It's always been unclear to me whether when I download the installation files whether or not I'm supposed to also download the patch file or whether the "base" installation file is already the latest patched version. The particular game I'm talking about today is Disco Elysium and you can see by the screenshot that there are several files to download the game itself, and then there is a patch file. Do I download the base game files, install it, then immediately download the patch file and apply it or will the "base" game downloads already be the latest patched version?

In case of Disco Elysium you'll have to download the base game installers every time a new build is rolled out. They stopped doing incremental patches 1 or 2 years ago (meaning you don't have to bother with that one very outdated patch installer that's still listed there, for some reason).

thank you.

I've never seen a game that wasn't the latest version compared to the patch. I suppose it's possible, if you look at the download list just as an update went out.
When in doubt, look up the game on GOGDB and look at the Builds tab. You can see the dates for each version there.

Generally you can tell by the versioning, but that is not the case with this game, which has something very different for that patch.

There are cases where a patch might continue to be relevant, despite versioning being different for it, if it is something optional that is controversial or impacts badly on some systems or is not needed on most systems, but is on a few. Patches can of course have fixes for some problems while introducing others.

There are some

Thanks. I'm surprised they still haven't updated the full installer for The Witcher 3 by this point. But I already finished it, and I didn't need Chinese language support in the first place, so it's not like it affects me personally.

Oh THANK YOU very much. Bookmarked that page....