Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Four is a party. Six is the crowd.

This isn't the case for me. I love D&D and the OS games individually. Played lots of both on the scale of thousands of hours for D&D with groups of 2 up to 10 people and hundreds of hours for OS. I legitimately think it's a superior way to play D&D type games. The concerns over "playing safe" vs. "trying out novelty builds" are true in CRPGs and TT because of how the rules are structured. Plus, you can take on larger risks with a larger party so you can have more grandiose events. Match that with act 1 which is definitely reaching for scale in terms of enemies and that I don't want to have to just stick to the classics in terms of party comp and build. Interesting choices need some buffer to make suboptimal ones. You exhaust the psychological safety of doing that when the rules punish you harshly for losing a single ally.

OOPS i def missed that =)

There's no demand. We are in the sub-forum "suggestions & feedback", and it's an early access game, so we suggest and give our feedback. Ultimately they'll decide for each suggestion, whether or not it's interesting to change / add / remove features.

There is a lot of experienced table-top and CRPGs people here, and indeed I've read interesting arguments either way in this thread. Larian had chosen parties of 4 in D:OS and sure, it worked, but this is a completely different ruleset and it would be foolish to think that they know better than everyone else. That's why they made a place for suggestions.


In any case, it would be interesting to hear Larian's thoughts on this, as they have certainly discussed the topic.

Seriously? You really think Larian would release the game as EA and ask players for feedback and opinions if their mindset was "our way or the highway"?

The difference, as I already pointed, is that I actually know what I'm talking about, so I'm not making absurd claims like "the entire game should be redesigned to adjust for 6 slots".
No, it shouldn't.
It should be adjusted in balance and UI, sure. Which is hardly a big fuss when both are currently works in progress, anyway.




It's almost like we actually played several of them across the years and we know what we like the most. After 30 years playing a genre you tend to learn what works and what doesn't.

I mean, I called out Larian on the random loot being shit in DOS 1 and the need to change it for the sequel. They didn't because they liked their idea of having randomized itemization.
Guess what? Loot turned out to be one of the shittiest aspects of a potential modern classic like DOS2. One that almost single-handedly ruined the sense of progression and discovery across the entire game and declassed it by one tier. Even worse than I predicted, in practice, because the scaling was also crazy.
BG3 in an incomplete alpha build has already a better itemization than Original Sin ever did. Let's hope it will improve across the game rather than getting worse like it did in DOS 2.

D&D is a far less chaotic/erratic system than the one used in Divinity (where EVERY class had crazy mobility and could use multiple abilities per turn, so I somewhat defended their choice to stick to 4 men parties then) and what's more important six-men party in this system have been broadly tested in practical scenarios for years. They even have systems in place to quickly adjust the difficulty of an encounter based on the party facing it, if you want the quick and cheap solution to an imaginary problem.

Besides, "Larian know what they are doing" is a occasionally questionable in itself. It's not the first time they insist to introduce a subsystem that just doesn't work and they stick to it no matter what, just to admit "Oh boy, that was bad" in hindsight (i.e. the armor system in DOS is the last blatant example of this).
Also, as mentioned just one post above, their itemization and progression systems in DOS 2 were among the WORST I've ever played in the genre.
Note that I say this as someone who still has a lot of admiration for DOS 1 and 2 overall.

I'm not sure there is much to add to what had already been discussed in this other thread Tuco mentioned. We seem to turn into circles, with new people who haven't read the post history repeating the same arguments over and over again

I agree. I dont want more than 4 party members, and absolutely not 6. way too much to keep track of, especially with backstories and everything. No thanks. Id rather have a party of 4 where i have to pick and chose which classes i want in there, and knowing i will be missing out on something.

Provides more replay value as well.

Just up lvl cap imo.

Well, that's basically ordinary day's life on any forum, isn't it?

Looking back at BG and other D&D games that had 6 in the party I actually felt always presed to have 1 mage, 1 thief and 1 cleric - which are ironically the 3 classes I'm least interested in. Why did I felt pressed to have them? Because the developer knew I have the space for them and knew that to feel special each class had to shine in its element forcing me to min-max.

So far with BG3 I didn't have this feeling. My ranger can open locks and disarm traps. With a paladin or a bard in the party they could probably heal enough to help worst cases, while actually the party would be deadly enough to not care - or there is at least a druid to replace the cleric. Bard or warlock could also be there to replace the wizard or I could go with a eldrich knight? In any case Larian can't expect a party of 4 to cover all bases so they have to give you more options to handle each situation - and that's what I've seen so far. To me the argument that 4 means tank, healer, dps and mage completely min-maxed isn't necessarily true for a game and I see it not being the case for BG3.

Still I have not played through the entire EA so I don't know if the Act I has the same (horrible) ending that DOS2 had which forced you to commit to a single party - that's something I'm completely against. I hated it in DOS2 and definitely don't want to see these kinds of artifical story based party reductions.

Besides that, I don't mind if the party size is increased, though I think it would just end up the same way BG1-2 and Icewind Dale ended up - basic 1 melee, wizard, thief and cleric + whoever you actually really like.

So an excellent degree of variety while still having room to experiment with something more exotic?
And that's a bad thing... because?

Also, BG2 had almost 20 different companions (I think they were 18 with Sarevok in ToB), which is why I find the argument "Just three slots for companions leave me room for trying new things the next playthrough!".
Way to set the bar low for yourself, Jesus Christ.

Just adding my thoughts that I agree with 4 is a good number. Happy with this.

I actually explained it, but you seem to have your opinion that you keep telling everyone who disagrees. I'm not starting an arguement here, I offered just a different perspective that you don't care about - fine by me.

i vote for 5-6 DLC if you have to but put it IN!...

No, you didn't. You said you would feel more forced to make this kind of choice if you had more room in your party (which is a dubious and fairly counter-intuitive claim in itself since usually the less room you have, the least you are left free to experiment with classes, but I didn't argue about it).
You never said WHy and in what way that would be bad, given that, as you pointed out yourself, you'd still have two slots to experiment with "whatever you like" (which reason suggests you wouldn't, with stricter party restrictions).



By the way yes, I'm opinionated about these things.
For some of you this may be just about making a poorly argued throw-away comment "I prefer four because six super slow", based on guts feeling more than facts, about a game you will mildly care about for two weeks and then throw to the pile of old stuff.
For someone like me the genre is a lifelong passion, and good titles in it are stuff I plan to go back even dozen times, if the depth is there.

@Tuco has nailed it. We need a 6 person party. And not as a mod.

With healer, tank, lockpicker, wizard you are out your ability to play the character you want to play. If I want to play an archer I need a tank -- that means I need to deal without a lockpicker or wizard. Warlocks only make sense as a fifth wheel -- they don't really replace fighters and they don't replace wizards. Same goes for bards, etc.

This is BG3 and not BG: ______ BG2 is the standard and the standard is 6 person party and 18 NPCs.

Point is plenty of people learned new system just fine,in DOS game. But this is Baldurs Gate, DOS players should not have a problem to learn a new system right ?

That the thing, isn't it... we see a whole lot of "get with the modern times, old fans" from DOS enthusiasts around here, but not so much willingness from those same people to maybe adapt to something new themselves. Very astute observation there.

I did. Games designed for parties of 6 tend to expect you to have specific roles in your party because everybody can 'fit them in' and it starts to become somewhat mandatory to emphasize the difference between roles by making them necessary to be affective. If the game designers can't be sure about it because the party size is smaller and they still want to allow for diversity they have to account for that by allowing different playstyles that support un-optimized parties.

Having a party where 3 companions - no matter their class - will work gives you more freedom than parties where you can experiment with just 2 out of 6 party memebers (except if you expect games to give you 19 different companions, like you mentioned BG2 + expension - but usually you will find rather far less, even more when they are voiced and have deeper story lines).

Again, like I wrote before, BG3 seems to take this into considerations. Other games might fail at it. For me BG never worked properly without wizards to break magic defenses or clerics to use divination spells to help with specific attacks. Dragon Age Origins on the other hand I've finished on the highest difficulty without problems even with characters and parties that where far from optimized. Pillars of Eternity 2 also worked for me perfectly fine without designated mage or healer, same when I included them.

Also saying you can play with less than 6 - well lets be real, those games that are balanced towards 6 tend to be harder with smaller parties forcing you to min-max even on lower difficulties. One could argue - as Larian did - that you can mod a 4 player party to 6 - but I absolutely agree that that isn't the same as it causes balacing issues as well... (and technical problems often)...



For the last part... Sorry, but you are not the only one who has been playing these games for more than 2 decades. I would guess many people around here can claim the same. Some might actually be passionate enough about games that they actually might even work in the industry... so assuming someone's opinion or passion to be superior to others might be a bit aloof... just saying as it really doesn't help the conversation at all...



To be perfectly clear - I'm not even arguing against the bigger party size. I'm indifferent about it as long as the solution they go with is properly implemented. I just don't think there is the one correct answer - its game design and that's about personal preferences and just reading here I see solid arguments from both sides (even if I don't agree with all of them).

Sticking with 4 character party makes it that much harder to argue against people that say this is DoS 3 and not BG 3.

Also, it seems like a prominent argument is that we will have more companions at full release, so a bigger party is better. Agreed with that.

BUT ALSO

Planning for full classes to be released, in addition to all of their subclasses, means the game will have tons of options. Presumably we'll also get 'mercenary' characters aka multiple Player Characters you can specifically design (you know, like in BG 1 and 2). Bigger party = more ability to try new things out, rather than being constricted to just 4.

Here's the thing I don't understand:

For people that only want 4....why do you care if there's the possibility of having 6? Literally nothing stopping you from just doing a party of 4. Hell one of the most popular challenges in BG 2 is the solo playthrough. So if the limit is 6, that pleases a lot of people that want the more traditional Baldur's Gate/D&D experience. But it also lets people who want the limit to be 4 to also have a party of 4. It's literally the best of both worlds, while a limit of 4 means the bigger party people can never have what they want.