one of the main reasons I use GOG.