WARNING! Use the "GIVE" with EXTREME care!

[The_Presence]

So I just found out that once you "give" an item to your fellowship mates then it's gone forever. Yup...that was a good decision right there. I just lost my best sword because of that. I would really like to know how this feature got passed by the QA people as I refuse to acknowledge this is was some deliberate.

I really hope Snowblind are going to fix this.

again, only use the give option in case you know you do not want the item as you will lose it forever.

I am not upset that they made it this way but I am upset that they didn't let you know prior to using that feature.

[Arctorus]

I still think the dark/light color of the character names indicates whether or not they'll use the item as an upgrade. Try to give them some crappy weapon they can use. You'll notice their name appears in dark gray. Try to give them a nice weapon they can use, and their names appear bright white.

I think this system is in play because if it were explicit in multiplayer co-op whether or not an item was an upgrade or not, the giving would just STOP. I like the idea that players will actively seek to move appropriate loot to the appropriate character regardless of whether or not its a true upgrade. If I saw a display every time I wanted to give an item in multiplayer that showed it wasn't an upgrade (the red arrows, for instance), I'd likely just keep it and vendor it for silver. That's not very cooperative, is it? Shift it to just a subtle brightness change, and it becomes far less black/white.

The lack of control over the other characters also ensures that other players are not hoarding good items from an online session for their characters in offline play.

I think Snowblind struck a nice balance and also found a way to enforce a sense of good will among randomly assembled online players.

[Kreigar]

I think they gimped the single player incredibly. It would have been one thing if they came right out and explained to you that the AI characters inventory and skills are completely out of your control, but they don't.

That might be nice for coop, but in single player, having to equip six full characters (each class AI and each class for yourself) was a terrible design decision. They could have very easily made the weapons you give an AI character remain on that character when you took control of them (they even said that was possible in one of their video walkthroughs), but they chose to make the AI a black hole when you give them items.

I agree that this needs to be fixed. I also think they should explain to us how the AI handles it's inventory and how it gets new stuff. Do they acquire new items over time via mysterious means? Just tell us how the thing works for crying out loud.

[TheMute88ORL]

Im not happy that this is a suprise to everyone BUT I think some of the value to games like this is really the hard way of finding out how everything works.

I tried what Actorus said last and you can watch them change their equipment. And yes I also think its balanced.

[simpatikool]

I think the current mechanism encourages you to give out equipment.

[fergy007]

If you really want a piece back that you accidentally gave a way, switch to the player you gave it to, and you can get it back

[Passive Chicken]

I don't believe you can do that, fergy, since there is both an NPC and a player controlled version of every character, making it so that you manage a six-person party. If you have your ranger equipped with the best equipment and you decide you want to switch to him, when you do so he will have his starting equipment and no skills, otherwise things such as this would not be a problem. Unless Snowblind released a patch to fix this that I don't know about. Did they?

[Wilhelm]

No, that's how I think most people assumed it would work, because that's similar to how it worked in Dragon Age: Origins. The approach to take is that you are one character, and you do not control your team mates...ever. No matter which character you play as, you are never in control of your team mates. So any gear you aquire, is always yours. The only time you should ever "give" any gear away is to another player.

I'm pretty sure the NPC's use randomly generated gear and weapons. Each time I switch characters they wear something else.

[Willrett]

playing single player i was giving items to the other npc's i happened to load one of them to check it out and all the weapons are gone and all the states need set. This needs fixed.

[philp]

Hopefully all the bugs are fixed by the time it comes to the UK