Greetings all. I was reading through the EA FAQ again and I noticed the last question from Jess from Larian.
Is your party permanent or can you change members out throughout the adventure?
Recruited companions will be at camp when not in the adventuring party, and can be swapped in and out at camp. After the first act however you are going to have to commit, also just like in real life.
I'm not sure how everyone else feels about this or even noticed it. Things move at a breakneck speed in these forums. I'm not sure I like this. At all. Now this is all baseless speculation at this point, so I don't want to be overly negative.
In DoS2, whichever 2 Origin members you didn't select to join your party became entirely unusable after a certain point. For the story of that game, it works. You're working with a very small party and each member is trying to attain godhood for their own particular reasons. It's a "shared" goal, but there can only be one. So it makes sense you might have to kill some people along the way (if that's how you play your version of the story out)
In BGIII, everyone is working towards the same goal. Get that tadpole out of your heads. They also have their own goals and motivations. But in BGI/II it was very much the same. Even though there was no camp per se, you could release a party member at any particular point and recruit someone else to see their story. A play through could be as long or as short as you wanted, depending on how many companions stories you got involved with.
Based on the wording from Larian, it leads me to believe that anyone who isn't with you at the end of Act 1 is going to die or otherwise become unavailable. We're then "forced" to complete the rest of the game with one party. Who knows. Maybe at the end of Act 1, you get some kind of delay for the tadpole removal in the Towers. Any members not with you will turn into Illithid. Yes, that's a very big assumption on my end. It's just a guess.
It also leads me to believe that there will not be all that many companions (if any) after Act 1. In BGI/II you met people everywhere. Meeting everyone in the same Act seems a bit too convenient.
If that happens, our ability to diversify our party based on needs will go out the window. Paired with the fact there are only 4 party members. I'm not saying you need 6, but 5 would be a nice happy median. You have that extra utility slot. But this post isn't about that. My concern is that it will get very stale dealing with the same party for another 60-80 hours, versus being able to keep things fresh with adding and removing party members at will.
For all I know though, this will fit in with the story they are weaving. I could also be entirely off base though. I just figured it would be worth bringing up. At the end of the day this is their game they are crafting and not ours and I 100% respect that, but some of that BG feel goes out the window if we have a set party locked. You can't please everyone. I'm happy either way in knowing I'll more than likely be getting a great game.