|
Read More
|
As you know, I’m a huge GOG (Good Old Games) fan and was very excited about the news of GOG Galaxy 2.0 in June 2019. I have been using the GOG Galaxy 2.0 closed beta this past few weeks and here are some of my thoughts on it.
If you didn’t know, GOG Galaxy 2 was supposed to unite all the game launchers out there under the GOG launcher. At the time of this writing, there is only one official integration, which is Xbox. The rest, Epic, Steam, PS4, Origin, etc., are all community-created. And not all launchers are available to connect either, we’re missing some major ones like Blizzard’s Battlenet and Bethesda. I suppose you have to keep in mind that it’s still early days, and GOG is working on connections to all the major players out there… but that does mean that the problem mostly lay with the other launchers.
When everything does work, it’s beautiful. You get to see all the games you own under one area and see immediately your duplicate games or history of your game play. You can see all the games you own (I’m seeing that I own 672 across the various platforms… which is nice to know), achievements, and hours you sunk into your games.
In addition to the games, GOG also unite all your buddies and friends from across the board, and you can get a broad overview of how all your friends are doing. It also keeps track of games you recently played, as well as recent plays from other users (so you can see what’s popular with all the GOG users). It’s all very cool.
The other nice thing is that you may see games you didn’t know you own or hadn’t seen in a long time (because it’s on a launcher you rarely use).
Now for some bad news. And again, I should stress that this is still in Beta, it could change or improved by the time it’s officially launches.
First of all, your connected launchers will randomly disconnect and required you to re-log back in. I understand this is a security thing, but some launchers require more frequent passwords than others. It’s gotten to a point that it’s so annoying to put in passwords and second authentic codes that I had to disable the two-factor authentication to make it less of a pain to log into Epic every two or three days.
The other problem is that you still need those other launchers to run your games. It can get annoying, when there are multiple launchers tied to one game. For example, if I wanted to run For Honor on Epic Games, it also launches Ubisoft’s Uplay. This isn’t a problem if you’re always up-to-date on your patches, but chances are these launchers may take an additional two or three minutes to patch and update. Then, once those launchers are running, they remain running until you manually shut them down. The automatically closing down the other launchers is forthcoming, as an option you can choose, but is not available in my closed beta.
Finally, although you can connect to the two major consoles, Xbox and PS4, you can’t obviously play your games on your PC. What you can do is view your achievements and install games remotely on your primary consoles. It’s a nice feature, but it’s probably something that I probably won’t be using in the future (considering that I haven’t really used either of my consoles since I bought the Fallout iBuyPower PC in March 2019).
Hopefully, GOG will address a lot of these problems, and get official integration with the popular launchers (especially for Steam), so you won’t see these random disconnections. Plus, I’d like to see these other launchers open up and share achievements and friends (not all launchers will allow this).
If you didn’t know, GOG Galaxy 2 was supposed to unite all the game launchers out there under the GOG launcher. At the time of this writing, there is only one official integration, which is Xbox. The rest, Epic, Steam, PS4, Origin, etc., are all community-created. And not all launchers are available to connect either, we’re missing some major ones like Blizzard’s Battlenet and Bethesda. I suppose you have to keep in mind that it’s still early days, and GOG is working on connections to all the major players out there… but that does mean that the problem mostly lay with the other launchers.
When everything does work, it’s beautiful. You get to see all the games you own under one area and see immediately your duplicate games or history of your game play. You can see all the games you own (I’m seeing that I own 672 across the various platforms… which is nice to know), achievements, and hours you sunk into your games.
In addition to the games, GOG also unite all your buddies and friends from across the board, and you can get a broad overview of how all your friends are doing. It also keeps track of games you recently played, as well as recent plays from other users (so you can see what’s popular with all the GOG users). It’s all very cool.
The other nice thing is that you may see games you didn’t know you own or hadn’t seen in a long time (because it’s on a launcher you rarely use).
Now for some bad news. And again, I should stress that this is still in Beta, it could change or improved by the time it’s officially launches.
First of all, your connected launchers will randomly disconnect and required you to re-log back in. I understand this is a security thing, but some launchers require more frequent passwords than others. It’s gotten to a point that it’s so annoying to put in passwords and second authentic codes that I had to disable the two-factor authentication to make it less of a pain to log into Epic every two or three days.
The other problem is that you still need those other launchers to run your games. It can get annoying, when there are multiple launchers tied to one game. For example, if I wanted to run For Honor on Epic Games, it also launches Ubisoft’s Uplay. This isn’t a problem if you’re always up-to-date on your patches, but chances are these launchers may take an additional two or three minutes to patch and update. Then, once those launchers are running, they remain running until you manually shut them down. The automatically closing down the other launchers is forthcoming, as an option you can choose, but is not available in my closed beta.
Finally, although you can connect to the two major consoles, Xbox and PS4, you can’t obviously play your games on your PC. What you can do is view your achievements and install games remotely on your primary consoles. It’s a nice feature, but it’s probably something that I probably won’t be using in the future (considering that I haven’t really used either of my consoles since I bought the Fallout iBuyPower PC in March 2019).
Hopefully, GOG will address a lot of these problems, and get official integration with the popular launchers (especially for Steam), so you won’t see these random disconnections. Plus, I’d like to see these other launchers open up and share achievements and friends (not all launchers will allow this).
|
|
