Blog

Multiplayer technical problems

Playthrough 1/14 was marked with a number of technical problems. I hope that by going over them, I can spare you from the same difficulties in your own multiplayer BG3 playthroughs.

Here’s the TL;DR version, if you want to skip this section and move on to the next:

According to Larian, and our own experience bears this out, in a cross-platform multiplayer BG3 game, if the host is to use any mods at all, the console player should be the host. If there is no console player, the Mac player should host.

The majority of the tech problems we encountered were related to Real Angela hosting the game on her PC. This is not intended to be a criticism. It was the natural thing to do: The playthrough centered on Real Angela’s experience. Having her host the game meant that she could play on her own if I were not available, or she just wanted to fiddle with things by herself.

Steam audio

Let’s start with an issue that had nothing to do with mods.

When we began playthrough 1/14, patch 8 had not yet been released. PC/console cross-play was not available. We had to use Steam for PC/Mac multiplayer. I’ve already documented the difficulty I had getting BG3 to work on the Mac, but that work was completed before I started playing with Real Angela.

We managed to become mutual Steam friends and she was able to invite me to a shared game. That wasn’t easy; Steam’s user interface does not make it clear how to do this. But, with a few web searches, we figured it out. We were able to talk to each other via a Steam chat room. Everything worked.

Once.

After that initial success, Real Angela and I could never get Steam chat to work again. We adjusted settings, we searched on the web, we examined our control-panel hardware configurations. Sometimes we’d connect but I could not hear her; sometimes it was the other way around. We couldn’t figure out what the problem was.

I suggested using Discord, which was designed for exactly this sort of thing. However, Real Angela did not want to get involved with another on-line service.

In the end, we simply used our phones. I set my phone to speaker, and left it hooked up to its charger. Real Angela used a headset, primarily so that her gaming wouldn’t disturb Michael.

This setup worked well for me as a guide. She couldn’t hear any sound coming from my game (I set the volume low), but I could hear her game. That told me when our scenes were in sync.

One thing I observed was the cadence of the words in the cutscenes was not the same on the two systems; they adjusted on the word/syllable level in order to get the timing of the cutscenes to be the same. Another triumph for Larian’s audio engineers!

Once Patch 8 was released, we used Larian’s crossplay servers. That process worked smoothly enough, and we didn’t have to fiddle with either Steam’s or Playstation’s Friends networks.

Mods

When we started playthrough 1/14, we didn’t use any mods. My reasoning is that it would best for Real Angela’s understanding of the game for her first playthrough to be “vanilla.” In her subsequent playthroughs she could install whatever mods appealed to her.

That worked fine until Real Angela became more and more concerned about Scratch. There was a mod she wanted to use, BFR Scratch Overhaul, that made him stronger and more useful in a party. I was familiar with the mod, and had used it myself.

That’s when we discovered that just because both the PC and the Mac had the same mod, it didn’t mean they were the same mod.

This is what I think was happening: BG3 mod developers almost entirely construct their mods on and for the PC. If they make a version for the Mac/console, it’s an afterthought. There are different technical requirements for mods on the two categories of system (console and Mac are a single category for this purpose).

What this means is that a developer might upload a particular mod with a specific version ID to Larian’s PC mod server, but not perform the same upgrade on the Mac/console version at the same time… if ever.

Larian’s mod servers can detect the difference in versions and recommend that a given mod be downgraded. However, it’s the host who determines which version of the mod should be used. A guest (that is, me) would be told to upgrade or downgrade a mod to match the host’s version. If that version was not available, the guest is not allowed to join the host’s game.

This is part of the reason why Larian recommends that console/Mac players be the hosts of cross-play games. That’s all well and good, but as I’ve said previously, this was Real Angela’s game and she was the host. Larian offers no option for her to downgrade her mods to the corresponding Mac/console version.

In the case of the Scratch mod, I tried several ways to make it work, including downloading it directly from Nexusmods and manually moving it into the mod directory on my Mac: ~/Documents/Larian\ Studios/Baldur's\ Gate\ 3/Mods. No success.

Real Angela was forced to disable the mod when I used Steam. When Patch 8 came out, the issues with the Scratch mod were resolved.

However, it always left a residue of doubt. There were occasional glitches and network disconnects. This was a particularly bad one:

I knew intellectually that the blurry shape in the middle was an owlbear, but that didn’t make it any easier to move around. I discovered a work-around: If I went into the options and visited my video settings, the problem would go away… until the next time there was a big shift in the game’s viewpoint.

Larian released a hotfix to address this problem. But I’d never seen it before. It didn’t happen until I (a) played a multiplayer game, and (b) used the Scratch mod in the multiplayer game. Were these two factors the cause? I couldn’t know.

As I’ll discuss later, Real Angela invited me to join in her next playthrough. She installed lots of mods, and she made sure they were all console/Mac compatible to enable me to play with her.

She activated more mods than I typically use (e.g., Weightless Gold). When I first joined her game, I was shown a screen that let me download and install all the mods she had installed but that I never did. That part worked.

However, the issue with the Scratch mod returned with a vengeance, along with problems with other mods:

At this point, in order for me to play with Real Angela, she has to turn off the mods in the picture.

That’s a shame. I use all those mods myself (except for Extra encounters and Minibosses, which I look forward to trying). I just can’t use them with Real Angela.

What’s next?

Real Angela

As I mentioned before, Real Angela has moved on to her next playthrough.

I only join her in one out of every three or four of her game sessions. Even with that limited exposure, I’ve seen scenes that I’ve never seen before.

From my BG3 series, you’ve learned that the question to ask for every playthrough is: “Whom will you have a relationship with?” For playthrough 2/14.5, Real Angela chose…

Why? She saw that many BG3 players are fascinated with him, calling him their waifu. After what happened with Astarion in playthrough 1/14, she wants to understand what the fuss is about.

For Tavella, it turned out to be…

If I ever write up playthrough 2/14.5, I’ll tell the story of how that happened.

Michael

Real Angela’s partner, Michael, has started a playthrough of his own. Real Angela occasionally joined him using two controllers on the same PC, with the game in split-screen mode. She tried being a guide for Michael, as I guided her, and found it to be harder than she thought!

However, Michael is not as interested in being guided as Real Angela was. He’d rather make his own mistakes. He’s making quite a few, since he’s nowhere near as familiar with D&D as Real Angela is. He bases many of his game decisions on his memory of playing BG1 and BG2, which were based on the D&D rules as they were a couple of decades ago.

Sabrina

You may recall that in playthrough 9 I named a character Sorcerer Sabrina, after a real-world friend named Sabrina.

“Real Sabrina” (no, I don’t plan to call her that) has asked me to guide her through BG3 the way I guided Real Angela.

I’ve already had one BG3 session with Sabrina. Again, I learned something new: Unlike Real Angela, Sabrina has no experience with video games. She doesn’t know how to use a controller. I’d tell her “Move your character over there” and she didn’t know what I was talking about, which joystick to use, and how to move it so that her character would move.

What I discovered is that I didn’t know which joystick to use! Using the buttons and joysticks on a controller is instinctive for me. I had to ask Sabrina to hand me the controller and let me fiddle with it before I could tell her, “Oh! It’s the left joystick.”

Me

It seems I have a magical formula to get my friends to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with me: Just name a hireling after them and make that hireling the center of the story.

Perhaps my next hirelings should be named Jessica, Carolyn, and Liana Marley…

I certainly plan to play BG3 on my own again. But with an occasional game with Real Angela, and the prospect of playing with Sabrina, I’m holding off for now.

To some degree this is because I don’t want to fiddle with a lot of mod switching between Real Angela’s mods, Sabrina’s mods (I’m going to suggest that she not use any), and any mods I might choose to use.

In fact, I’m thinking my next playthrough won’t use any mods at all. You can’t earn Achievements in the game if you have any mods enabled. I’m not an “Achievement hog”, but there are a couple I’d like to get, like Busker.

Of course, there’s a Dark Urge playthrough in my future. I may name the character Buffy. We’ll see…

This is a multi-part essay. Here are links to all the parts:

• Part 1 – Fey and Bellandria
• Part 2 – Characters
• Part 3 – Hugs and Doggies
• Part 4 – Approvals and Interruptions
• Part 5 – Problems and Plans