You're going to need patience and/or some highly committed friends. It's a huge game and it can be frustrating to play only a multiplayer campaign with a group that only meets for a few hours a week.

Also be aware that certain characters will only interact with the party member that invites them to join camp. So you can miss out on a lot of dialogue or romance options if you're committing to avoid the single player route

Tips:

If you have less than 4 folks you're playing with, you can switch who controls a given NPC by ditching them at camp and letting someone else add them back to the party. (This allows combat to go faster since you can parallelize the NPCs instead of having the host control all of them).

Additionally, if friends can't make it for a playthrough it's OK to leave their character at camp and take a NPC with you instead. Your friend will gain any XP they missed out on when they rejoin.

Thanks! Since it's my wife and I playing its going to be pretty casual. We will probably put a lot of time in up front to see if we like it and then take it from there. We play a lot of tabletop games, including the D&D Adventure System games and I have played regular D&D so I know what we are getting into there.

Thanks again.

Great question. Here are some of the key things I learned which I think you need to know.

The biggest thing I will say is to do with your companions. You can piss them off and they can leave. The way me and my coop friend were doing it is we both have one each that we control and romance. This is probably dependent on how their stories unfold but because my coop friend spoke/interacted with a key quest/NPC (which mattered a lot for my companion) my companion reacted like it was me that made the decision (which I expected) but as far as I know (haven't even finished my first playthrough yet lol) I missed the chance to interact with my companion during the conversation with the key NPC. I think there should have a been a persuasion check at least or what have you. The thing is the game overall is pretty good at separating two tavs (custom characters) but in this case it didn't. Like I said I kinda expected this, so me and my coop friend always usually agree on the choices we make. What I didn't realise was I missed out on hashing it out with my companion.

Don't let this scare you though, this doesn't happen often and in my case at least it was very clear in hindsight I should have been the one to talk.

So a good way to avoid this other than that is save often (which is good practice either way, I save literally after every fight or long convo) is to reload if you think the other person speaking would have been better. You also sometimes get pulled into convos without choosing who it is so saving during combat is even a good idea sometimes.

Another thing is some things are one time 'uses'. Depends as there definitely are things that each character can try (like perception checks, specific dialogue etc) but sometimes certain things will only happen once so only one player can do it although with a lot of the dialogues even if one person does it the coop player can watch it. So for example with no spoilers, later on in the game someone can make something special for you for your camp. We found out today that because I did no one else can get one. Same thing with unique buffs usually and whatnot so pick wisely and try to figure out who it's best on.

WOW! Thank you for this long reply. This community is pretty cool.

I am going to re-read this right before we start playing to make sure I got everything. Speaking to what you said conversations and NPCs I very briefly played the space ship part last week just to see how the game feels on controller and ran into a weird exchange between Lae-zel an Shadowheart..I happened to be controlling Lae-zel at the time. I made a post about it and the answer seemed to be - dont talk to NPCs if you are controlling an NPC. Always do conversations with your main. What this told me was don't overthink the responses some characters give. Just go with what happens.

One of you will create the playthrough and the other person can join your game via the multiplayer option. I usually just filter the list by friends. When your friend joins, they will make a new character that will pop into the world at the same time or just join up if you create your character first and load in.

Your party cap is still 4 so you can bring two companions with you. You can each control one or have one person control both.

Just remember that the game is still the same so if one of goes off alone and gets into a fight or dies, the other is going to have to come help out.

Whoever started the campaign controls the saves from my experience so keep that in mind for scum saving or just regular saves.

You ever just have a specific question and someone on reddit asked the exact same thing 2 months ago?? That just happend. Thanks dude! Me and my husband both have our own tv/ps5 and are trying to play together. Happy trails!

1 month later and it's happened again. Me and my wife just started a couch co-op playthrough tonight on Xbox and I'm looking for tips. Somehow my wife (player 2) had control of our other two party members and main thing I was looking for was why that was and how to change it.