Has anyone managed to finish BG:EE in Multiplayer without encountering the duplicate NPC bug?

Heya

This brought our last MP game to a standstill - my adventure-buddy, who I'd really like to share the BG experience with, has agreed to a restart but it might be harder to convince him to start over for a third time if this happens again. I was going to wait until the issue was patched, but it seems that might be a while off yet.

Is there anything I can do to minimise the chances of this happening? Not letting *any* NPCs flee to a different area seems like a tall order over the course of a whole playthrough.

bigdogchris

In some cases the duplicate NPC's may be caused by fleeing, but I've found commoners in locations where they shouldn't even belong, like Isle of Balduran and outside Sarevok's temple.

This also is an issue in single players games (it happened to me three times)

Liberelli

I've not encoutered any of that in sp, i was relieved to see they fixed it. Now im worried to see i was only lucky
I also encountered those random commoners in a mp game yesterday, dozens and dozens of them in the Candlekeep catacombs for unexplained reasons, never seen anything like it.

Avari

Made a succesfull playthrough last week. We had the fishermen from north of Friendly Arms Inn popping up in some weird places once we reached Candlekeep dungeon, but it wasn't anything that broke the game. Was just one of those annoying things.

Heya

Thought I'd give this a bump as I may be in a position to start another MP playthrough soon, and since a lot of people will now have had the chance to play through the game in MP, is this something that occurs more often than not in MP games?

Is there any word on whether the issue can be reliably replicated, and will we see a fix within the next couple of patches? The link on the known bugs list in the forums seems to have gone dead.

It was the only issue I had with the MP really, but it turned into a gamebreaking one, and I don't think I've seen any posts saying they've had a MP playthrough free of it. I don't want to commit to a playthrough if the duplication gets so bad I can't enter buildings, like I've seen happen to players on these forums.

Anyone managed to avoid this then, and is there anything I can do to minimise the risk of it?

minutus

It tends to happen when aggressive/confused/panicked/fleeing (red/yellow circle) NPCs are left on maps, and particularly so if they transit between map areas or sections inside maps (which was probably not possible in original BG1). Some quests can directly trigger this, like the fishermen (vs priest of Umberlee) quest that makes them flee (I don't think they should go red but they do) inside their homes in one of the possible outcomes.

For some reason they keep on respawning on other areas in the game later on. If you get this glitch the clone spawning happens every time on loading a save (in the area you happen to be), though sometimes they spawn outside of map borders and are difficult to notice (you can still spot it in the logs if their state forces them to fight each other). I also suspect leaving charmed/polymorphed NPCs on maps might cause this, which annoyingly renders usage of charm as failsafe for pickpocketing etc. riskier than it should be.

If you get the glitch it's difficult to fix even with console/scripts, as the culprits might be unnamed commoners or other hard to track "random" NPCs. If it happens very late in the playthrough, you can just try to ignore it and avoid loading as much as possible, though that's obviously not a real solution in a long game like BG. We got the glitch twice in our playthrough. First with the said fishermen, which we were luckily able to solve by using a global quest trigger variable. Second time time we had an Enforcer yelling "I AM THE LAW" in the beginning of each play session (after loading) and cutting down courtesans somewhere outside of visible map. I think they glitched because of series of unfortunate events in the "Lantern", which left some guards charmed, one polymorphed to squirrel, and some courtesans in panick mode.

On top of this some commoners from Ulgoth's Beard were spawning in werewolf island for some reason, but perhaps not elsewhere. Or maybe ctrl-y'ing them there cleared it, who knows.

This playthrough was played before the current patch, so I'm unaware if the issue was addressed later.

EDIT: Smiley made the fix for the duplicating fishermen available here (note that this fixes only duplicating fishermen, not other duplicating NPCs): http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/15984/respawning-and-multiplying-fishermen-bug-fix#latest

Heya

We were getting it as early as the Gnoll Fortress, a bunch of Tarises and Barkeeps hanging around on the North of the map. By the Bandit Camp we had panicked commoners rushing around all over the place, party members teleporting across the map, and a solid line of infinite fat merchants in multicoloured shirts walking from the top of the area to the bottom (?!). Our combat log was being continually spammed and all my multiplay partner could hear was "Aieeee! Heeeelp!" every few seconds. As you can imagine, it wasn't really enjoyable in that state.

Not having any red/yellow NPCs transitioning between areas seems like a big ask to me - don't civilians flee from fights in taverns, etc.? Or would we have to had hit them with an AOE to do that?

What's this ctrl-Y thing? Is the fisherman fix modifiable to get rid of other NPCs?

I could deal with the odd duplicate, but I don't think I've heard anyone say they've managed to get all the way through without it being an issue at some point. It seems you have to be very lucky for this not to ruin your game, so I'm reluctant to start a new session until I hear something concrete on this. It's a much bigger problem in my eyes than lack of matchmaking, or even the combat animation problem. Shame, as I was introducing a newcomer to the world of BG and was having great fun initially.

Tresset

Wait this is still an issue?

Tresset

Well they seem to have done something about this. I remember that I tried to reproduce this bug once and it was very easy to make npcs transfer between areas. Now it seems almost impossible to make them do this. That should decrease the odds of this bug happening.

minutus

Heya said:

Not having any red/yellow NPCs transitioning between areas seems like a big ask to me - don't civilians flee from fights in taverns, etc.? Or would we have to had hit them with an AOE to do that?

What's this ctrl-Y thing? Is the fisherman fix modifiable to get rid of other NPCs?

If you have debug mode set on in the ini file ( http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/8317/how-to-tweak-your-game ) you can hover your mouse pointer on any creature/npc and press Y while holding Control (ctrl+y) to instantly slay them. This is helpful if you need to get rid of bunch of clones that are not supposed to be there. It works in co-op if the player hosting the game has the debug mode enabled, and other players can use the function then as well if they have it set on in their ini's. It doesn't solve the problem, as they will still keep multiplying and spawning after each load, but it might help if you get past some areas if you get the glitch late in the game.

The fix for fishermen uses quest trigger already in game (it basically switches the result of the quest to "fishermen were killed") so it doesn't work for anything else. I think Smiley mentioned that it's possible to make spawn preventing/despawning for specific creatures but it would be very crude solution as they'd still keep on multiplying and then despawning perhaps crashing your game completely at some point when loading a save. And it can be difficult to notice when the glitch starts happening, as if the NPCs multiplying aren't hostile to each other you won't see it in the combat log.

I agree that the bug is very annoying and has high potential to break your game completely. Even if you manage to avoid it for the most part, it makes you play in an unintuitive way just to avoid it. Though in the end I think we got so annoyed by it impacting our game that we just thought "the hell with it" and played the way we liked - even if it caused more multiplying NPCs. At first I thought we were unlucky to get the glitch, but after reading the forum it seems we were lucky to get it so late that it didn't prevent us from finishing the game.

I think the devs mentioned they were looking into it, and perhaps there's already something at place to prevent it. Confirmation for whether this is/will be addressed would be nice for sure. Co-op in this game is something special, and especially so if you get to play it for the first time and figure out puzzles/stories/dialogue/combat tactics together on the fly. Time investment / scheduling required is huge though, so a bug like this can ruin a lot. I hope it gets fixed for you!

Oh, and if you do wait, you might want to consider SCS mod before starting a game (I think it's in beta for EE now), it seems to play quite nicely in multiplayer at least in BG2 (except improved shapeshifting component, that caused us problems), and spices up the combat a lot.

EDIT: Forgot about the AOE question. I'm pretty sure they only need to panick/flee & run to another area, no direct dmg / effects required. We didn't directly dmg / affect commoners in Ulgoth or the courtesans at Lantern, but confused/panicked enemies might have hit / chased them.