Hello,
I upgraded to the expansion during launch and I got a few family members to buy the base game from a GOG sale that was happening (I also have GOG). However, when we tried to play together, we weren’t able to since I’m on the expansion and they are on the base game. I was under the impression that this upgrade would be similar to how Diablo II was where Classic players and Expansion players couldn’t play with each other, but one could check a box in order to play with Non-Expansion characters. This would be the equivalent of me making a new “Non Ashes of Malmouth” character and being able to play Acts 1-4 (And not have any of the expansion items be considered for drop). I can see that this wasn’t programmed like that so it isn’t possible. However, are there any plans in the future to allow players to have 1 copy of the base game but be allowed to play with other players (expansion/non-expansion)? Or maybe have a way to quickly enable disable the DLC without having to re-download two GB of data from GOG? I know that the enabling/disabling the DLC feature is from GOG so this might be something that could be reported to them. It would be nice for the DLC to be cached so that if I do need to enable/disable the DLC, I can at least cache the changes locally so I don’t have to constantly re-download 2 gb.
My current workaround at the moment in GOG is to copy the directory for Grim Dawn without the DLC enabled, and save that as a “Grim Dawn - Vanilla” copy. Then I downloaded the expansion and saved another copy of it as “Grim Dawn - Ashes”. then I can switch the main copy of the game back and forth by renaming it to the directory that GOG expects, and then launching the game. This wastes space but at least I basically have the game already “cached” locally.
As I mentioned earlier, since this is an engine change, and the game wasn’t designed in a way that one could easily “check a ‘Classic’ box”, could there be something developed that would allow us to easily switch between the base and expansion game at a file level? Maybe a “Switcher” utility that would move around the files in the directory depending on what mode the user selected? I could script this manually but I would rather an “official” solution be developed.