You might want to begin a thread of "games you might want to buy elsewhere", but do note that it might affect your rep.

A not shared GOGmix, perhaps?

Perhaps. I never remember that GOGMixes even exist.

Heroes Chronicles is digitally exclusive on GOG, so that might be a tad difficult.

Good point, as usual.

Does this deal also give GOG exclusive rights to dissect the game any way they feel like?

If they got the OK from Ubisoft, then it's basically GOG's way or the highway.

As much as it pains to me to see the wastage of per-chapter installers for this game, wasn't that the way it was originally sold?

If there was ever a combined DVD release from the original publisher, I'd want GOG to sell that version "bundled" (since it should be cheap enough by now for most people not to need to buy it chapter by chapter), but I don't want GOG to be messing with the packaging of games any more than necessary (because they will most likely introduce problems that way and diverge from the original game experience).

I believe that GOG should be selling the definitive versions of games, regardless of whether the chapters/expansions in the definitive versions are combined or separate, and regardless of whether the episodes are named alphabetically. ;-)

I'd rather deal with the original inconsistencies than new packaging bugs (though hiring someone clever enough to understand how to present this more tidily in our libraries [logical sort on internal sub-keys, etc.] would be nice, and multiple copies of FLAC soundtracks, etc. is NOT nice and lies squarely with GOG).

I'd send you the old bundled installer but I strongly believe GOG wouldn't like that.

Don't act like you give a damn about the wishlist, you obviously didn't. I recall nobody explicitly asking for unbundling in the first place. I know what you are trying to say but that just rubs more salt into the wound.


edit: fixed logic

That's definitely a good idea and a valid solution. This is even great for those games which aren't in a bundle, but are part of a series and the title doesn't give away any of the order.

Interestingly enough, they probably don't even have to add any new fields in their database to order the games. From what I can see on the game page, they seem to have the "release date" available for a game, so if they chose to allow you to sort by "release order", that would be one way to see them in the order they were meant to be played. :)

Release order works except if I want my games largely alphabetically, and in the event that a special edition of a game released after its sequels and is the only version of the game that GoG has would be displayed after its sequels.

Well, for me personally, I like the idea of having the games "unbundled", at least on the shelf so they can be arranged. However, I would prefer that games which belong to a "bundle" be identified as such on the bookshelf and contain a link to the "bundled" version of the game as well as an individual installer. (More on that in a moment.)

I assume these "bundled" games came from the original older 'collection' distributions (I bought several of the Sierra collections, for instance which contained 2 or more games). As long as the collections are still being sold as a single unit and there's only one download (either item in the collection points to the same links for the bundled game and extra content), I don't mind them having separate items on the shelf.

Now, as far as an individual installer --yes, it's going to take up more storage space if you download and archive them on a drive somewhere; however, there are times you only want to install "one" game, not all two or more. There are also times you want to uninstall a single game instead of all two or more.

Provide the bundle installer as part of the purchase, provide the individual installers as a convenience, provide same links to bundled installation and extra content and provide separate 'covers' for the bundled games on the shelf for more convenient organization.
Well, the nice thing about SQL queries is that you can do a "sort by" and "then by" and "then by", so you can combine sort orders in different ways. It would be great if you could sort your games alphabetically first, then by release date or vice versa. :)

Too late. GOG installers are basically prettier analogues to warez installers. You're already risking new packaging bugs as a result of being freed from having to mount a CD image via Daemon Tools.

...and depending on how Heroes Chronicles works (it's been a long time since I installed from the four Heroes Chronicles CDs I own), the all-in-one layout may be the result of installing all the CDs at the same time anyway.

But you have complete control over the name used. If you had planned this at all you could have easily chosen a consistent naming scheme that would sort nicely with the alphabetic search.

Evidence of prior naming disasters (gm21, republic_commando_copy3) suggests that it's just a tag with no deeper meaning, so why not.

That why I said "I don't want GOG to be messing with the packaging of games any more than necessary".

Replacing the old installer technology is often necessary, since the installers are frequently more frail than the games themselves and do more damage to your system when they go wrong. But at least they're not re-inventing the wheel, by using an established installer technology (not that it's perfect, and GOG have still been known to screw up their installer scripts in major ways, hence why I previously said I'd rather they just used a compressed archive and an editable install script that I can read and fix myself, wrapped in an .exe that can be easily unpacked using commonly available tools; most folks just need that convenience).

If that is indeed how the game originally installed, I'm all for keeping it bundled. The result of the GOG install(s) should be just the same as the result of the original install(s), modulo compatibility fixes.