[PSA] YOU CANNOT DISMISS PLAYER CHARACTERS

[Senyuno]

This means that if anyone (a friend on Steam, somebody you give the Direct Connection code to, or anyone browsing the Multiplayer lobbies), at any time, joins your ongoing Campaign, they take up one permanent slot of your four party members! You cannot talk to them. You cannot ask them to wait at camp. All Origin Characters will say your party is full. Withers will not recognize that character in the Hireling dialogue.

Essentially, they are a Player Character just the same as if they had started the Campaign with you and created a Custom Character. They go through the Character Creation section (they cannot select an Origin Character). Then, one of your non-PC characters is returned to Camp. The Custom Character is then permanently attached to the four Party Portraits on the left side of the screen. They are treated as a PC/main character.

And they ARE PERMANENT. Once you save, you kinda have to commit to playing the rest of the Campaign out with that person, because you have to accept that one of your four party slots is forever taken. Same as a fresh Multiplayer Campaign. Only by returning to a previous save before you make this change can you "undo" this.

So don't let friends just jump in to hang out. Don't leave your Invite Visibility open. Direction Connection if you're worried about this. If somebody randomly joins you, I've experienced hard crashing + lengthy files verification + settings resets. And if it goes through, you have to kick them/reload a previous save ASAP if committing their character to the campaign permanently is not intentional.

In fact, my experience with the Multiplayer section feels like it's bugged anyway. It shows a very strange assortment of lobbies, some of them my friends' on Steams, some random, and the Filters have no effect. I would legit recommend just turning off this feature. Larian should disable this feature and come up with a new solution. Because it seems like an insane release day vulnerability that your random friend can click Join via the lobby or even Steam and crash your game or essentially corrupt your Save files.

Larian should honestly address this as a major issue, disable it, set Visibility to None by default, and/or at least warn players of this system. There's many of us losing hours of progress due to it causes bugs, crashes, and general feels bad moments of, "oh my god, THATS how that works?" after hours of progress like this.

So just please spread the word or give your +1 to this to keep this notice fresh.

[Joshnovski]

+1

[Young Chief Viking]

+1

[Gums]

By "invite visibility" do you mean a setting in the game or a steam setting? (Haven't played yet)

[red]

This also makes some companion quests (where they need to join your party) impossible to do in a 4-player session.

[John Helldiver]

+1 again.

Seriously Larian, this is kinda important, please commit to fixing this.

[Boson_Heavy]

[FIX] - (Have not confirmed if all steps are necessary, but this is the solution I found when I ran into the same problem where I could not speak to or dismiss PCs)

1. Traveled with all characters back to camp (could not dismiss PCs)
2. Exited and reloaded game after all other players left the game (Still could not dismiss PCs)
3. In game settings, unchecked the "Direct Connection" box. (Still could not dismiss PCs)
4. Completed a long rest at camp. (All PCs could now be spoken to and dismissed successfully)

NOTE: Once you dismiss a player created character, you will need to speak to Withers in your camp if you want to have that character rejoin your party in the future.