The executable crashes before it shows up on screen.

I decided to go ahead and install the latest version through Galaxy right now and see what happens, it might possibly work now, not sure if I tested the most recent build or not so what the heck... :) Going to end up burning 16+GB of Internet altogether this way though as I need to download the standalone too, but that can wait for another day...

Oh, then it must be a different issue than here.

Ok, I got the game installed and the executable launches now so that problem seems to be solved but wow is this game ever incredibly buggy and quirky.

- It stalls on the splash screen for about 30 seconds.

- Then it triggers the Windows Firewall alert trying to access the Internet after it starts without initiating any Multiplayer functionality (phone home of some sort). I'm guessing this is what made it take 30 seconds to get past the splash screen.

- Displays an error "Currently unable to get latest changelog"

- Clicking on "Advanced Options" gives an error and warning to run the game once first (just bad programming to throw an error at a user doing something a lot will do by default.

- Clicking Play goes back to the splash screen for about 10 seconds, then the game goes fullscreen with a completely black screen for 20 seconds with silence for about 8 seconds then some music plays a heavy metal riff and a keyboard, a very fast flash of an Apogee logo shows up very briefly (on subsequent runs the Apogee logo shows up earlier indicating the Apogee splash has some kind of glitch going on).

- The main menu comes up with the background graphics flickering and shearing massively. I've never seen a game flicker/shear so much, I'll have to go into advanced settings and see if VSYNC helps resolve that.

- The audio on the main menu and everything after that including the opening comic book cut scene and the start of the game is very choppy and stuttery with distortion like it is playing at th wrong sample rate. The graphics also freeze up for seconds and stutter, locking up for as much as 10 seconds.

- Eventually the game loads and shows some weapons and stuff and then hard locks and I have to ALT-TAB. The system is almost unresponsive and it takes about 2 minutes to get task manager running and be able to kill the game process.

It was actually quite entertaining to see just how amazingly buggy a modern game like this could possibly be. LOL I am very impressed at the epic level of fail and thinking it may deserve an anti-award of some kind. :) I'll leave it be for now and maybe sometime in the next few weeks surf the forums/web for problem workarounds as I'm sure others have probably went through it already and published their workarounds/findings etc.

I suspect that more game patches are forthcoming from the publisher though because wow.... such fail. :)

In that case, I'll have to either stop putting off installing that Linux application firewall I ran across or build the airgapped Win98/WinXP-booting nostalgia machine I've been meaning to build.

(If it works without phoning home, then it's none of their business. If it doesn't work without phoning home, then I'll raise a stink over being cheated and thank my lucky stars that I didn't get tricked into violating my "what I get used to playing must continue to work despite outliving the developer/publisher/vendor. That's what ownership means" policy.)

At the moment - for me at least it doesn't work whether it phones home or not. The furthest I've got on about 5 attempts to start a game is the game loader screen where it appears like it should be loading the first level and the camera zooms in between a couple buildings as a sort of cut scene with some heavy metal music skipping and chopping like you put a fan in front of a speaker. This sequence repeats over and over, no keys on the keyboard do anything, the mouse does nothing. I left it sitting there for 3 minutes and it just kept looping with the music chopping. Only ALT-TAB or CTRL-ALT-DEL do anything, and either one has about a 10 second delay until it switches out of the game at which point the entire system is super sluggish. I even went into task manager and set the CPU affinity from all 8 cores to just one core so that the system would be more responsive but that had no effect. Ended up having to right click and End Process each time I started the game. This is with version 1.5.1 also which is the latest.

I gotta admit, from the screenshots and advertising materials for this game I totally thought the ROTT remake entered the world of triple-A gaming (or at least the major leagues), but now that I've seen how buggy it is and the poor quality comic book opening cut scene with bad voice acting and stuttering audio, I literally laughed out loud and cracked up at how bad it was so far. It has a super-buggy indie-shovelware feel to it from what I've seen so far. I'd still like to actually play the game itself though to actually see what they were able to do with it so I'll eventually search for workarounds some day and try any new patches that come out, but... wow... holy super mega epic fail of mass proportions. LOL

Good idea!

I've created Changelog threads for This War of Mine, Might and Magic, Desktop Dungeons, Dead State and Fantasy General.

https://www.gog.com/forum/this_war_of_mine/changelog
https://www.gog.com/forum/might_and_magic_series/changelog
https://www.gog.com/forum/desktop_dungeons/changelog
https://www.gog.com/forum/dead_state/changelog
https://www.gog.com/forum/fantasy_general/changelog

Maybe Judas can make them sticky?

Thank you both!

From MaGog's logs for 17 May:

NOTE! CHANGED Guild Gold Edition, The, title_de: ***TO*** Gilde Gold, Die

NOTE! CHANGED Guild 2, The, title_de: ***TO*** Gilde 2, Die

NOTE! CHANGED Guild 2: Pirates of the European Seas, The, title_de: ***TO*** Gilde 2: Seeräuber der Hanse, Die

NOTE! CHANGED Guild 2 Renaissance, The, title_de: ***TO*** Gilde 2: Renaissance, Die





NOTE! CHANGED Black Mirror, The, title_ru: ***TO*** Черное зеркало

NOTE! CHANGED Black Mirror 2, title_ru: ***TO*** Черное зеркало 2

NOTE! CHANGED Black Mirror 3, title_ru: ***TO*** Черное зеркало 3

NOTE! CHANGED Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword, title_ru: ***TO*** Mount & Blade. Огнём и мечом





NOTE! CHANGED Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded, sys_req_win: Windows XP or Windows Vista, 1,7 GHz Processor, 512GB RAM, 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 9.0c (128 MB NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700, ATI Radeon 9600 or higher), 3GB HDD, Mouse, Keyboard ***TO*** Windows XP or Windows Vista, 1,7 GHz Processor, 512MB RAM, 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 9.0c (128 MB NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700, ATI Radeon 9600 or higher), 3GB HDD, Mouse, Keyboard

[Finally I can play it]

Bwahahahahah. That's some serious optimization right there! LOL

Strange, TWoM and Dead State have changelogs already. Did I miss something?

Dead State: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_what_did_just_update_thread/post8809

They have changelogs in your account when you own the games, but not in their respective forums. Some of the updates and patches might be interesting for people who don't own the game as well though and that's why I created the threads.

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/post_duplicates_of_the_changelogs_in_the_respective_game_forums

Ah yes, of course it's understandable that people who don't own games want to see the changelogs. My mistake.

Of course it doesn't always make sense. But the changelog doesn't include just minor patches, but also information about newly added languages, supported OSes and systems and fixes for compability issues. Some of the stuff might be very helpful for people to decide if they want or don't want to buy a certain game.

Got at least 2 update flags but when I go to my library there's nothing updates. Brrr, stop teasing me!


Edit: There we go, Blood and Realms of Arkania 3 updated.