Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Party size and PC vs Companion composition

Well as people have already pointed out, the big reason Larian would go with four is their huge emphasis on co-op/MP play. But I personally very strongly prefer six, and believe it is possible at least on this issue to satisfy a wide range of preferences. They could make party size of four as the default for the game, and lock that in for MP, but allow players to have a party of upto six when playing SP with the understanding that the game may be unbalanced with anything over four. After all, people do like playing with party size of one as well, and that too makes for an unbalanced game, so why not allow players to go in the other direction as well and have a party size bigger than the default?

Due to tradition in DoS larian games, Coop-MP, and because most D&D 5 campaigns are about 4 to 5 players (and they said that they are based in tabletop) I think they are going to settle around a party of 4-5.
But I also think that sooner rather than later will appear a mod to make a party of six anyway, like in the previous games of Larian. They should spare us the wait and make an option to have a bigger party =P

Yes exactly. Why wait on a mod to give it to us and instead gain some measure of appreciation and goodwill from fans of the old BG games by just giving us a togglable option to raise party size upto six just for single-player? It really won't even cost them anything because as I said they could provide a disclaimer saying the game is optimized for four so increasing party size can unbalance the player's game experience, then leave it upto us to decide whether that is worth it for us.

I agree with this.

Also, can I have your Ring.

Need it.

Makes sense... this is DoS 3 now, I guess.

lol

They already stated that they are going to use use Larian´s Divinity engine 4.0 (DoS2 EE was 3.5)
https://fextralife.com/baldurs-gate-3-interview-with-larian-and-wizards-of-the-coast/

Another one who has no idea what a game engine is. No, the game engine has nothing to do with the number of party members that you can recruit. This a something you can put in every single engine on this planet with a few simple lines of script.

I am not an expert, but a good game engine takes care of resource management (images, sound, data files), rendering on a stable framerate, etc amongst other things, but has limitations. Unity, for example, is famous for its limitations if you are going for a larger game area or high Unit count games, due to several problems and because it´s closed source (it's a 32 bit floating point precision limits it's physics to a 10 km cubed space, so no big epic space battles.It's game objects that do not self pool, so you need to drag out the pool manager, pool-able component scripts for anything with object turnover rates. Even though it has an aging stuttery garbage collection system.The fact that the API still does not do multi-threading, even though it uses a modular component based scripting system and internally runs a multi-threaded jobs core.The vectors, transforms and quaternions that do not have a batch based SIMD powered or multi-threaded API.The lack of instancing even though it's been a common feature of DirectX and OpenGL since 2009.The lack of Mantle, DirectX 12 and Vulkan support being addressed but was not even on the Roadmap)


But I hope you are right, they can manage it with a "few lines of script" and we can have 6 party members.

Ultimately I think this is the real issue. It's not about whether party size of 4 or 6 is what is appropriate for a game called BG3, or even a decision based on limitations of the game system or technology. Rather, this, and all other choices (ex. the combat system, misses in combat "not fun," etc.) are being made purely on the basis of one criterion: what is best for co-op/multiplayer? That seems to be the definitive driver of all the game design choices Larian is making. And *that* is absolutely a dealbreaker for me.

The game needs to have been designed and built from the ground up to maximize the single-player gaming experience first and foremost, and so what is ideal for the SP game is what ought to have driven game design choices. If this is not the case, then definitely it is not a game for me. And labeling and marketing a game that was not built this way as an SP game would be blatant false advertising. All of the IE games had MP, but it was very clear from all the marketing for those games, everything that the devs said about the games before they were released. and from even a short amount of time spent playing the games that those games were designed as SP games first and foremost and that all design choices were made with SP in mind.

I think there are more diplomatic ways of phrasing things. I think the point is that some game engines are better optimised for that type of thing than others, though of course the precise definition of "game engine" is a moving target. See also the Chambers Dictionary's definition of "middle aged": "variously reckoned to suit the reckoner."

You will more likely find that "designed and built from the ground up" for a DnD experience not "single-player" although there is plenty of subjectivity and nuance in the term. Dos2 was imo as both playable enjoyable in SP and MP