Ongoing multiplayer with specific friend - reliable way to stay in sync?

Support and Bug Reports
1

Greetings! I purchased GZ when it first came out, and loved it! Came back recently to play solo and was amazed at how much it had evolved and improved, how friendly the community was, and how responsive the devs seem to be!

I am writing to ask about multiplayer mission progress. I know similar questions have been asked in other forums/posts, but there seem to be conflicting answers. I was hoping I could explain what I am trying to accomplish and get the experts’ opinion.

A friend of mine recently purchased GZ. I was hoping he could start a game (character #1/world #1) and I could join him with a my character #2/world #2 (I reserve character #1 and world #1 for my solo play). I was hoping my friend and I could play through the game, just the two of us, from the beginning, meeting up every week to play through the story. We would never play these characters solo, or with others. The idea would be for us to stay in sync with each other, with our characters progrssing at basically the same rate. We want it to be a continual experience, where we don’t have to have one of us go out on their own and redo missions “solo” in order to get our mission progress back in sync. Is this possible? The GZ wiki on Fandom seems to indicate that the game can work this way IF “you are entirely aligned with the host’s progress”. But I don’t know how to make this work from the beginning, because the moment your start the game, you are given a mission, before you are able to invite someone in to join you.

Will the mission progres stay in sync if the client and the host are at the same mid-point in the sequence of sub-missions? For example, if both players have completed “Find the Toolbox for Therese” in the “Raod to Salthamn” mission, and neither player has progressed any further, and they join together for a multiplayer session, will they reliably BOTH receive mission progress XP when they complete “Road to Salthamn”? Or do they need to both start the mission from the very beginning for this to work?

Some Reddit posts suggest that this DOES work for side missions, but not for main missions. Other posts say it does not work at all. Still others say the player with the least mission progress should always host, but I don’t know if that recommendation is just to help the host catch up, or if it actually will allow the players to “snap into sync”, with all players then receiving mission progress together during the multiplayer session.

I am sorry this is so long-winded, but as I said, Googling has turned up conflicting answers. I feel like the game is so well-designed for just this type of scenario, where 2-4 people would wanrt to meet up, only with each other, to experience the story together, in order.

I’ll ask the question in a simpler way: is there a reliable, predictable way for two players who want to play together, and ONLY together, to start a game in which they will both receive XP and mission progress in sync with each other, without anyone having to backtrack or repeat missions solo?

Thank you in advance!

2

Haven’t done that for a while.
In the days when my mate and me started playing GZ together, it worked that way.

But when the devs added the other 3 worlds IT changed. Mission and world progress just is saved to the hosts world as far as I know.

In the past there was just 1 world per player to save at.
Now with multiple worlds, the guests game doesn’t know where to save at, as the game doesn’t ask on joining a multiplayer game.

5

I always figured that when a guest gets pulled into a game by invite, mission progress - IF it was saved to the guest - would go into whatever the “current world” was (i.e., the last one selected or opened). When you go to the world/character selection screen, it always seems to indicate which one is “current” and I would have thought that would be the one used to save synchronized progress.

It would be a shame if you’re right, Madchaser, but I suppose there’s a reason. Have the majority of players on the forum here moved past the point where they are playing the story from the beginning? Is nobody playing this way anymore?

I’m guessing you’re right about this, but can any other players confirm that synchronized progress just no longer works at all?

6

Well, tried a few tests last night with my friend, and actually . . . it seems to work! Granted, we are just going through the intro missions on the Archipelago region, but it works. I don’t know what was wrong in our first session, but everything snapped into place this time. We would both get credit when either one of us completed a mission. Discrepencies in XP seemed to be mostly due to A) which of the two of us “discovered” a location, and B) destroying machines versus “assists” (as the more experienced player, I was taking down more machines). To get around that, if my friend started falling behind, I would just let him be the first into a new location, or let him set off a trap that I laid, scoring several machines at once.

I’m sure there may be complications as we progress further into the game, but for the moment, mission-wise, we are in lockstep, and it’s working well.