Posted July 09, 2023
Hi everyone. It is my first time posting here and I just wanted to help anyone who might be in doubt about the SR4 situation. It is still possible to play the pre-patch Game of the Century Edition of the game as of the time I'm posting. Reading through several posts in this forum left me confused as to whether that was possible or not. So I decided to see if I could get it working.
I couldn't find a way to get the installers for that version, as they seem to have been removed shortly after the Re-Elected version was released. I then tried to switch Gog Galaxy to the beta branch that supposedly exists, which would install the legacy pre-patch version, but I couldn't find that. For me no beta branch is available. It does show up on steam, although I have seen reports that it still installs the re-elected version. I tried to go into configurations, but mostly all of them were greyed out. I then decided to install the game via Galaxy which got me the Re-Elected version. The game crashed shortly after it opened, so no good there. I then checked the options again and now I had the option to revert my install to a previous version. I chose to revert it to version 20170523, as it was the latest release before last december. After Galaxy basically reinstalled the game, I got a shortcut to the GotC version. I started it and it works perfectly fine for me. Features that had been reported as missing by other users such as borderless windowed and the tf2 dlc are all there. I was able to play in borderless mode in both wide and ultrawide resolutions. This was tested on windows 10. After that I made a backup of the install folder and copied it to another computer. On a windows 11 machine the game also ran fine, running in borderless mode with ultra settings. I've played for about 3 hours give or take and haven't had any issues. While playing on my machine with Gog Galaxy the achievements were registering fine too.
TL:DR So to summarize this, install the game through Gog Galaxy, revert to GotC (20170523), back it up and enjoy. Although I couldn't get the installers, the game folder isn't too big (about 10 Gb), so I just backed up the whole game. I'm glad I was able to get the GotC version back with all the goodies. Hope this helps other people who didn't have the old installers and weren't sure how to go about getting the old version like me.
I couldn't find a way to get the installers for that version, as they seem to have been removed shortly after the Re-Elected version was released. I then tried to switch Gog Galaxy to the beta branch that supposedly exists, which would install the legacy pre-patch version, but I couldn't find that. For me no beta branch is available. It does show up on steam, although I have seen reports that it still installs the re-elected version. I tried to go into configurations, but mostly all of them were greyed out. I then decided to install the game via Galaxy which got me the Re-Elected version. The game crashed shortly after it opened, so no good there. I then checked the options again and now I had the option to revert my install to a previous version. I chose to revert it to version 20170523, as it was the latest release before last december. After Galaxy basically reinstalled the game, I got a shortcut to the GotC version. I started it and it works perfectly fine for me. Features that had been reported as missing by other users such as borderless windowed and the tf2 dlc are all there. I was able to play in borderless mode in both wide and ultrawide resolutions. This was tested on windows 10. After that I made a backup of the install folder and copied it to another computer. On a windows 11 machine the game also ran fine, running in borderless mode with ultra settings. I've played for about 3 hours give or take and haven't had any issues. While playing on my machine with Gog Galaxy the achievements were registering fine too.
TL:DR So to summarize this, install the game through Gog Galaxy, revert to GotC (20170523), back it up and enjoy. Although I couldn't get the installers, the game folder isn't too big (about 10 Gb), so I just backed up the whole game. I'm glad I was able to get the GotC version back with all the goodies. Hope this helps other people who didn't have the old installers and weren't sure how to go about getting the old version like me.
