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General discussionIMPORTANT NOTICE: Unbundling games(1959 posts)(1959 posts)
(1959 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted March 21, 2015
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Ciris: Hi, guys!

Following your many requests and in connection with preparing game libraries better for GOG Galaxy, we’re going to be starting what we’re calling unbundling games.

This means that multiple games that are bundled as one “product” (for instance: Tomb Raider 1+2+3) will no longer appear as one title on your game shelf, but rather - be split into individual items. This means more convenient downloads, smaller downloads if you just want to get one game, better representation of the games on your shelf, and being able to toggle installing and auto-updating titles from such a bundle in GOG Galaxy individually (should you decide use the client in the future once it's released).

Such bundles won't be unbundled in the store, so no price changes will happen - it's just a different way to display them on your shelf, which will make things easier for you and future software.

In the first "run" of such unbundlings - tomorrow - we'll take on two shelved items: Alien Breed + Tower Assault and American McGee's Grimm. Starting next Tuesday, we'll move on to unbundling all games in our library and this process will take a week. Before this process ends, you may still see some items on your shelf stay in bundles, but don't worry, their time will come as well and your game shelf will be neat once again. :)

If you have any questions, feel free to ask and we'll do our best to answer them. We’re also awaiting your feedback in terms of how unbundling went for your games - we’ll be following this thread, so keep us informed of any issues!

[EDIT] full list of games: HERE
I'm assuming the process is still ongoing even for games that are already displayed as unbundled on the shelf, since i tried to download the new installers for my affected games, and on HOMM 5, the installers are listed at +2gb, but the downloader returns a 20mb instaler. Given this, i hope when the process is finished, all affected games get flagged as updated.
Posted March 21, 2015
I like this change but its very very very sloopy job from GOG.it seems that people are coming with new issues all the time
Posted March 21, 2015
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RottenRotz: I like this change but its very very very sloopy job from GOG.it seems that people are coming with new issues all the time
Yeah, I generally enjoy the forums but the non-stop barrage of website bugs, glitches, forum posts getting eaten now too, sluggishness of the site, increase of problems overall, combined with widespread discontent from people about all of it, as well as my own increasing discontentment with the state of things despite my best efforts to maintain good spirits about things is making it very challenging to feel like sticking around in the forums at the moment, especially with no sign of anything getting fixed, and virtually no communications about any efforts that might be happening to do so.

Seriously thinking about taking a GOGcation from the forums for a while to avoid my spirits being drained as I'm feeling a bit grumpy. ;/
Posted March 21, 2015
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mvscot: Rather than having the re-assurance of obtaining the most definitive version of an older game available, convenient to install, I now face an uncertain and wasteful download experience.
How is an installer that includes Ultima 4, 5 and 6 "the most definitive version" of Ultima 5?

How is an installer that includes only Ultima 5 a "wasteful download experience" compared with installer that includes 2 other Ultima games if I care zero for them and just want to download and play Ultima 5?

Admit it already that all you care is convenience of downloading everything from your library to satisfy your backing up needs and you have zero care for typical user of GOG who simply wants to download and play a single game from their library.
Posted March 21, 2015
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d2t: Admit it already that all you care is convenience of downloading everything from your library to satisfy your backing up needs and you have zero care for typical user of GOG who simply wants to download and play a single game from their library.
Ha, you have a point there. So many users here seem obsessed with buying, collecting, and backing up games that I don't think they actually even play most of their games. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I can see how this update upsets a lot of users.

I still think unbundling isn't a bad idea in general, but I'll only be happy with it if GOG irons out all the bugs it's causing, which, knowing them, might take a while.
Posted March 21, 2015
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d2t: How is an installer that includes Ultima 4, 5 and 6 "the most definitive version" of Ultima 5?

How is an installer that includes only Ultima 5 a "wasteful download experience" compared with installer that includes 2 other Ultima games if I care zero for them and just want to download and play Ultima 5?
The issue I was addressing isn't "useful" unbundling of separate games (done right with no broken/missing links, incorrect descriptions/box art, etc.), but that of large-scale duplication such as the one with Heroes Chronicles I was responding to, and that of large duplicate bonuses I mentioned elsewhere.

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d2t: Admit it already that all you care is convenience of downloading everything from your library to satisfy your backing up needs and you have zero care for typical user of GOG who simply wants to download and play a single game from their library.
Quite the opposite, actually. If that were the case, I'd be advocating making the users download dependencies such as the right version of DOSBox themselves! (I very rarely use the bundled DOSBox or ScummVM, but configure each game to run with my preferred installation of each.)

I believe there's a compromise possible which works well enough for most people, but that GOG's efforts at getting there currently fall short.
Posted March 21, 2015
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yogsloth: I like them grouped. I wish Cognition was grouped together. Doesn't sound like we can toggle it - it's unbundling whether you want it or not. It's not a huge deal, but it's going to create some real confusion.

Might & Magic I-VI are now going to be six entries on my shelf?
Gets even worse on Heroes Cronicles (8 entries), Leisure Suit Larry Collection (also 8 entries) and Avernum (7 entries). Geneforge and Battle Isle Platinum are now both 5 entries, Ishar and the Incredible Machine packages come up to 4 entries now.

In short, my collection "grew" that way from 128 to 185, and gives me a hard time now not only due to the sheer number (shelves adapting to screen width could help a bit), but also because I struggle to find the correct entry on some games which use very similar boxarts (especially on the incredible machne, Larry Laffer (the VGA tags are barely visible on those versions) and Avernum (which got scattered all over the place in my shelve, forcing me to rearrange everything)
Posted March 21, 2015
Yeah, this feels like the biggest blunder gog's had in a while. No way in hell I'm going to try to manually sort 744 games, and all the hours I spent organizing my collection before the unbundling have been wasted. The product page links are gone, the game forum link just goes to general discussion...? I'm having trouble figuring out what some of my games even are. This sucks.
Posted March 21, 2015
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d2t: How is an installer that includes Ultima 4, 5 and 6 "the most definitive version" of Ultima 5?
It is not about games that stand on their own, such as Ultima, or the Witcher. It is about the games that have had expansions added to them or which are just new scenarios for an existing engine (ie. the Heroes Chronicles).

The expected standard of digital distribution is that once you click install inside a client or download an installer, you get the complete version of the game up to that point. With the focus of the unbundling being mostly classical games, where expansions are part and parcel of what is today expected to be the "whole" game, this entire exercise has turned into a farce. We can be glad that Wing Commander or Dungeon Keeper didn't get their expansion packs turned into two installers as well (the only reason it probably did not is because they are DOS games).

Add to this the numerous bugs that this unbundling has introduced and an influx of "bonus_product_xxx" that has been present for a while now and because of which no-one knows what bonus material has been added without downloading it; and what the people in this thread (myself included) are arguing for, are not the demands of a vocal minority to have things returned to the way they were, but for GOG to talk to its community, not take away our choice and to think before jumping into such major decisions before testing them or considering what the consumer (the people who keep GOG afloat) would want to come with such an unbundling.
Posted March 21, 2015
Question if they are unbundling games how come Dracula 1 is 10 gb and the other two are less space than that doesn't really make sense. Did they make a mistake and accidentally leave Dracula 1-3 bundled under Dracula 1.

Dracula 2 is 900 and something MB and Dracula 3 is 2 something GB yet the first one is 10.8 GB in hard drive space yeah that doesn't sound right.
Post edited March 21, 2015 by angelus04
Posted March 21, 2015
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angelus04: Question if they are unbundling games how come Dracula 1 is 10 gb and the other two are less space than that doesn't really make sense. Did they make a mistake and accidentally leave Dracula 1-3 bundled under Dracula 1.

Dracula 2 is 900 and something MB and Dracula 3 is 2 something GB yet the first one is 10.8 GB in hard drive space yeah that doesn't sound right.
I just checked the actual size and when you download Dracula 1 it is 1.02 GB, so a display text error.
Post edited March 21, 2015 by stg83
Posted March 21, 2015
At least give us access to the last installers before they were unbundled:

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/legacy_installers_for_unbundled_games
Posted March 21, 2015
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Ciris: Hi, guys!

Following your many requests and in connection with preparing game libraries better for GOG Galaxy, we’re going to be starting what we’re calling unbundling games.

This means that multiple games that are bundled as one “product” (for instance: Tomb Raider 1+2+3) will no longer appear as one title on your game shelf, but rather - be split into individual items. This means more convenient downloads, smaller downloads if you just want to get one game, better representation of the games on your shelf, and being able to toggle installing and auto-updating titles from such a bundle in GOG Galaxy individually (should you decide use the client in the future once it's released).

Such bundles won't be unbundled in the store, so no price changes will happen - it's just a different way to display them on your shelf, which will make things easier for you and future software.

In the first "run" of such unbundlings - tomorrow - we'll take on two shelved items: Alien Breed + Tower Assault and American McGee's Grimm. Starting next Tuesday, we'll move on to unbundling all games in our library and this process will take a week. Before this process ends, you may still see some items on your shelf stay in bundles, but don't worry, their time will come as well and your game shelf will be neat once again. :)

If you have any questions, feel free to ask and we'll do our best to answer them. We’re also awaiting your feedback in terms of how unbundling went for your games - we’ll be following this thread, so keep us informed of any issues!

[EDIT] full list of games: <a href="http://www.gog.com/forum/general/important_notice_unbundling_games/post1" class="link_arrow"></a></div> Maybe it's offtopic, I apologize for that. But I have a question. What format is used now in the GOG installers? Older distributions can be unpacked using "innounp" (I use [url=http://fec.ct8.pl/blog/innoex]http://fec.ct8.pl/blog/innoex/), but not the recent, unfortunately. Are you still using Inno Setup?
Posted March 21, 2015
Unlike a lot of folks complaining in this thread (some with very understandable complaints) I fully support the unbundling. And I have a little over 100 games in my library, many of which are impacted, so this is a pretty big thing to me too.

I was actually just thinking about downloading the Quest for Glory series on my underpowered little extra-tiny laptop, and decided not to bother- I really only wanted 1 and 2 on there, and the whole bundle was just too big to bother with on that little go-cart of a machine. So this is great- I'll actually be using it really soon.

However this does make something really clear: we desperately need better organizational tools for our libraries.

I want to have options to:

*Group games by series and then explode those into the individual games.
*Sort by original release date.
*Sort by rating (yeah, I use this to decide what to play next sometimes).
*Sort by most recently updated.
*Filter by... stuff like the above.

For those unaware someone has made an awesome tool that can do some of this for us at this site. GoG really ought to learn from this tool and implement some of these awesome features for their site.
Posted March 21, 2015
I took 10 minutes and actually came up with decent Quest for Glory box art for the series. It won't help your game shelf, but if you're like me and archive your games AND their box art from the game shelf, these should look worlds better. Just drop each into the appropriate directory and rename each as folder.jpg

Feel free to use them GOG.

PLEASE.

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2905813/q4g.zip
Attachments:
q4g.jpg (80 Kb)
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionIMPORTANT NOTICE: Unbundling games(1959 posts)(1959 posts)
(1959 posts)