Why 1
Why 2

Hello.

After discussing with the community in the threads above I noticed that this topic is controversial enough and many are dissatisfied with how GOG is handling Offline Installers.
The way we - offline installers users - are being continuously treated as second class citizens in favour of Galaxy 'more advanced features'. (Rollback, essentially.)

When I first noticed that Dragon Age: Origins and The Witcher Post-Preservation Program builds would not work well on my old Notebook's Intel CPU, my escape and personal solution was to use the awesome 'lgogdownloader' tool by 'Sude', because I'm mainly on Linux.

If you're on Windows, you can use the awesome tool by Timboli GOGCli, albeit I don't know if GOGCli does have the option to download older versions, so if you know, please, feel free to post the answer below, or use Galaxy itself to rollback for a previous version, which should be easy enough following the gui.

-
- -
- - -
Guide
- - -
- -

- -
- - -
Building / Installation
- - -
- -

First things first:
Don't use your distribution lgogdownloader version as its probably heavily outdated. I recommend building and installing it following Sude's guide on his Forum thread, here. This should give you the latest stable version of the program and all its dependencies.

For your convenience, I recommend just copy-pasting the commands on his thread on a .sh script and make it run. If you're not paranoid or 'more safe than sorry' kind, about this of course, still, its safe and you can clearly see what those commands do, you can also check the code because its open source. I just did that for test with version 3.17 and everything worked just fine.

After you have the program running, check if you're on its last stable version with the following command: It should give you a simple output like this: Now that you got the latest version of lgogdownloader from its original source, built and running, let's start:
(If you're an advanced user, and don't use lgogdownloader yet, just go to Step 3 as you will probably automate or have everything necessary done already)

You can also check all the commands available in the program through both commands below: Let's start.

- -
- - -
Step 0: Understanding what happens behind the scenes and a couple of explanations
- - -
- -

If I understood Sude's tool correctly, what lgogdownloader does is call Galaxy API server commands after creating an authentication token through its login in calls.
While lgogdownloader can and in my opinion should also be used if you're Linux to download Offline Installers, the method of this guide will focus on giving you options to download Galaxy builds, without Galaxy, basically.

This means that you will not have the game in the '1.exe 2.bin 3.bin' format default to Offline Installers packaged by GOG team through InnoSetup, but Galaxy files, "Steam like", directly downloaded to the folder of choice. But fear not because lgogdownloader auto-creates a folder named after your to-be-downloaded game.

This is important because you can later package your game files the way you want, and, uh, 'truly Preserve' the "Pre-Preservation Program" not broken builds / builds that do work on your systems.

One big warning though: At the time of writing this thread/post, lgogdownloader only supports Galaxy Gen 2 builds and up. This unfortunately mean that you cannot use this method to download Gen 1 Galaxy exclusive older game builds. Thus, F.E.A.R build Pre-Preservation Program is "l o s t" for Linux users because it was Gen 1.
Yeah, F.E.A.R was also affected by the curse of fixing what was not broken, and I tried to solve the problem for myself and couldn't. Now I can't access a version that works well on my system without using Galaxy. (THANKS GOG.)

Anyway, moving on with the guide.

- -
- - -
Step 1: Login / Authentication
- - -
- -

Type in your terminal window: And you will be prompted with: Type in your Email, press Enter and then this should appear: After you type in your password, lgogdownloader will give you an Authentication Link which should look like this with random authentication characters: Copy it and Paste it in your address bar in your browser of choice.
It should redirect you to a GOG Login Box.
Login as you normally would.
Now a new link should appear in your address bar which should look like this: Copy this new link from your address bar, paste it on your terminal and press Enter, as requested by lgogdownloader.

If you made those steps correctly, something like this should appear: And you're done. You should now be able to use lgogdownloader from your terminal.

- -
- - -
Step 2: Moving to a directory you want
- - -
- -

Just an easy tip:
Before downloading your games, be sure to create a folder for them or move away from your $HOME path.
A simple tip, but many by distraction could end up downloading their games on their $HOME path disorganizing everything in the process.
So to save you time and trouble, before continuing, through your terminal, move to $HOME/Downloads/ or something: And create a folder for your to be downloaded games: Now that you've done that, lets move on to the action and the reason of this guide.

- -
- - -
Step 3: Checking the correct name of your game through lgogdownloader
- - -
- -

Cutting straight to the point:

Type in - if you want to list all your games, including the hidden ones from your GOG library: Or only - if you want to list only your non-hidden games: You should see a full list of your games/products listed separated by underscore (_) and possibly with [1] and coloured by green or blue (with default terminal colours depending on your distribution).
- Games listed in Green colour, accompanied by [1] means this game had an update after you last downloaded them.
- Games listed in Blue colour are newly added items to your library since you last checked your library.

- -
- - -
Step 4: Finding your game on lgogdownloader
- - -
- -

For the purpose of this Guide we will be downloading a Pre Preservation Program build of Dragon Age: Origins, which is possibly the game people are still more mad about after the program has started, which is still, to the day of this post, with the unnecessary 'limit to 2 core "fix"', which kills performance on many systems and caused all the trouble we're tired of hearing and reading about.

You can manually search for a game name using the commands '--list --game [game_name]': You can also manually search on your listed library games using incomplete names separated by underscore: And if something resembles it in your library, your complete game name will show up.
lgogdownloader is also smart enough to download games without their full name typed in, but for the purpose of this Guide we will do the things 'the right way'.

To check galaxy builds of your games, you can use '--galaxy-show-builds [game_name]': - -
- - -
Step 5: Checking the last build before the Preservation Program
- - -
- -

Now that you've learn all the basics for checking galaxy builds, lets do it: At the time of this post, this should give this result: So theres a number, a version, a date and time, the generation and the build id.
The numbers are rollback back builds with 0 being the latest which installs by default, the version is the name of build, the date is when they were first uploaded, the Gen 2 defines to which generation of the API this build was built for and the build id is the way the server communicate what product is that.

- -
- - -
Step 6: Downloading the desired build
- - -
- -

We're interested in the first number, the date and the generation for the purpose of downloading Pre-Preservation Program builds on Linux.

Why this is important? Because you may want an even older version than the one before the Preservation Program, so feel free to experiment. The generation is also important for the reasons explained at Step 0. If the game you want to download has a Gen 1 build, you will not be able to use this method unfortunately, because lgogdownloader at the time of writing this post doesn't support Gen 1 builds. (Give us offline installers rollback GOG! I want my F.E.A.R back!)

By observing the date and the version name we can clearly see which is the version affected by the Preservation Program, so now its time to download it, which you can do using the command '--galaxy-install' and placing the number after a slash '/', like this: If you did everything correctly, lgogdownloader should now be downloading your game to a folder named Dragon Age Origins, inside your $HOME/Downloads/ path or wherever you were in your terminal following this guide.

- - -
- -
-

This is a very dumb down guide I made thinking in people that want a solution on Linux but never though on using community tools to do so. Its easy for those of us that already use Linux for a while, but maybe there's someone out there to witch this guide will be helpful, at least I hope it does help those in need as doing it myself helped me recover at least 2 games after the preservation program break them for me.

Anyway, that's enough. Good luck! God bless.

My distribution (Debian) comes with LGOGDownloader 3.17, this is not what I would call "heavily outdated" ;)

My bad. :)

It’s still good advice to build from source if the distribution does indeed come with a very outdated build, but I think it would be better to suggest the user checks the provided version first. Especially as distro-provided builds could be patched to work better when integrated in the distribution, something that would lack from an upstream build.

Makes a lot of sense.
This is clearly ignorance on my part. :P
I will update the guide.

Thank you, I have just been in need for this!

On the go, I figured out, that the following command is wrong The option is called " --galaxy-show-builds ", not "...list..."

Thanks!

Oh, thanks for the correction!
Sorry for letting that one pass. :)

Fixed!

Thanks for the guide. Is there any way to tell if a build was created/approved by the publishers, or just by GOG, so I can avoid the latter?

The version number in GOG Preservation builds include a GOG 0.X version code in addition to the normal patch number.

For The Witcher:
https://www.gogdb.org/product/1207658924#builds

Windows, last "normal" patch: 1.5 (A)
Windows, GPP patch: 1.5 (CS) GOG 0.2

Should make them easy to spot with the overview you get via
lgogdownloader --galaxy-show-builds game_title
as shown in .Keys initial post as it always lists the complete version entry.

Thanks. I did wonder about the "GOG" marking. However, it seems like this doesn't apply to all games. E.g. Resident Evil. Is there any way to tell for those games?

Thanks for the praise, but just for the record, my GUI is a frontend I built for gogcli.exe which is developed by Magnitus, who deserves a large amount of praise.

That said, my GUI has been expanded in more recent times, to optionally use some other third party programs instead of gogcli.exe for some things ... curl.exe, aria2c.exe and Free Download Manager ... those last two being multiple thread capable, unlike gogcli.exe.

In regard to your query, I am not aware that gogcli.exe can download older offline installer versions, and I wish it could. In any case, Magnitus would be the one to approach about that, especially if that is as I suspect, a Galaxy API ability, which I am pretty sure gogcli.exe doesn't interact with at all.

The gogcli.exe program essentially uses the download links you see in your browser, which are dynamic ... meaning they always provide the latest update.

P.S. The gogcli.exe command-line program also works in Linux, unlike my GUI.

Yes - those are games where GOG helped making them available again and the "GOG version" is the only available option.
Those have originaldeveloper / GOG listed in the "Developers" field, here for Breath of Fire IV:
https://www.gogdb.org/product/1587885678#builds

If you really want to make sure which games are "verified" according to the GOG Preservation Program you could look for the "Good Old Game" mark on the store page or use the game filter in the store to list affected ones:
https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program?onlyPreservedGames=true

But here also are outliers, for example Mad Max:
https://www.gogdb.org/product/1296467424#builds

Where no GOG patch was added, as apparently it was not necessary:
Validated stability
Verified compatibility with Windows 10 and 11
Verified Cloud Saves support

Game is still on version 1.03 from 2021 - GPP started November 2024.

So when in doubt, you'd still need to check out the changelog, it's on the right-hand side on the store page, below the system requirements.
Since these are GOG's own checks/fixes, there should always be a changelog listed for affected games.

Thanks. Sounds like it may be possible to avoid the GOG versions then.