Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Help/Tips/Tricks What can and can't henchmen do in 4 player coop

Hi, 3 friends and I want to buy this game to play 4 player coop but want to find out a bit about the henchman experience for the 3rd and 4th player. I was wondering if someone can help me.

I assume they cant initiate dialogue with NPCs. Fair enough.
But can they see all the dialogues that the main 2 players see? - so that they don't miss any storyline/plot details.
Can they pick up items or trigger combat?
Anything else I should know?

Many thanks in advance for any help on this.

Companions and henchmen can talk to NPCs in order to trade, but the only actual dialogue is the NPC saying they don't want to speak to underlings.

They can pick up items, etc, and trigger combat, but there are some things that need to be triggered by a main character.

I haven't played co-p at all, so I'm not sure about listening in on conversations (or the conversation log), or the 'anything else'.

Thanks for the reply! Its the potential to miss storyline that most concerns me. I think we can live with most other limitations.

I will be running a 4 player coop game tomorrow and I still have yet to find out how it will work exactly, but this post has some good info to start with (and how to set it up): http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=563379

Dialog is the part that concerns me the most. If the other players can't have dialog with anyone (outside of trading), that's going to be a pretty bland experience for them. In particular conversational skills will be useless, like the animal speaking trait. If they can't initiate conversation with animals, there's no point taking that trait.

I'll try and report back to give a recap of how it went.

Thanks for the reply - would definitely appreciate if you reported back on what storyline dialogue the henchmen see when the main characters are talking to NPCs.

GaelicVigil is planning on using the '4 Character Creation' mod, to allow 4 main characters to be customized from the start (see the description in the link he posted), so will not be effected by restrictions on henchmen.

Just dropping in again to report on our 4 player game on Saturday. For the most part, it went great, we played for 7 hours straight and we had a blast. The only problem we ran into were a few crashes during quicksave and autosaves. I have a feeling that this was due to the host (me) playing on a pretty low spec laptop. My only suggestion is that the host player use the beefiest rig of the group.

Other than that, it was an awesome experience. Dialog was fine, the only thing that the 2nd pair could not do was participate in the dialog banter mechanic, but that actually doesn't happen all that often and nobody really cared anyway. They could initiate any other kind of dialog that they wanted, including trade.

Most of the time we were all in different places exploring the world and even getting into our own fights. It all felt like a mini-mmo, but much cooler. We used Google hangout to communicate while we played and it was hard to get a word in because every couple seconds you'd hear, "hey look what I found!...I'm getting attacked, someone help!...I found a secret dungeon!...Hey a neat two handed sword, anyone want it !?". It was fun, but it almost felt a little too overwhelming. This game feels huge playing alone, but with 4 players it just quadruples the information overload.

Overall: great experience, I highly recommend it. The enjoyment far outweighed any tiny limitations.