COOP connection problems Solved - Definitive Edition Upgrade Issues

[Sevane]

So I just bought Outward for a friend and Steam only has the "Definitive edition" now. Any time he tried to connect to me he would get "No game with that name found" and anytime I tried to connect to him nothing would happen. Turns out I found the solution.

When we both went to the local executable file and ran as administrator to see if that was the problem, he told me that he lost character creation options that were present before when launching through the steam launcher. Turns out that launching the executable launches the vanilla version (i.e. non definitive edition) game and then he was able to connect to my game flawlessly.

Even though MY version of the game (which I purchased like a year ago before definitive launched) *says* its Definitive Edition, the file install size is actually less than half of what it is supposed to be - indicating that the Old versions that were "upgraded" to Definitive edition when it came out did not properly get flagged for all of the content.

If anyone else is experiencing problems like this - the solution I found was to run the local executable as admin and then you can at least play the game without the DLC content. I don't own the DLC right now so I have no idea if purchasing the DLC will be all that's required to get the game working with definitive

Hope this helps someone out there who went through hours of frustrating troubleshooting as I did.