Gonna give this a few days before I refund it, this is out of order, there's no communication, no support or anything.

No. GoG policy on refunds for early access is 30 days. It's been three years since EA started.

the direct connect fails if 2 GOG users try to join is literally a GOG issue because i can host a direct connect with another friend that has the game on steam and i can join his game but i cant join a direct connect session with my friend that has it also on gog and i cant host it for him either

I've played a 3 player lobby with 2 gog and 1 steam users hosted by the other gog user and had no issue and also a 4 player lobby of 2 gog and 2 steam hosted by a steam player both worked fine, other then the usernames of connected users messing up

Played the game exclusively with a friend, both of us Galaxy users, no issues with direct connect, but the Galaxy-native invite system is fucked.

this is really weird i and one more user and the guy that write this thread here has the same problem as me and ive seen a lot of threads on reddit forums and another one in this forum about that problem of the NAT punch error when using direct connect

Does anyone know if this issue with not finding any games "no lobbies found" could be a portforward issue..?

the network .log-file in game directory\bin mentions something about in the second last line;

- "Binding socket to port 23243"

then last line

- "IO Failure while trying to get Galaxy lobby list"

one other line that sticks out:

- "Discovery finished... no usable UPnP enabled routers found"

checker portforward.com and it mentions only the steam version of BG3, to open ports;

TCP: 27015,27036
UDP: 27015,27031-27036

but also, when Google:ing "port 23243" i find some threds mentioning issues for Another Larian game "Divinity Original Sin 2"....

hmmm... I'm no hacker nor programmer, but just thinking out loud here....

I don't believe it is a port forwarding issue. Even if you follow their instructions here (https://larian.com/support/faqs/multiplayer-issues_84) and forward 'ports 23253-23262 and 23243-23252', it doesn't work. When you look in the network log files, there are IP addresses that point the AWS.

While I'm guessing here, i believe there is something wrong with their backend, which must be using AWS as an intermediary. This handshake between GOG versions of BG3 and AWS is broken and that is what is stopping lobby lists and direct connections from working properly. If this is the case, there is nothing that can be done client side and we must wait for Larian and/or GOG to fix it.

This issue wasted two days of my time, so i ended up buy two new copies on Steam, so my friend and i could play. The steam version of the game worked flawlessly. This is the last time i will purchase a multiplayer game from GOG.

Well, kind of feeling the same. but cannot refund at this point, since I've got the game in Early Access a long while back...

I kind of like GOG though, but I guess some trust-issues now have been grown... =/

How could such a large bug slip through, is the question?

It stung, buying it all over again. I'm assuming it slipped through because GOG must have been a small portion of the overall sales, so it's possibly a low priority issue. I'll still buy single player games from GOG, but never another multiplayer. Time is valuable and while they're doing whatever they're currently doing, my wasting the little time i have.

It didn't slip through, they knew about it, but didn't care. It won't negatively affect them, because gog doesn't have enough press coverage for issue like this to hurt their sales. In fact it can help their sales, as people will just start buying second copies on steam - which is already happening.

As for gog itself, if they had a shred of integrity, they would pull the game from the store, or at least slap a huge red banner 'multiplayer broken' on it. But they won't, of course, as they have no problem selling you a broken product.

Well, still doesn't work

Also got NatPunch(62) yesterday when trying to connect to some random I found via the Xbox-overlay

same here...

NATPunch means your firewall is set to NAT-Strict mode or UPnP is turned off on your router. You should double-check your router settings and be sure UPnP is ON/ENABLED and that NAT Strict Mode is set to OFF or DISABLED.

Should fix the issue.

Also, when trying to cross-play with Xbox overlay you need to be sure Windows 10/11 Game Mode is ENABLED. I had a problem getting BG3 to connect to a friend with Xbox overlay until I enabled game mode in settings. But you also have to do the stuff I mentioned above as well.

This will get you out of NatPunch(62), after that you hit NatPunch(66), which no amount of tinkering with router, firewall, antivirus, port forwarding, etc will fix.