How to play a glitchy campaign co-op locally

[Stephen7853]

Thanks to AANXAAN for figuring this out

There's a menu glitch that lets you play campaign co-op locally (so if you want to play online, use parsec or steam screen share) PLS DON'T FIX THIS IGA TEAM!! It's by no means a polished experience but it's still fun

I made a quick video to show how it works cause it's a little confusing without a visual. There's a bit of online gameplay in the second half
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_IiSyHxX4Y

The tl;dr is, you can confirm and go back at the same time in the menus. This lets you start Extra Mode and back out at the same time, and when you reach chaos mode's character select screen, navigate the main menu to start a normal game with 2 players.

It has some limitations, mainly with the inventory.. You'll probably get a better experience with the special characters like Zangetsu, but only player 1 can heal at save points.

The limitations for Miriam co-op from what we found, player 2 can't pick up items. So whatever save file you load, player 2 will inherit player 1's inventory, and the inventories act separately. This wouldn't be so bad if you could just save and load anytime there's new progress, but it seems to save player 2's inventory for some reason.
Also from our limited time playing, we found Den of Behemoths wasn't accessible with two players, there might be other places that won't work.

[Green Skeleton]

So it's possible for co-op campaign to work, they just didn't want to.

[Stephen7853]

Originally posted by Green Skeleton:

So it's possible for co-op campaign to work, they just didn't want to.

Locally, in an unfinished state. I dunno how easy it'd be to drag and drop multiplayer functionality into a game that was developed to be fully single player from the start.
Chaos mode in itself is kinda janky, you can see they had to work around the singleplayer inventory system. I imagine actually implementing that into multiplayer is whole other task, along with syncing save data between two players for online multiplayer, the current save system can't really work with that.

Getting a fully functional MP system like we saw in Harmony of Despair would need a lot more work, and considering how long it's taken to get all these stretch goals, might be beyond what the current developers are capable of doing anytime soon. Most of their resources are probably focused on Bloodstained 2 right now

[Green Skeleton]

Originally posted by Stephen7853:

Originally posted by Green Skeleton:

So it's possible for co-op campaign to work, they just didn't want to.

Locally, in an unfinished state. I dunno how easy it'd be to drag and drop multiplayer functionality into a game that was developed to be fully single player from the start.
Chaos mode in itself is kinda janky, you can see they had to work around the singleplayer inventory system. I imagine actually implementing that into multiplayer is whole other task, along with syncing save data between two players for online multiplayer, the current save system can't really work with that.

Getting a fully functional MP system like we saw in Harmony of Despair would need a lot more work, and considering how long it's taken to get all these stretch goals, might be beyond what the current developers are capable of doing anytime soon. Most of their resources are probably focused on Bloodstained 2 right now

I do wonder how difficult it is. Another indie game called Salt and Sanctuary, forced both players to share the same inventory for its co-op. Then another patch just recently released separated both inventories.

[2cide]

BRO THANKS

[Stephen7853]

Originally posted by Green Skeleton:

Originally posted by Stephen7853:

Locally, in an unfinished state. I dunno how easy it'd be to drag and drop multiplayer functionality into a game that was developed to be fully single player from the start.
Chaos mode in itself is kinda janky, you can see they had to work around the singleplayer inventory system. I imagine actually implementing that into multiplayer is whole other task, along with syncing save data between two players for online multiplayer, the current save system can't really work with that.

Getting a fully functional MP system like we saw in Harmony of Despair would need a lot more work, and considering how long it's taken to get all these stretch goals, might be beyond what the current developers are capable of doing anytime soon. Most of their resources are probably focused on Bloodstained 2 right now

I do wonder how difficult it is. Another indie game called Salt and Sanctuary, forced both players to share the same inventory for its co-op. Then another patch just recently released separated both inventories.

Yeah I'd take a forced shared inventory for this, good enough for me and probably the easier route.
It's just, we don't know their budget for support. They're not technically indie, a publisher needs to fund post launch support. Maybe they had to compromise, don't wanna add in half baked co-op, otherwise they'd need to rewrite how the inventory system is handled and test for any bugs that might pop up in the story, and there's a few, so they settled for chaos mode. There's a lot of unexpected behavior for a game this big.
I'm honestly surprised we even got online multiplayer at all. That was probably the hardest task, unless that kinda thing's already built into Unreal Engine, I dunno

Maybe with enough attention from fans they'd be willing to expand on it, or maybe they'll be going all in on Bloodstained 2 now, who knows.

[なかの31]

It's really cool to see that local multiplayer actually works, even more on the state it is, which is pretty much playable.
I even have some ideas of how the devs could make the coop work if they're interested.

1) They could try doing something like in Vampire Survivors Coop, where if you're playing in multiplayer, the camera will be centered around the center position of both players. Maybe zoom out the camera if the players are far away from each other, but at some point, movement would need to be blocked to avoid further zooming out.

2) The shared inventory wouldn't be a problem, if both players have their own loadouts (each player having their own equipment slots). Maybe two players can't use the same item (or at least the same item has only one stack available, since you can't use an item someone else is using). The souls on the other hand, I don't have much ideas.

3) When moving to another map, the other player could be teleported to the door too (beside this might cause issues if one player is moving left, and the other is moving right after teleporting, teleporting back to the previous map as side effect).

Anyways, really cool to see that the game campaign can be playable on local coop, even if by abusing of bug.

[zero254]

Originally posted by Green Skeleton:

So it's possible for co-op campaign to work, they just didn't want to.

I think they just didn't test it really. I'm sure it's possible though but not very good.

[Green Skeleton]

I just wanna ask:

Is the game beatable with this glitch?

[Shoah Kahn]

Originally posted by Green Skeleton:

So it's possible for co-op campaign to work, they just didn't want to.

It seems so... Only the inventories look to need nutting out. There are other ARPG's that do it, like the Salt and Sanctuary / Sacrifice games. Hopefully, if there is a sequel, the game will have full co-op for all modes, and a nice suite of characters to compliment it.

Q. Is there anyway to force either of the two players as a particular characters -- such as via Cheat Engine -- so that the players are not using the same character?

[Rudolf Fischer]

thx, waiting for real coop.