We had a nice, long session last night and got to finish of Act 1. We, as guest players, were unable to finish Act 1 and move forward with our host/party leader. A bit tired, and since today was work day, we didnt give a lot of credit to it, rather we thought „its a bug“ since we run onto bunch of strange issues while in a party during our session.Today, after booting game again i was shocked when i found my self sitting in front of the cave where game starts with a quest to reach that first settlement. I’ve checked with my friends and It didn’t took long to figure that our story progression wasn’t saved at all and only player that got his story progressed was our host/party leader.
We run onto multiple issues, ill name a few:
- Guest players are unable to use teleports unless they are previously unlocked in their own story progression even so they unlocked it during co-op. Pressing „T“ to use town portal outright did nothing and when we tried to use waypoint teleport via world map we were getting errors: „That spell is on cooldown“
- Guest players STORY achievements are NOT progressed and they are reset after leaving the party since they are not progressing their story in co-op. I got bunch of activity achievements like „Upgrade a weapon,“ „Mixology“ etc… and they stayed, however STORY progression achievements are reset.
- Guest players are unable to complete/finish Act’s and progress in next one. As above, the root cause is the same, guest players were not progressing their own story.
- While in a party, only ONE story scroll and Story quest item drops/shows up. Best examples early game are spear and amulet which you need to buy back from a vendor. First person who bough it is only one which can get it. Next example is story scroll in Cathedral, first one who gets it will hear the audio log, noone else. This kinda makes story inconsistent as, while in a party, you can miss a lot of Lore if you are into it.
- Guest players are obligated to accept all story/cutscene skips and start of a new chapters if someone in party decides to skip something or is starting new chapter. When someone initiates cutscene/story skip or starts a new chapter you get ingame warning and option to accept or decline. A warning also says that by not accepting you will be kicked out of the game, thus loosing story progress which are you not earning in the first place to begin with if you are joining the party.
- Skipping some sequences will put players who skipped them back in a game while desynching others who havent skipped them. Earliest example is when players are attacked by the villagers after being drugged. Players who skipped the sequence were put back into the game and killed all the villagers, while we, who watched it, ended up with our „crazy“ monk shouting: „They are coming!“… and noone attacked us since everyone were already dead, killed by player who skipped the sequence with words „Ive seen it in beta.“ Its a minor thing, but it happened so often that it started to be annoying since tempo of whole party is dictated by individuals. If you are not on the same page with „will we rush the game“ or „lets take time and watch all“ it can be troublesome and immersion breaking.
- If players are not „two screens“ close to each other their health in party frames will show as 0, aka like they are dead. We had few panic reactions when we were dropping what we were doing and running back to revive teammates just to find them well and healthy as we got close.
- Super rarely, but it happened few times, Guest players were unable to use NPC vendors. Ill pin this to minor bug or server hiccup, but its worth mentioning
This is absolutely unacceptable for a $70+(I paid 90 dollars to play early with friends) game.
What’s the point of a multiplayer game that’s always online and won’t save progression progress with friends!?