GOG Galaxy 2.0 Update 5 Brings Subscription Support, Executable Control, and Sorting Titles

[Guest_Jim_*]

GOG Galaxy 2.0 has been an ambitious project since it was first announced and when it entered open beta in December and today it has received an update with some very welcome additions. For those who do not remember, GOG Galaxy 2.0 is meant to be a single client you can use to view and manage your entire game library. Games on Steam, Epic Games Store, Uplay, Origin, Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Humble Bundle can all be viewed from the single list GOG Galaxy 2.0 produces. The API for these integrations is also publicly documented, allowing the community to produce open source modules for them. Galaxy 2.0 cannot get around needing a launcher, such as Steam, to play a game, but it is still pretty useful to have everything pulled together in a single place.

Topping the list of new features for me is something I can understand not everyone being so excited about; the ability to set Sorting Titles. Sorting Titles allows the software to decouple the actual game title you would see and the title used to sort it. For many games, this will likely not be too important, but a perfect example of a game series that can benefit from it is Assassin's Creed. For some of its entries, the games were numbered so an alphabetical sort would have them in order, but there are also several that are without numbering, so their order will be incorrect. With this feature you can manually add numbers to the sorting title, marking Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood as Assassins Creed 3, as it was in fact the third game in the series. Actually, that series is such a good example of the need for Sorting Titles, somebody else already thought of it as I found they already had them. (There is the issue of some using "Assassin's Creed" and others "Assassins Creed" so you may still want to manually check them.) This is not the case for all game series though, so you may want to do it manually if you wish. It appears that by default the Sorting Title will be derived from the (visible) Title but will remove things such as "the" at the front and special symbols, like parantheses.

The other two highlighted features are support for gaming Subscriptions and Multiple Executables. Subscription support means services such as Game Pass for PC and Uplay+ can have the games you have on them appear in your library view. You can then install and uninstall them through Galaxy 2.0, but as I indicated earlier, this will still require the appropriate launchers, but Galaxy 2.0 can tell other launchers to install, launch, and uninstall.

The Multiple Executable support also includes the ability to provide specific launch parameters, which is a fairly useful feature in Steam. For example, you can disable the launch videos at the start of same games with just a launch flag, like "-novid" and not need to do any special modding like moving or removing files. Another use for this is to allow you to apply custom settings, which may be necessary if you work with custom mods, so you can launch the game properly to use them or disable them for a vanilla experience.

Some games have multiple executables, such as to launch the game with different graphics APIs. Previously Galaxy 2.0 had no way to let you select which you want to use, while Steam and Uplay at least will provide a dropdown list or a pop-up window asking which to use. Now you can go to "Manage Installation" and "Configure" to add a new set of launch instructions. These special instructions could be to use launch arguments or to launch a different executable. You can then set the default executable but if you ever want to launch a different version, you can Right-Click in the library view and selecting "Additional Executables" or click on the settings icon next to Play when looking at the game's page.

Other changes arriving with this update are a smoother experience scrolling and expanded context menu to making managing installation and rating games quicker. If you have GOG Galaxy 2.0 installed, this new version is 2.0.14.254, which can be seen in the lower-left of the Settings window. It might take a little bit after launching the application before it asks about updating, but you can try restarting it to check for the update.

Source: Press Release

Back to original news post