spindown: Unbundling Heroes Chronicles is insane. Please provide a combined installer again.
Does anyone know whether the original individual CD-ROM releases
installed separate copies of the common parts of the games into separate game folders, or whether the installers made an attempt to share/update those?
I'm inclined to prefer that GOG do the
minimum of re-packaging (since the more you try to change, the more likely you are to screw up), so if the original games installed this way, it's OK for GOG to do the same (but since GOG previously avoided multiple copies of shared components for Heroes Chronicles with their combined installer, I suspect they're just being lazy with their new packaging design).
Having said that, I think GOG installers should be designed to be somewhat aware of common dependencies (such as DOSBox, ScummVM) and share only one of each necessary version (one DOSBox 0.73, one DOSBox 0.74, etc.), at least as far as installation goes (most people probably want single-file downloads for each game, so the installer still needs to contain the duplicate components, though having an
option for the downloader to fetch shared components separately might be nice, but not at the expense of the convenient single-file downloads).
The poorly-differentiated shortcut icons are one change that is borderline; I myself prefer to put up with the original, but recognisable, 16-colour icons of old games than to have a whole bunch of GOG-styled hi-colour icons I can't tell apart.