Unable To Play With Non-Expansion Players Feedback

How? All my chars were converted to the expansion.

And every time uninstall the dlc, create new chars and afterwards redownload the dlc is no solution.

I would be happy if non dlc player just don’t get the new stuff (max lvl, new world, new classes) but they are still able to play with dlc players in the old world. And if this is to much work at least like titan quest with 2 .exe files und 2 save folders…

No, they’re not. When you start the expansion the game makes a copy of your toon at the point just before that so effectively there are two versions of your toons, one base game and one expansion. You can see them in the My Documents\My Games\Grim Dawn\Save\Main folder and also if you look in GDDefiler you’ll see the same. Cloud saving should work in the same way.

To play with your friends you’d play with your base game toons so won’t have any of the gains you made in the expansion. I have an L64 Conjurer in the base (brought back from Elite to playtest the expansion in Normal) and the expansion Conjurer is now L96 in Ultimate.

they are all converted without backup:

Guess that’s cloud saving for you. :frowning:

The way it should save is you’ll see double __ before original Grim Dawn saves, and a single _ for the expansion.

so the way it should be doesn’t work :frowning:

For the record, I do not use Steam backup. It seemed to cause more problems than it was worth.

no they were not, there are vanilla backups in dirs with __ at the beginning, instead of the usual _ You can use those to play without the expansion

If you never play a vanilla char in the expansion, it remains vanilla.

And every time uninstall the dlc, create new chars and afterwards redownload the dlc is no solution

you might need to redownload the expansion, not sure (I had to during its beta, have not tried since), while this is a bit annoying and being able to just disable it would be better, it is more a nuisance than a problem. I can download the expansion in a minute or so, your milage may vary.

At the very least it is possible while jumping through some minor hoops, not impossible like you said.

then either you created them with the expansion or deleted the backup afterwards, the game does create a backup, at least it always did for me

Look at the screenshot there are no backups.

It doesn’t created a backup in my case. 2 Chars were created before the expansion.

I see what I came here to post has a) a thread & b) the suggestions I wished to make.
Therefore I’ll keep things short & sweet; it may be a bit of fiddling with the code, but it could be rolled out in a patch to simply add a button in the main menu to deselect the expansion content and in the case of item conflict auto vault so it cannot be equipped during a base game instance.
Then all you need is a prompt when returning to expansion mode to retrieve vault items to stash on a timer set to check if the vault has items at game load.
Simple to lock out expansion characters, deal with item versions and because the expanded base game still has the base game content just require multi-play to be initiated by the base game owner while essentially the expansion owner is in compatibility mode.

2020 post here and I’m sure this won’t be answered but thought I’d give it a try anyways.

Here’s the situation…

I bought the game and the dlc together in a package and loved the game. Convinced a friend to pick it up. We quickly figured out the DLC issue and the checkbox in steam with dlc to play only the vanilla game.

I then made a character with the dlc unchecked and got through a good chunk of the game with him (2 base classes no dlc). When not playing with my buddy I reinstall the dlc and load up my main guy who was created in the DLC. Did this for several weeks with no issues

I accidentally loaded my non-dlc character up during one of the times I had the dlc installed and loaded the bank. The character is now DLC only and won’t even appear unless DLC is installed. There was no backup file created, there is no transfer to an older version. I checked in multiple locations tried all the tips listed above.

I do have steam cloud saves set up but there is nothing there.

My fix was to load up my laptop and make sure it was disconnected from the internet and copied the save over to my desktop and replace it. It set me back about 20 levels and a full act and a half of the game but I don’t have to start from scratch. I’m not sure if there was an update that removed the backup creation and if so why it was done but I’m not thrilled.

Guess you learned a valuable lesson. Make backups yourself when going back and forth. It’s as easy as copying and pasting a folder elsewhere. As far as I’m aware the only time the game creates any kind of backups is when you very first upgrade to the expacs. After that it isn’t going to automagically just know when you enable/disable expacs.

Also…

…if you’re gunna be enabling/disabling expacs and backing files up then I highly recommend you don’t use Steam cloud. That’s a no-no. Improve the view and cut a cloud system you have very little control over out of the picture. Such things are safer and drastically all-around easier to deal with when you are saving locally and have full control.

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Not sure why you thought it appropriate to say “looks like you learned a valuable lesson.” but thank you for your unhelpful and condescending reply to an issue that is literally the fault of the game not the user.

I’ve been gaming for 20+ years and not once have I had this issue with any game on console or pc.

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It was very appropriate to the situation. I think that’s rather obvious.

Except for all the other parts where I gave you helpful advice, correct? Don’t get tunnel vision just because you didn’t like my first line.

I’ve been gaming for over 30 years. 20 of them have been almost primarily on PC. Just because you personally have never had this “issue” means little in the world of PC gaming, where many things are possible. This is simply how this game works when doing these edge cases - you either learn to handle them how they want to be handled or… /shrugs.

Actually it wasn’t helpful as the issue is not corrected aside from what I did before your reply, nor is your comment on steam saves helpful as it wouldn’t have prevented this issue to begin with (see all the comments in the thread above)… so no your comment was useless and condescending. You’re old enough to know better bud.

The issue is not common in pc or console, if you think so I’m sorry to hear you’ve been playing broken or hacked games for 30 years my guy. This has been a basic QoL feature in most games post 2010 (the game itself actually had this feature but it was removed sometime in 2018 per the comments above).

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Which feature is that specifically, bud? Automagically knowing to backup files when you toggle DLC? I’m dying to see the list of games that does this. Grim Dawn never had such a thing.

read the thread above bud

There is nothing this thread can tell me I don’t already know. I’ve been playng GD since 2013. The game has NEVER done what you think it has done. Again, as noted in my first reply, the only time GD makes backups is the very first time you upgrade to an expansion.

This is done probably in case the customer refunds the expansion they don’t lose their pre-expansion character.

You should really read the thread from the beginning friend before you go saying things like that :wink: