By Nelson Schneider - 01/17/15 at 05:29 PM CT
Back in June, our friends in Poland, CD Projekt, announced that they were beginning work on an integrated – but still fully optional – gaming client for their wildly popular GOG.com DRM-free game shop. After months of distressing silence, GOG Galaxy has finally reached Alpha status and excited GOG.com members can get into the queue for an Alpha key by signing up here.
I got my Galaxy Alpha key this past week and had the opportunity to take the new client for a test drive. While it is still clearly an Alpha piece of software, this early state mainly comes across due to the fact that Galaxy is not currently feature complete by any stretch of the imagination. The current Galaxy Alpha (version 0.2.2.662) only includes the core features of shopping the GOG.com website and downloading/updating games in a user’s library. Fortunately, the GOG website loads quickly in the Galaxy browser and the games I tested with the Galaxy downloader worked flawlessly.
There are still rough edges, however, as the download/update function is only available for 20 of the 45 games in my GOG account. Furthermore, the browser for the GOG website is missing such rudimentary features as navigation buttons, and the client itself doesn’t currently support running in the background as a system tray icon. There are also plenty of placeholder areas within the Galaxy client for things like friend lists and recent player activity.
Since GOG Galaxy is still in such an early Alpha phase, the lack of polish can be forgiven, since the core functionality at least does what it’s supposed to. There are plenty of game clients out there that are a lot worse and more annoying to use than Galaxy (like Origin, Uplay, and Desura), and they are supposedly ‘finished.’ I encourage everyone who cares about the future of DRM-free gaming to sign-up for the Galaxy Alpha test and submit feedback to the Galaxy Issue Tracker.
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