The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

Recently I mentioned that Diablo 3 was announced and this inspired me to pick up Diablo 2 to re-live the experience.  As I noted in my previous post on that topic, things didn’t turn out like i’d hoped and the graphics pained me more than I remembered their pixellated glory doing so.

So, I ordered Dungeon Siege 2 Deluxe edition (includes the expansion) from a reseller on Amazon.com for $15 including the shipping and handling.  The game arrived promptly and since both myself and my younger brother had ordered it, we wanted to play some online multi-player.  This is where our saga begins.

Dungeon Siege 2 has multi-player in the form of Local Area Network, Anonymous Internet, and Gamespy Internet.  We started off trying to do just the regular internet connection, which utilizes Gamespy to handle the chat and the lobby rooms where you host and join games.  We were able to get one hosted fairly easily and my brother could join it - but we could not see each other for the ping connectivity (it just showed as red all the time) so I was pretty sure our first attempts would be doomed - and they were.  The dreaded error message of “could not make a direct connection to host” kept coming up repeatedly until I wanted to throw my keyboard through my monitor and embed it in the wall behind it.  It wouldn’t help my multi-player woes any, but darnit it would make me feel better!

Next, I added some port forwarding for Gamespy to my router’s firewall rules as well as some other forwards that Dungeon Siege 2 needs (UDP 2300-2400 for example).  After this I was able to host and see the ping but we still got the silly error message.

At this point my younger brother’s computer decided that it would quit reading his CDs and so he couldn’t pass the CD check.  I’m still not sure if this is a copy protection issue, a failed DVD drive, or just the fact that he has the Windows Vista operating system installed.  This is at the 5 hours-into-our-saga point on Thursday night, so he decides to go buy an external DVD drive from Wal-Mart.  Fast forward an hour and he’s back, having procured an $80 device that now lets him pass the cd-checks.

During the time period in which his DVD drive was not working, we had decided to utilize no-cd tools so that he could still try to play. Dungeon Siege 2 does a rudimentary CRC check to verify that both players have the same .exe file though, so this required me to no-cd my own copy as well.  This is the crucial point that messed us up I think which i’ll get back to later.

Once he has his DVD drive in hand we continue to try various things with no luck and then decide to try using Hamachi to make a VPN and then use the LAN connection.  Turns out Dungeon Siege 2 has this silly little problem where it tries to read the first LAN connection and ignores all the other ones, and they also seem to have done something to make it hate Hamachi.  Either way we tried numerous work-arounds, none of which worked to get the LAN idea going.  Usually with Hamachi this idea is a breeze to do, but in this case Gas Powered Games had set us up for failure.

The next day we decided to try having my brother use his cell-phone Sprint internet connection instead of the cable modem so that he would be out from behind a firewall completely.  At the same time we put my computer in the DMZ so that I would be behind my firewall as well.  After doing this we had no success but then I checked my copy of Dungeon Siege 2 on my machine and realized I had inadvertently left the no-cd fix installed (remember when I mentioned earlier this was key?).  Since the exe’s were different, it was not letting us actually join the game the other person was hosting!

Once I fixed my exe back to the one from the CD (which I had a backup of!) the hosting worked fine!  We then put my brother back on his cable modem and me hosting still worked fine.  After that I removed the DMZ host from my connection and just left the port forwards and the hosting worked great.  We were able to get a 6 hour game in on Friday night which was fabulously fun.

I’m not sure that it was “8-hours wasted getting this crap to work” fun, but it definitely was a lot more playable than going back to Diablo 2’s graphics.  So far the story seems to be pretty good, there are lots of hidden areas to find and the game play is pretty nice as well.  Hopefully we’ll be able to get into it some more this week, i’ll update on my thoughts of the game once I finish it as well.

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