I want to know why this game needs Steam or Galaxy to play MP at all. It's that or LAN. Are we sure this game isn't from 1999, not 2019? Why can't I host my own, private game for friends to join at my IP? I don't care about Galaxy.

Yes, generally, people play together who are running the same client version...;) Wouldn't make much sense, otherwise, imo.

Where do you think multiplayer games are hosted?...;) A multiplayer game *must* be hosted somewhere on the Internet or else it does not exist anywhere that players can join a game...;) Your IP address has nothing to do with whether or not you are running a server that is running the game-hosting software and that is connected to the Internet so that your sever can host a multiplayer game! I'm really amazed at how much I see this nonsense..;) One guy I recall was telling people in a post that GOG was "lying" about DRM because of the "fine print" he saw telling people that for multiplayer games they had to have an Internet connection! Wow--blew my mind, it did...;) Yes, multiplayer games require that a *server* be set up for that purpose somewhere on the Internet where players can then access the server hosting the game environment! GOG now offers its own Mulitplayer environment, just as Steam has operated its multiplayer environment for years.

Multiplayer does not happen otherwise. Your IP address is wholly insufficient for anything aside from sending and receiving email and nailing down your location on the web--it identifies you by that address, just as your street address identifies your physical address in the 3d world.

Now, you can play through a LAN, but your friends need to be physically connected to that LAN in order to play.

What are you talking about? You only need your friends IP address to direct connect to join their hosted game, no 3rd party needs to be involved.

Yeah, totally technically possible to have one of the computers act as server and host the game.

It's more that many developer don't want to support such a system anymore. Probably because information is money. Or too hard to implement. (I mean we are talking about developers that claim it's impossible to have the map state of the game being saved due to bad coding structure.)

Also forgot to mention, back in the day (around mid 90's) Me and a friend would direct connect by dialing up each others modems to play Doom and Quake. No internet needed.

I also have the same problem. I have gog version and can play with one friend that also has gog version but I can't play with another friend with steam version (we can see each other's servers but we are unable to join). He can play with other people with steam version so I don't think it's an issue related to firewall or router because we are able to play with people with the same version as ours. We have the same game version number with all expansions. We even tried to use hamachi to connect via vlan (changed network adapter in game network settings) but it also didn't work. We wasted 2,5h so far on trying to play together and I'm done for today, this is really bad.

See if anything here helps

https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/grim-dawn-common-issues-and-solutions/81943/3

If not then please report it as a bug in the Bug Report section of the forum.

https://forums.crateentertainment.com/c/grimdawn/bug-reporting

and it says port forwarding is 1 of the most dangerous stuff you can do... any hacker going into that can rip your info to hell... so becarfull going to that site and do port forwarding... its really really thin lined..

Eh. That's a bit of an over-reaction. Port-forwarding is common enough and nowhere near as "dangerous" as you're trying to portray.

https://portforward.com/is-portforward-safe/ https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/84317/is-port-forwarding-inherently-unsafe

I have the same problem. When do they fix this? I bought the game for nothing now. Tried every single solution from the devs, nothing is working.

Then please report it on the forum using the link given above. The devs can't fix it if they don't have info on what's wrong. Give as much info as possible on what you've tried so far.