Baldur’s Gate 3 multiplayer is one of the best multiplayer experiences available right now, welcoming both online and local co-op players alike, but it has one big bug causing players trouble. Although the game is a booming success, shattering Steam records a bug in the multiplayer causes something very strange to happen with your friend’s created or chosen characters, which causes them to become stuck as party members. While fixes do exist, they are far from convenient, and it’s now up to Larian Studios to figure out the flaw in their multiplayer design and fix it before the fans turn sour on a major part of this near-perfect game.
Why Is the Multiplayer Bug in Baldur’s Gate 3 Causing Issues?
(Updated on October 11, 2024 – updated links and format)
When you play with a friend, whether it be online or local co-op, the character your friend decides to create is permanently in your party until the end of the game. This not only prevents you from removing them from the party, but you cannot converse with them either. For those that play the game co-op the whole way through, this isn’t a problem, but if you want to jump into a friend’s game on occasion or vice versa, you’re in for a rude awakening. The Baldur’s Gate 3 multiplayer bug gets even worse; where if you decide to play with a friend from the start of the game and they choose an origin character, that character is now affixed to your party as well, and you can’t speak to them either.
Fans of the game have already voiced this concern on multiple occasions. What makes the bug so strange is that it’s not a bug at all but rather a feature implemented by the developers because they figured players would do co-op for every second of the game. It’s a bold assumption, to say the least, and those that only play Baldur’s Gate 3 in multiplayer occasionally will suffer for it. What makes this feature so problematic is that you need certain characters in your party to not only get unique dialogue throughout the story but also for sidequests. This isn’t the biggest issue if you have only one additional multiplayer character in your party. But, if you are playing with three friends for some of your playthrough, you are pretty much breaking a massive part of your game.
Solutions to this are few, but some include mods, such as one that lets you increase the party size, as well as crueler measures, such as throwing your friend’s character into a ravine and just leaving them there forever. There are also some file workarounds for this issue. No word has come yet on whether a patch is in the works for this or not, but for those who like to jump into Baldur’s Gate 3 multiplayer every now and then with a friend, take heed.
