GOG.com

[Venser]

Phew. Thank God they did not "update" original Falloutz I own.

Weren't the original Fallout games on GOG censored? I could be wrong but I think I read about it.

 

[rohand]

Yes, I'll take a look when I get home and download my pre-removal versions to see if the old Interplay setup was preserved or they were updated to the new Bethesda version.

 

[Infinitron]

Yes, I'll take a look when I get home and download my pre-removal versions to see if the old Interplay setup was preserved or they were updated to the new Bethesda version.

They weren't, otherwise there would be no reason to keep a separate "Classic" SKU.

 

[Crooked Bee]

http://www.pcgamer.com/how-gog-rescued-13-forgotten-realms-games-from-licensing-hell/

How GOG rescued 13 Forgotten Realms games from licensing hell

In the 1980s and ‘90s, the roleplay system Dungeons and Dragons was huge, and so were the spin-off video games set in the Forgotten Realms—titles like Pool of Radiance, Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Hack and the awesomely-named Menzoberranzan. Why have you never played them? Because, like Planescape: Torment and Baldur’s Gate, they’ve spent twenty years lost in licensing hell. And Good Old Games has finally tracked them down.

For Good Old Games finding the missing games, establishing who owned which parts of them, and getting them into a playable state has taken many years. Their first step was to work out who owned what. After all, the original developers SSI disappeared into Mindscape in 1994, before being passed through The Learning Company, Mattel and Ubisoft—and this game was licensed from TSR, who closed in 1997.

As GOG’s Oleg Klapovsky explained to us, “with classic games like those from the Forgotten Realms series, years of mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies can really leave the rights sitting in very strange places... like banks, or enormous conglomerates. Sometimes the original documents aren't even digitized, so somebody has to physically head down to the figurative cellar and dig through countless cabinets.” On top of that, the art, the music, the license, the digital distribution rights, the code can all be owned by different people.

So GOG went to SSI, and hence to Ubisoft, who were also the publisher of the first SSI game. “After considerable back and forth, it unfortunately (though perhaps fortunately for us) turned out to be a dead end.” says Klapovsky. “The rights were not with Ubisoft. They were sold or left behind somewhere along the way.”

Then GOG went to the next logical place, the current owners for D&D, Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast. “While they did own The Forgotten Realms intellectual property and were very excited for what we're doing, they also had never gotten the actual games themselves.” Another dead end.

With the trail running cold, GOG tracked down SSI’s original President and founder, Joel Billings. “As a huge fan of D&D he was willing to help walk us through a detailed history behind SSI mergers and narrow the search down to two potential candidates: Mattel, or Gores Technology Group (who had acquired The Learning Company). The latter was a hit. We had found the actual rights owners to the Forgotten Realms games, and after several more months of negotiations, they agreed to sell them to us outright.”

GOG managed to recover thirteen games this way. They are: the party-based RPG Pool of Radiance; its sequels Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades and Pools of Darkness; C&C creators Westwood’s minigame RPG Hillsfar; the RPG construction kit Unlimited Adventures; Westwood’s first-person Eye of the Beholder Trilogy; the roguelike FPS Dungeon Hack; the two Savage Frontier games; and the Ultima Underworld-like Underdark exploration game Menzoberranzan.

Then it they had the not-so-small matter of getting all thirteen running and bug-free for modern systems including Windows 10. Considering these were huge games—and not bug free in their release versions—that’s a massive task that the GOG team has been working on since April.

One of the stranger challenges has been to get the Code Wheels working—the nostalgia-inducing cardboard security devices that came in the SSI Gold Boxes. “We considered trying to remove the need to use these codes during gameplay (much like we've done with several of our games in the past) but instead decided to opt for leaving that mechanic intact for the sake of a cooler, more authentic old-school experience.” So each game has a printable DIY code wheel for players to construct and a software version as well.

For the SSI team who created them, it’s great that these games will get rediscovered by a new generation. After all, twenty years ago they put their heart and souls into them, as the lead designer David Shelley explains. “SSI had bet its future on the franchise, bringing in their first artists, and creating a team much larger than the 2-3 man teams they usually had.” Thankfully, the games did so well that, as one of the programmers said, “we could have shipped pancakes in a D&D Gold box and made money.”

Though it sounds ridiculous now, before these games came out it was thought that the computing power simply didn’t exist to represent D&D accurately. As SSI programmer Keith Brors recalls, “These games were extremely advanced for the time. The C64 and Apple II versions were written completely in 6502 assembly and those computers only had around 48,000 bytes of Ram. The computer I'm using here to answer these questions has 166,000 times as much memory.” (Charmingly, Bror still works on D&D, as lead programmer on Neverwinter Online.)

Not that they were perfect games, by any means. Laura Bowen-Shelley was an artist at SSI; “They do have a different feeling from modern games, less dark and not very grim even when they were violent. Less questioning of stereotypes, too. There seemed to be less at stake, and there was less judging and pointing of fingers. As a female, I felt a bit outside of the whole thing and not able to push back much, though I was a lot less embattled than seems to be the case with some women in gaming right now. No one was making threats when I said I preferred to draw a female authority figure with a strong jaw rather than a sexy pout.”

That said, all the team we spoke to seemed proud that these games are once again part of videogame history. “We have seen the D&D torch passed on to great games like Baldur's Gate, and members of those teams have gone on to make some games in the same vein, such as Pillars of Eternity.” said David Shelley. “It does trade off turn based detail for realtime excitement, but the story and style hearkens back to many of the games in these collections. Divinity: Original Sin is another with an excellent fantasy feel, and a similar experience.”

And though these games are all that’s left of SSI, the team behind them has finally found the impetus to recreate their charms, as Shelley explains. “Some of us decided that we should get together again and produce a new RPG which hearkens back to those great games. We helped found TSI, and are busy creating Seven Dragon Saga. Our six character parties, and turn based combat, are inspired by the work done on the D&D games.”

 

[Infinitron]

Hah, so in the end it was neither Ubisoft nor Hasbro. "Gores Technology Group". Geez. But what about the non-FR games?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Considering the time frame that passed from GOG securing the rights and until they released the games, they've probably tracked down many of the rightholders by now and are in negotiations with them.

I'd guess we'll see more releases by the end of the year.

 

[JudasIscariot]

Yes, it's Dosbox. No idea about that particular bug. I won't have time to play it long enough in the near future anyway.

JudasIscariot Are you perhaps aware if Bethesda or GOG fixed that crash for the release?

We tested the games from start to finish so AFAIK that crash did not occur for us while testing. Please let us know if it does

 

[LennyFromMotorbread]

Morrowind doesn't even come with the soundtrack
I know you can copy-paste it from the game files, but still...

Don't they add some of that shit later? That's why you get notifications on your Library tab every now and then to discover there's a brand new Journeyman Project wallpaper!

 

[Magellan]

Wait what Battlespire?????

Wow.

Just wow.

Battlespire and Redguard are the only two I never played. Pretty good stuff?

 

[Alex]

There's a D&D sale on 1st Edition FR books going on as well http://www.dndclassics.com/browse.php?filters=0_44710_44700

This is a good reference about the books that were released, if anyone is interested. A lot of the early stuff is pretty cool, I think, but it starts getting repetitive and formulaic later on. I never played them, but I heard the times of troubles adventures are really bad, with the PCs playing a minor part and mostly just watching or doing inconsequential things. If they release more stuff, I think the setting books from before the 90s may be the best thing to aim for. Also, not 1st edition, but I am really fond of Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog. The book doesn't have much in the way for rules (and is kinda disappointing when it does), but it has several items you can use to make your games more fun and colorful.

 

[Brumaire]

Don't they add some of that shit later? That's why you get notifications on your Library tab every now and then to discover there's a brand new Journeyman Project wallpaper!

Sure, they could add it later, but it's not like Morrowind's soundtrack is some long lost artifact that would require hours of work to put online. A scan of the cloth map would also have been appreciated, but is seems like Bethesda only wants to do the bare minimum to rake in the cash.

 

[Telengard]

Battlespire and Redguard are the only two I never played. Pretty good stuff?

I can't wait to see what newcomers to the game think of Redguard - Bethedsa's attempt at an adventure game. Imagine, if you will, Bethesda making a game billed as an action RPG set in its standard RPG world but without any RPG elements at all. The empty RPG that everyone was guessing Elder Scrolls IX would be after they experienced Oblivion. Well, you don't have to imagine anymore. Here it is.

It was going to be a series, but the first game sunk it.

 

[Turjan]

I can't wait to see what newcomers to the game think of Redguard - Bethedsa's attempt at an adventure game. Imagine, if you will, Bethesda making a game billed as an action RPG set in its standard RPG world but without any RPG elements at all.

Just to make this clear, this was never billed as any kind of RPG. They tried to make something like Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia, with platforming and fighting sections. The action RPG was Battlespire.

Redguard's importance for the RPG series lies more in the point that this game shipped with the first "Pocket Guide to the Empire".

Edit: Of course, they cut out the "Pocket Guide to the Empire" from the manual they put in the GOG.com version. You still see it in the table of contents though. Which is even more infuriating than the lack of the comic.

 

[Rabbid]

The comic is here. I guess they could have included it in the gog version.

In case you guys missed it, buying any of the three Elder Scrolls titles adds Arena and Daggerfall in your gog library. I guess they come with gog installers.

 

[Aenra]

Hopefully not out of topic..? Was wondering if anyone could post a semi-review of Galaxy? Am mostly interested in:

- mod-friendliness compared to the retarded way Steam handles it
- online/offline mode or other "must be"s that are there only to remind you what a good little slave you are
- ability (if any) to install a game where and as you want it, because dumping files in /root is not even funny
- if/whether registry keys are all nicely and tidely bundled up under a GOG folder, just like it happens when installing their games individually

I am sure some all of these have been answered before, so feel free to swear at me. After replying?

 

[rohand]

Hopefully not out of topic..? Was wondering if anyone could post a semi-review of Galaxy? Am mostly interested in:

- mod-friendliness compared to the retarded way Steam handles it
- online/offline mode or other "must be"s that are there only to remind you what a good little slave you are
- ability (if any) to install a game where and as you want it, because dumping files in /root is not even funny
- if/whether registry keys are all nicely and tidely bundled up under a GOG folder, just like it happens when installing their games individually

I am sure some all of these have been answered before, so feel free to swear at me. After replying?

From what I remember

- I don't think it has mod support at all
- I'm not sure you can go offline with it, but it's irrelevant, since you can launch the games directly by their shortcuts (Galaxy is optional)
- There are folder installation configs and other customizable stuff
- Normally everything is installed in the GOG Games folder in C:, but I don't know about registry entries

 

[Aenra]

Thank you rohand

 

[Kirben]

http://www.pcgamer.com/how-gog-rescued-13-forgotten-realms-games-from-licensing-hell/

The only good point about the GOG releases, is the CodeWheel program they added, but the graphics for symbols aren't a perfect match, so can still get the wrong response.

The GoldBox games are a good example of why I'm getting tired of GOG not really going to much effort at all:
-Several games (Hillsfar, Eye of the Beholder) requires configuarion on every startup. Too bad if you don't know what the options actually mean.
-Copy protection warnings added to a few games (Dungeon Hack, Eye of the Beholder II/III) on every startup
-Using versions of Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds which had the music broken/disabled/removed.
-Still using PC Speaker sound effect, rather than superior Tandy sound effects
-Missing documentation for several games, with several poor scans.

Not much of an effort, for several months of so called testing.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Friday deal, going (Old) School with Codemasters and Atari. Since when Chronicles or Rid Dick is old school? Why they still didin't bring back Severance Blade of Darkness?
And since when they have IGI and why only sequel?
http://af.gog.com/game/i_g_i_2_covert_strike?as=1649904300

 

[Infinitron]

Fun fact: Chronicles of Riddick is the top-selling "new" game on GOG that isn't a Witcher title: https://www.gog.com/games##sort=bestselling&page=1?as=1649904300

(This is of course because t's not available on Steam for some reason.)

 

[Aenra]

Copy protection warnings added to a few games on every startup

Could you elaborate on that please? What kind of warnings?
This is probably not what you meant, but some games had an inbuilt copy protection of sorts which could not be removed as ingame content relied on it. All one had to do was having first read the manual, which GOG does provide IIRC.

 

[Kirben]

Could you elaborate on that please? What kind of warnings?
This is probably not what you meant, but some games had an inbuilt copy protection of sorts which could not be removed as ingame content relied on it. All one had to do was having first read the manual, which GOG does provide IIRC.

The following message is displayed every time these games (Dungeon Hack, Eye of the Beholder II/III) are started:

COPY PROTECTION NOTICE:
When the protect screen comes up in-game just type
anything, press ENTER and the game will continue.
Press any key to continue

 

[rohand]

The following message is displayed every time these games (Dungeon Hack, Eye of the Beholder II/III) are started:

That's probably because the original copy protection that required reading the manual was "hacked" , like those old abandonware versions did.

Since there's no way to change the executables enough to forgo the copy protection screen altogether, the Enter keypress bypass them.

 

[Astral Rag]

like those old abandonware versions did.

Never forget: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/pay-for-torrented-games-at-gog-com.42099/

 

[Bigg Boss]

This may be a stupid question, but do they alter the intro of the Fallout games to say Bethesda rather than Interplay/Black Isle?