Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Multiplayer

Picked this game up last night, I was a huge fan of Baulder's Gate so I'm really enjoying myself so far. I do have one issue though, Multiplayer... I invited a friend to join my game, and when he joins he ends up as one of my characters. Not sure if we did something wrong but if not this is pretty lame. He doesn't want to play as one of my characters, I don't want him to play as one of my characters and on top of that he's getting nothing by playing with me. No progress in the story, no items, no gold, nothing... you pretty much have to ask your friend to halt all their progress in the game to come assist you, turning your friendly game in to a charity event. Assuming we didn't do something wrong, this needs to be fixed.

This is the way multi-player works. The game was designed for two players to play co-op from the start and make your characters at the same time from one host.

Note: You can assign your friend to a henchman but he will not be able to participate in any quest dialog.

There are plenty of games out there in similar genres that handle this much better. It would be nice for them to fix this, not sure what they were thinking here. This sounds like an awful multiplayer model from the start. I understand the concept of advancing through the story together but that really shouldn't interfere with individual character development.

So, you are saying that your friend - who can be, for example, lvl 20, should be able to join your lvl 5 character and play through whole story again, so he wouldnt lose his progres.....(and game would be just terrible easy becouse he would be to strong)?

Its Co-op - when u play co-op mode u both play together through whole game. If you want to play alone.. play singeplayer instead.

Ok, please make some example how it should work without unbalancing game.

This isn't an MMO, there isn't any individual character to develop.

A good analogy is you have the monopoly board game, you invite your friend over for a game. You pick a car, your friend picks a thimble from your box of selectable game pieces. All the pieces that you own.

You play for a gazillion hours and finally end a game. You had fun, and your friend goes home. The board game is still yours after the game ends, your friend don't get to take your board game home.

At most, if you started a new game with your friend, s/he would have been able to customize one of the main heroes, but the game is being hosted by you.

It being or not being an MMO really has nothing to do with character development. Diablo 3 is a perfect example. I can play coop with my friend, enjoy the same story, yet if he stops hosting the game I'm not forced to start the game over, I don't lose my drops or gold. A simple solution for this? Don't over think the problem. Join a game with your friend and play, you quit the game? No big deal, you retaining your items or progress doesn't hurt anything. Your friend being level 20 and you being level 5 is unbalanced but it's relative to your situation (it's not being forced down your throat) it's handled the same way it is in any other game RPG style coop game. Level your guy up to your friends level or your friend is going to have to be forced to come back and assist you. This game is a turn based Diablo 3 for the most part, to think it should be handled differently on multiplayer simply for the sake of being different isn't a good argument. Playing an hour in a friends game, only to have to start the game over when he stops hosting is a horrible design plain and simple. There are fixes for this that shouldn't be ignored here.

Diablo has a completely differnt design philosophy with respawning enemies. Also Diablo 3 is an always-online game with your characters stored online on the servers. That's the worst abomination of DRM ever made. Most of the people here hate this kind of stuff and Larian would never even dare to come up with an always-online concept...

And no, this game is NO turn-based Diablo 3. Not at all.

This game is designed as a story/quest-driven RPG not as a leveling/loot driven RPG. If you want to play in co-op then you should play the whole campaign in co-op. It's not a game which you play for 20 minutes to kill some pointless genereic enemies and loot some gold. It's a game in which you do quests. Everything in this game is based on quests and story and not on pointless enemy-clicking like in Diablo. Maybe you should inform yourself better about the basic principles of game design and different design approaches...

No, its not turn based diablo. Diablo is hack&slash game with story-comvat is main thing in diablo and difficulty scales with number of players in game. In divinity story and quests are much more important, its not about killing everything and then again and again with bigger difficulty. Also divinity is somehow balanced for 4 player party(or 2 with lone wolf). And becouse its balanced for 4 players and story is important if you would be able to join and leave game whenever you want it would 1)break story element-suddenly there would be totaly different one of the main hero. 2)it would break difficukty if one the players had different level.

Its just isnt diablo with turn based combat. If u want enjoy story with your friend-dont play without him.

So your saying that repawning enemies, a different story line, and picking up loot off a body vs off the ground make this a completely different game? Next your going to tell me that Max Payne wasn't a shooter because it had bullet time or that OSX isn't an OS because Apple put everything in a different spot and called it something else. Everything you listed was a rearrangement of ideas of existing genres. I could take Diablo and rearrange everything that is already in the game and make pretty close to the same game. BTW I think you should actually go try Diablo out, the game was nothing but quests and story. More loot and respawning enemies doesn't really change much.

I'm not bashing Divinity, I'm having a ton of fun playing it but I also don't sit there and get force fed garbage ideas and pretend like there great.

If you invite your friend at the character creation screen, then he gets to create his own character for your game. If you invited him after you created both main characters, then he has to play as one of yours.

In Diablo, the game world is a linear progression of dungeons with respawnable enemies and loot. The focus is obtaining loot, the story is merely a mechanism for explaining the order of dungeons you go through.

In this game the story is the goal. The choices you make can have impacts on your game world. Nothing respawns. When you finish the game, you don't get to take your character to the inferno version of the storyline.

Your character is part of the world instance you created when you started a new game. S/he lives and dies with it.

If you want to play Diablo, you came to the wrong game.

Logistically speaking, this game is the same as Diablo.

When you host a game in Diablo, *YOU* host nothing. The battlenet server creates an instance on its machine. The server grabs the character files stored on its databases that it links with your user profile. You do not own your character files. You are merely accessing the battlenet servers as clients.

In this game, you are literally creating the instance are your machine, you are the server on which all the characters are saved. You are basically acting as the battlenet server and your friend is your client.

Larian doesn't have the budget that ActiBlizzard have to maintain a persistent free server for you, so you have to act as a server, technically speaking, if your friend can't access his/her character whenever s/he wants to play, it's actually your fault for not maintaining the server for him/her to access, not Larians

Never said I wanted to play Diablo, read from the top and work your way down. The issue is people pretending like playing your friends character and being forced to start the game over when your friend quits the game is fun. It's not and again, there are fixes for this.

You don't want to understand it, do you? This is only possible if your character is stored online which is not an option here because nobody here wants an always-online experience.

Second, Diablo 3 is a stricly linear game without any options, freedom or branching stuff (don't even try to argue with me here, I've played every three Diablo games intensively). You just kill and loot. That's everything. Diablo is incredibly limited in terms of "game states" compared to D:OS and that's why hop-in/hop-off co-op is so easy to implement there with its server based solution. Just because someone puts to games in the same overall genre doesn't mean they are the same. Diablo isn't really an RPG anyway, it's more or less a loot-based acion-adventure with RPG elements (leveling). Game design is a bit more complex than just seperating shooters from everything else...

Did you read my post? I'm telling you that there is no "fix" because there is nothing to fix.

The onus is on you to save your game so that you can host it for your friend to play with you again. Someone has to be the host.

If you know of a "fix", please by all means enlighten us

Your exact quote was "this game is designed as a story/quest-driven RPG not as a leveling/loot driven RPG" inferring that Diablo isn't story or quest driven which is 100% wrong. Your picking select portions of the game and diluting and over analyzing till they sound completely different to you. If you want to believe your own crap your entitled to that. More complex, server based, isn't technically and rpg...blah blah blah. You can pour a gallon of water in to this man, at the end of the day it doesn't change the core of either of these games.

I believe that's referred to as an opinion. I listed a fix, go back and read.

Nice text, dude. Especially funny that you avoided/ignored every single argument that points out why mulitplayer is different in Diablo 3...

You know, I don't care whether you call Diablo story/quest-driven or not, it's really not important. These are just terms. Important are the facts which you completely ignore (not only mine but those of everyone here).

So yeah, blah, blah, blah...you wanted to rant and complain and as soon as somebody disproves your points you ignore it. Anyway, I'm out, happy trolling.

No you didn't. You stated you wanted something, I told you it can't be done based on the technical constraints of technology. Where's your rebuttal about how to overcome the technical constraint?

Your post is basically, I want you to build stairs to the moon. I told you stairs aren't possible. But I am welling to concede I don't know your technical background, you might be a rocket scientist and knows of another way to the moon. So I ask you to share your solution. I guessing by your continuous lack of arguments that you don't know either?