Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Bugs & Technical Problems How come I cannot play 4 player with my friends?

Everytime we do this, one of our characters does not appear and the portraits are rearranged with the names. Only 3 people come up.

Please email supportdos2@larian.com, with a save at the start of the game (or a Dropbox or Google drive link, etc), and a description of the missing character and what is wrong with the portraits and names of the others.
Each save is a folder in the '..\Documents\Larian Studios\Divinity Original Sin 2\PlayerProfiles\<ProfileName>\Savegames' folder. In Windows Explorer you can zip file(s) and folder(s) by right clicking on it/them and selecting 'Send To | Compressed (zipped) Folder'.

A few people have reported this, one saying it helped after they switched who was hosting and didn't use custom tags, and a couple others saying it worked after they made sure they didn't have 2 characters of the same race.

Can confirm a similar issue. Multiplayer Explorer Mode allowed me to invite three friends in and each create characters, but on loading in to the game itself two people were essentially kicked out from the game as they were stuck on the loading screen. Tried several times to get it working, ensuring that we did not use custom tags and were all a different race as per other suggestions. Also, the portraits get messed up - as a human my friends received the default dwarf portrait and name from the opposite gender as originally created. This issue did not come up in Classic Mode, however.

When I tried two custom humans yesterday, the second instance could not get past the loading screen, and the host instance loaded in with control of the character he created, but only the portrait of the second character (who never loaded in) was shown. I got it working by mixing a custom origin with a story origin (Custom: Human and Lohse in this case).

I just tried two custom humans again today and both were able to load in. I also tested 4 local instances, and that worked when all 4 characters were different custom races.

This issue has been fixed on the development branch

It's currently still a problem and has something to do with players being the same race when choosing custom characters.

Chosing an origins character has always worked.
Choosing a different gender often works.

I've noticed this problem mostly with human characters. This may just be because most people chose thus its the one that gets noticed the most

Yes, the fix will not be in the release version until the next update (no ETA yet).