Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General CO-OP Gameplay: Thoughts

Heya, I'm not very good at description so I'll try my best.

After attempting to play through the game in its current state with a friend of mine, we came across a few issues with the co-op functionality. We are not entirely sure if these are bugs or gameplay choices, or really if we were just going about things wrong but we came across a few situations that we felt probably should not have occurred.

One such instance that describes the sort of stuff we were encountering was where we had just entered the second camp (not the Fort Joy Ghetto but the one with the seekers I believe it was); there were 3 injured fellows on the ground; I spoke to the lady attending them and said we could try healing them, but since I wasn't the healer of the group I gave the task to my friend. My friend healed all three of them with restoration but when I talked to her again she just mentioned that "A stranger had come and saved them". As if my friend had not been directly next to me and in my party, or as if he had not gotten her request to heal them either.

Another such instance was with the retrieval of Lord Withermoores soul. My friend had spoken to and freed him and got the quest to go and find his soul. We found his soul jar and I tucked it away into my inventory. We returned to him and I spoke to him, saying I had his soul jar. I smashed it for him and wound up getting no EXP; meanwhile my friend who was standing next to me and his party got EXP for completing the quest, as though only he had actually taken it, despite us being in the same place at the same time and even listening to each other's convos.

A final example was one where I had recruited an NPC to work for the party, then gave him to my friend to control. It wound up with neither of us being able to talk to him because, I was the one who recruited him but he was the one in control of them.

There were other smaller instances of this sort of discrepancy where something one of us initiated could not be completed by the other, as though the game was having us both play through the game separately from one another despite sharing the same finite world space. I believe this may have something to do with the "making war" and new multiplayer competitiveness that was pushed out in the last update.

I was sort of wondering if when the full game is released, that it would be possible to be able to restore the sort of CO-OP that went on in the first game where if one person starts a quest, everyones' logs are updated and anyone can complete that quest and speak to NPCS as though they had been the one to talk first (or at least acknowledge that they are in the same party and therefore the same group). If you say, wanted to do an actual non competitive playthrough together. Or if this was just a series of bugs or unfinished gameplay.

Anyways those are my thoughts so far, great game otherwise! Really enjoying it.

For the second one, right now they are testing(?) this feature of not giving exp to the members who are not "linked". To see how this competitive Co-op work, and obv a lot of people are not happy about it, so I am guessing it will be changed or a "shared exp" option will be in game. Right now, what me and my friend do is if we see not all of us got the exp, we will reload (obv quicksave before turning in quest), hit ESC, go into "Assign characters", one of you should take all the characters and then link them. LINKING is important in this. Then you can turn in quest and everyone should get exp, Withermoor Quest is one of those that only those linked get exp.

And I have had that issue as well, so when you want to recruit an NPC, let the person who will control them recruit atm bc they don't wanna talk to you. Obv if you recruited and gave that companion over, and you want to talk to them, go into assign characters, take it back and then talk to them and then you can even dismiss them and make it so your friend talks to him to recruit? Idk if that will change his alignment or not.

This desire to achieve some kind of competitive game play in a single player game that has finite resources is strange at best. Multiplayer alone already is miserable as i hanging in the screen for 2 hours and being constantly kicked by hosts for no reason what so ever. What is the point of making competitive gameplay when you are kicked the second you join the game? And for people that argue just play with a friend, well the game should advertise Lan rather than multiplayer then shouldnt it? I saw a multiplayer tag on the steam page and co-op and i expect at least some what functional multiplayer experiences.

It is incredibly important that the dev can fix the current multiplayer experience and promote a healthy, less trolly environment so the multiplayer is actually active rather than play with friend or nothing.

The multiplayer FUNCTIONS fine, people just prefer playing with their friends to random strangers, and playing with friends doesn't equal playing in the same house, or on LAN. After all, Discord is a thing, and so on. Just connect to other online friends who have it, or ones int he same town but not the same house, or etc. At the same time people do, here on the forums, pretty frequently advertise looking for group things after new patches and then people join together and game despite not knowing each other outside of the forums / at all, really.