Hi folks,
Since discovering GoG's offline installers, I've realised just how much better purely offline gaming feels. I'm not sure why - it's still the same game as on Steam, for example, but without the hassle of logging in and all the baggage of updates, achievements, badges and other such useless fluff. I click on the icon, the game loads up and I'm instantly transported 20 years back to when I just stuck a disc in the drive and played. How I miss those days...

Most of the games on GOG have their online modes deactivated, and you can play them only offline. That's because most of the time "online mode = DRM". Honestly, I prefer it a lot this way.

The heck is an online?

No :)

I like the gametime counting and then seeing my games on a list after i am done with them.

and i do not miss cd days. They were also far from instantaneous. took some time to load the game :

Online multi player is one thing. Online single player is a glass hammer.

You don't need to be connected to an online service for this, though. Lutris does this for all of my Windows games (on Linux), no matter where they come from, completely offline.

I'm curious - why do you like to see the game time counting? What does knowing how many hours you've played mean to you?

I actually *don't* like that Lutris does this, and I wish there were a way to turn it off.

Also, I wish there were a way to take advantage of the Lutris scripts to make games easy to run without having to actually use the launcher, as I prefer to start games from the command line.

I too hate to see how much time I've wasted in my life on frivolous things like video games. Lutris does a lot of under the hood, all kinds of scripts, tweaks, patches and env variables, to make everything run well and with a lot of features and options, that's true.

I bet once the wine prefix is made though, and you figured out the env variables, you could run it through the command line with the correct wine version and get pretty close to a similar experience. A lot of people might not even notice a difference, unless there's a performance dip or cutscenes not playing, or something major.

Not sure why you'd want to, but to each their own :)

Assuming the game I want to play is the one I most recently played (usual situation, since the games I play tend to be long-form games with save features, which tend to be the majority of games these days), and that the terminal window is still open, it's much easier to start it that way:
* Using Lutris, I have to find the game in the GUI, move the mouse cursor over to it (a pain if on a laptop), click on the game (again, a a pain if on a laptop), and only then does the game start. There's also the time it takes to launch Lutris in the first place, particularly since, by default, Lutris wants to check for updates on launch before it even shows the GUI.
* Using the terminal, I just press up until the command to launch the game shows up, then Enter. If I haven't done anything else on that terminal, I only need to press up once. In particular, I do not need to use the mouse (a pain on the laptop, and particularly annoying when I don't otherwise need the mouse to play the game). If the terminal isn't running, it's a lot faster to start than Lutris. I'd like something that does everything Lutris does under the hood, and nothing more. In particular, I *don't* want a GUI.

Wow, 2 clicks on a laptop touchpad? And 3 seconds to launch Lutris? That *is* a tall order. I'd rather pull my teeth out ;)

You can get the commandline to launch a game using lutris, if you first make a desktop shortcut for the game inside Lutris, open it with a text editor and pluck it out from there. The command will run the game from the terminal without the GUI, as it will suppress it.

An example from mine:
LUTRIS_SKIP_INIT=1 lutris lutris:rungameid/2

If however you want to "mimic" Lutris using the correct wine prefix, wine version and myriad of env variables and correct runtimes, good luck with that! There's a reason Lutris was developed for years to be this good and convenient.

Does anyone else just find purely offline play cosy?

Actually yes. It must be psychological or something. Like when you turn off your wifi connection, it somehow represents cutting the connection with everything you value in your online life. Like taking a break for a couple of days to a countryside or something similar

I don't know much about the command line but you can create a start menu entry when you right click on a game in the lutris library maybe this helps...

What you are looking for is ./play.it ;)
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/linux_playit_weekly_news

It's not just the clicks (which, on some touchpads, aren't that easy); it's moving the mouse cursor to a specific spot on the screen.

By the way, please don't use sarcasm.