/rant

I gave in and redeemed my Galaxy code as provided by GOG and Christ, my eyes were opened to the realm of lies that has been GOG during the past year. Every single design choice, from website to account system to library (and the smartass unbundling) has been solely for the purpose of making Galaxy their main product. Yeah, all these changes have nothing to do with Galaxy at all.

I would not mind that much, if after almost a year of what I expect to be hard work by a dedicated team, they at least had something more concrete than a bastardized version of the browser shelf. Seeing how they have copied Steam's design with their website, you would think they would have taken take some additional inspiration for the design of the client and build on top of it. Nope.

It is indeed a sad day when the competitor that everyone dislikes/despises does something better even though you intend to do stuff better than him (and had years to learn from them).

I believe you may get you wish once the new account system is deployed (planned release time: the future), since it is supposed to be similar to Galaxy's, which uses a 100 game page, not unlike the 50 game page already used for the GOG catalogue.

It hurts when you realise this, doesn't it?

Right now I'm just waiting until Galaxy is finished. The only thing that can repair all the damage GOG has done now is that when it finally releases and we as the end user have that "a'ha!" moment when it all clicks into place. The whole Omlette / broken eggs thing. I'm not convinced that will happen, but I'm sure hoping.

Here's to an omlette future. Not Humpty Dumpty.

Can anyone rearrange the shelf manually?

I have never had problems with that before (except for some random glitches), but now I can't rearrange the games even if I try to change browsers or refresh or anything else.

I used to have, for example, all adventure games nicely on the top of my shelf, but this unbundling put those in a complete random order to the bottom of my shelf. And with hundreds of games on the shelf, I don't know anymore where my games are located, unless I change to (not so good) "by title" view.

There's a known bug that the manual sort does not work if you have more than 626 games on your shelf. Seriously.
If you have more, you can either give up on manual sort, or hide enough games that the number of displayed games is no more than 626.
Haven't tried any of this myself (as I only use list mode), but this has been reported by others.

I like this change personally. I prefer each game be a separate entity and I'm fine with episodic content being separated out as well. That's how I'd play it, one episode at a time so that works for me. That's how I notice the first Sam & Max series is setup on Steam that I recently installed. I have one entry in the client for each episode to download and play as I get to them. I notice that is true for the other TellTale episodic games I have too.

I am hopeful that Galaxy will make the shelf obsolete eventually. I'd much rather use a client than a web page to organize my library, install and update my games and download installers to backup locally for a rainy day.

I should clarify that I mean I hope it becomes obsolete for me personally. For others who prefer it and want no part of a client it isn't that I'd wish for it to be taken from them of course.

Considering how easy it is to hide anything you don't want to see I don't know why anybody would get upset about this change. Life really is too short to get all worked up over something that is relatively speaking such a minor thing. For episodic stuff you could just hide the unplayed installments until you want to install and play them. Maybe just keep the first unplayed one visible as a reminder you own that series. Likewise, with DLC it would be easy to just hide it if you want and display it when you want to install it. That's just a suggestion and how I'd do it if I cared enough to bother which I don't.

Wow. That's unbelievable, but it actually seems to work.
Thanks.

Hope GOG will fix this soon, because it's really a problem caused, or at least made much worse, by them when creating all those "new" games to the shelf.



It is anything but easy.

To hide a game, you need to click twice. First to open the game-specific menu, and then clicking the hide option. So to hide, let's say 10 games, you need to click 20 times.
Of course it's the same when making a game visible again (plus that one extra click to unhide all hidden games).

So to go full show-hide-unhide circle for 10 games, you actually need to click (at least) 41 times.
That's maybe easy as in "not difficult to do", but not easy as in "convenient".

Any ideas where the magic number "626" comes from? Is it like the product id of Fallout divided by the birth year of a former GOG web dev or something?

My library recently crossed that threshold thanks to the second phase of U-wording, but thankfully I've been around the block enough times not to have wasted my time on manual sorting on a web page in the first place, even though I've been prompted a few hundred times to switch to it by some other silly bug that won't be fixed because the new account system will be bug-free from the day/year/century it launches...

Aren't I a cynical bunny?

Now you know why I am so bitchy and negative.

I would not be surprised if GOG drops the ability to run the games without Galaxy some time after the release for the sake of some certain planned fluff feature which does not make much sense without the client.

Will happen. Will probably start just with new games and multiplayer. That way they can make the "unified" argument that Devs adopted the Galaxy multiplayer format and the games will not work, in multiplayer, with out them. Eventually it will be because right now they have to maintain two separate maintenance streams. One for the Individual Installers, and one for Galaxy. A time will come when the extra workload required for both will not be justafiable, so individual installers will be scrapped.

Why else would they start working on a client Years after already establishing the second largest customer pool on the internet, that did NOT support just one maintenance stream already in place? No one doubles their work load for no reason. The only logical answer is so the new can replace the old.

..and before anyone says "but they said" blah blah.. I remind you of the numerous times "they have said" in the past, that ended with "good news".

I'm beta testing the client now and i must say i'm really unimpressed.
It's basically just a dumbed down version of the site+forums, with less features. Kinda sad, actually.
Anyway, i took the chance of bug reporting/features requesting to request an option to let users bundle/unbundle games at will, again. I won't stop requesting it no matter what, even if i'll have to do it for years.

In case anybody missed it, there's still the community request i opened to wishlist such a feature to bundle/unbundle games at will, which seems to me a more logical, useful and meaningful way of handling the arrangement instead of the mandatory unbundling:

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

Please, feel free to contribute by voting it if you didn't already.

Kings Quest 3 still says Kings Quest 2 on the cover.

Don't worry. They'll get around to fixing the product covers on the shelf after the Galaxy is released. There, the Cossacks games have the right names on their boxes, not so much on the website shelf. I cannot confirm this for KQ as I don't own it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's already fixed on Galaxy.

Yes, it's fixed on Galaxy.

The client will totally be optional once it's released, as long as you're not picky about functionality.