So, the first area - the beach after crashing the MF ship and getting outta hell, started up with my character, and I noticed that unlike when I was playing with friends, my character was not talking, there was only one dead fisherman, and none of the enemies were there.
I also was not able to save the game, so I loaded an autosave, which was apparently before the helm fight, so, yay.
I'll try it out again later to see if it does the same thing. Not sure if it made a difference, but I got the green woman to activate the teleporter thing after the MF died to the flaming demon bloke.