So I've been messing around with mods quite a bit lately on games from both Steam and GOG. And one of the things that been causing me slight difficulties has been version issues.

Now a mod might work on one version of a game and may not work on a later version. Alright fair enough, no harm, no foul. Mods are third-party things after all. My irritation arose from the fact that Steam forces a game to use the utmost latest version of itself absolutely no excuses. Disabling auto-update in Steam does just this, it prevents Steam from updating a game automatically, however it will require an update upon launching the game, essentially making it a mandatory manual update. And no power in the 'verse can seem to stop this and let Steam run an older version that's been modded to within an inch of its life. The worst problem I ran into was actually a year or two back when I was playing Assassin's Creed II. AC II on an older Mac requires quite a bit of finagling to get it to launch. Fun times all around. Imagine my horror when Steam promptly decided to update it for me, eating my perfectly good working game and rendering it once more unusable. I was successful in the end, but man I hate fixing something twice, especially when it was working just fine and I was perfectly happy with it the way it was.

Now I understand that Steam is providing a service in keeping games up to snuff for whomever does not want to be pestered with patching and all of that. However I really do wish there was a way to say, hey, stop that. I don't want you to patch that. I like it the way it is. I understand the risks, I get that there may be bugs, and I wont complain to whatever customer support desk is relevant. I just want to play the game the way I please, thank you.

Meanwhile, all the games I've downloaded from GOG are sitting there happy as can be in whatever state I last left them. Which is kind of just awesome. They don't fix themselves unless I tell them to, they just are happy existing. I don't think I've ever really appreciated a lack of action before, but I honestly do now.

Why am I posting this here? I don't know; I just wanted to say thanks. Keep being GOG, GOG it's really appreciated.

There are ups and downs, as always ;-) GOG also keeps their games up to date, but not everyone likes to install patches manually.

For older games, it doesn't really matter, because most of the mods should be compatible with the newest official version anyway. For newer games, I, for instance, don't care that much about mods, but I like my games up to date.

Also, steam has a workshop, which really makes modding easy.

But for manual modding, yes, GOG's approach seems to be a little bit better.