GOG's Preservation Program Is the DRM-Free Store Refocusing on the Classics

I don't know. I wish for them to succeed but as someone who's had a GOG account since before it officially launched, I have seen them claim to refocus on classics at least twice before, with meager effects. It's gotten bad enough that some games ostensibly under GOG's mission are actually better off on Steam and I don't think it's entirely on the publisher.

The examples chosen to hightlight the program on gog's own page for this initiative also do not fill with confidence. If you read between the lines it turns out that for instance it took them five years (!) to fix a crashing HoMM3 intro in a language they added, and likewise they only checked if Diablo/Hellfire even works on win 10/11 yesterday, years after they started selling it.

More power to them, if they keep at it, but I don't see anything to get excited over yet.

Not crashing, just the intros don't get played. Considering the intros and how stilted they are, it was probably thought to be a feature.

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Verifying in this case means they are marking it in the store as expected to run on such platforms. Different concept from "can run on those platforms"

Which classic games are better on Steam than they are on GoG?

Hmm, this is kind of off-topic, but I'm unable to skip the intro on the HoMM3 I own on GOG. Not that I play HoMM3 often, but I'm still kind of pissed off because they won't fix that.

I'm pretty sure the first time you play HoMM3 the intro can't be skipped. So question is, do you make a fresh install every time you play (as you play rarely), or does it fail to save that intro has already been played. Also using HD Launcher might help.

Septerra Core for instance, last I checked (2022) gog required quite a lot of searching and effort from the user (missing files, recompiled exe), while Steam version works out of the box. FEAR: Extraction Point also ran somewhat better off Steam IME.

Buy HOMM3 then you can use the content with VCMI and have an overall better experience in my opinion.

IIRC (this was a while ago), it saves a key into the Windows registry. But somehow, it overwrites it the next time I launch or quit the game, so I can skip the intro after I modify the key, but then it reverts.

I haven't had the patience to debug it and see exactly when it changes the value.

Update: They finally fixed it on the latest patch (13th of November).

Thank you GOG!