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

But why do you have to play safe? Take risks, learn what works and what doesn't. Is it so important to be able to beat the game completely on your first try? If you have to lower the difficulty on the first couple of playthroughs in order to get your head around all the different ways of approaching encounters then what is wrong with that?

Take chess for example. A relatively simple game in comparison yet for hundreds of years people have and continue to learn and approach it in new ways. The better a game is, the more rewarding it is to put the effort in to learn how to beat it.

Uh, that is absolutely false. BG 1 and BG 2 were designed with 6 players in mind. My very first playthrough (back when I didn't even know what D&D was, much less the actual mechanics of THAC0, etc) I never even had a Rogue except at the beginning of BG 2. Multiple playthroughs with no magic support.

Can you do it on the absolute hardest setting? Yes, you can. You can solo the entire BG series as a Monk if you want.

The ultimate argument is that a party limit of 6 gives everyone what they want, while a limit of 4 only gives some people what they want. As far as my opinion goes, the option that gives everyone what they want is the better option, even if it requires some additional balancing like more exp for the party of 4 because there are less players to split the EXP.

Yeah you can see it that way, but I naturally bought BG3, because it is Baldur's Gate and not because it's gameplay is derived from Divinity, which I have not played a game of since 2010 or so. And I might do Larian injustice here, but apart from being set in Fâerun, which I have to believe it is, yet I am not sure, there is nothing reminding me of the other games including SoD and the 3rd person action game.

The argument would be balance. A game balanced for 6 is different than balanced for 4. Saying you want 4 doesn't equal saying you want a higher challenge. Especially when you end up at the same level at the end of the game due to level cap.


For why people prefer 4 the arguements can be found on several pages around here.


Personally I don't mind either way as long as I'm not forced to use 'optimized' characters and parties. I do prefer bigger parties to get more of the party banter/story (yeah, I don't have the time to play a game a dozen times just to get to know the companions). But when it comes to gameplay I don't think 4-6 has a magic number as long as the game is well balanced.

I've already learned the DoS system for parties, and 6 characters is still what I want.

You're using the wrong example. 6 player parties is chess, 4 player parties is checkers. Each have their own benefits, but all else being equal, I'd rather play Chess than Checkers because Chess has more variety. So people that want 6 player parties get to have more variety, while those that want smaller parties *can still have those smaller parties*. In a 4 player party, those that want more variety to to try out suboptimal builds are prevented from doing so.

And balancing a game for 3 players is different than 4. Same for 2, or even solo playthroughs. What's your point? That Larian isn't capable of balancing a game for 6 players? Or that if they balance it for 6 then you won't be able to beat the game with a party of 4?

That. Yes, you could probably challenge yourself and play with smaller parties - not arguing that - but maybe people just want the regular challenge, without the hustle of managing a bigger party and still play the way the game was ment to be? I guess you also wouldn't want it to be balanced towards smaller parties just to get the feeling that playing with a full one you are cheating the game, or am I wrong?


In any case, to me party size isn't as important as giving the player the option to make the party itself flexible in its class compositon. So 4 or 6 I personally don't care, just pointing on arguements that people made. BG3 to me doesn't feel like I need any specific class, rather that any combination works.

Here to disagree. Rebalancing is a non-issue, not all encounters will even need rebalancing. Once we add Barabrian, Monk, Bard, Paladin, Sorcerer... 4 characters is not going to feel like a party, it barely does now.

I think a nice compromise is 5, thats generally the sweet spot for pencil and paper groups. I would rather them rebalance around the player taking 5 actions every round in combat than 4. This is not divinity, most turns you have one action you get to do (some subclasses are built around the bonus action too), the broken bonus actions that they added are not a solution.Rogue cunning action is basically just Expeditious retreat now. Shieldmaster feat is milquetoast without the bonus action shove mixed in. Dont get me wrong, its incredibly strong giving Warlocks bonus/disengage.... letting warriors peel with shove.... endless midcombat hiding with all classes. But these things water down classes and feats that they are stealing from and all to make the action economy work for 4 players. Just give us 5 and fix these things. If you are going to steal an effect from a class to improve the "video game feels" of this, do it with classes and subclasses that will not be added to the game. Cunning action is directly from the rogue and it was given to every character with the exception of the dash effect. Now every character is multiclassed as rogue for the benefits that many 5e players tended to put 2 points into rogue class just for cunning action.

+1

Agreed.

This is probably controversial. But in my opinion there should be a start were you get 4 custom characters and are able to save only one companion from the ship who you then find during the 1st Act.

Then we can avoid this class restriction nonsense and focus on one particular characters story (or two if you select a story character to play as).

hard to say better. when all classes and companions will be in the game "adept of 4 ppl party" will understant about what restrictions we are talking.
btw i think 5ppl is ideal number too. not a big fun of 6ppl solution

Could you imagine the AI pathfinding with more characters?!


Kidding aside, i do like 4. I'd probably be okay with 5 too, but it starts to become a hassle to micro manage more characters in some other crpg games.

I was trying to avoid a direct comparison between this game and chess because obviously there is a whole world of difference - so that analogy falls down.

My point was more to say that the overall popularity and longevity of a game comes from (in part) requiring a bit of effort and experimentation with new and unfamiliar approaches, the reward you get for learning a new way to be victorious is tenfold in comparison with having all the solutions presented to you.

In the context of BG3, people are saying that with 4 characters they will be restricted to running certain classes, and therefore will be unable to experiment with party makeup. My answer is that they *are* able to experiment, they just might have to work a little harder to find the solution. For me, an encounter feels a lot more satisfying if I have to "solve" it rather than just blast my way through on the way to the next.

This is all just my opinion of course, so don't feel like I'm trying to correct anybody, just add my thoughts into the discussion.

I have to disagree with you here because as it is I am absolutely forced to keep a tank and healer in my party (I built my Ranger in such a way that she can handle locks so a rogue isn't as essential, but not everyone will want to build their characters like that). I am barely pulling through a lot of combat's as is, without even one of them this game would be too difficult for me to get far in at all.





Because most people don't like throwing themselves at encounters and dying over and over? Not every gamer enjoys being constantly pushed to the limit in every encounter and frankly most encounters shouldn't push the player to their limits, some should be bracing challenges that require thinking but with adequate experience aren't big deals. I will say though that I firmly believe in turning down the difficulty of a game if you need to.

Yes we are all different and certainly many people don't enjoy the challenge if it forces us out of our comfort zone. Yes being pushed to your limits may be frustrating at first as there is a lot to learn and approaching combat in the traditional "safe" way (i.e. with tank & healer) may not be the ideal approach in every situation. Perhaps if they were to implement a comprehensive tutorial, maybe even separate from the main game itself (something like the Black Pits, but with hints etc) that would give people the chance to learn the system without impacting on their playthrough?

Still just my own opinion but I feel we have a potential masterpiece of a game here, and it might not always be wise to choose "tried & tested" over "new & innovative".

I’m not saying that playing 6 characters is slower than playing with 4 in the same encounter. I’m saying that rebalancing the game for a default party of 6 would slow down all the encounters. To balance each fight against 50% more characters means either 50% more enemies, or make those enemies tougher. Either way should make the fights longer.



OK, so are you saying that they keep the current balance and make everyone not able to reach as high a level as they can currently if they have a full team? That might be doable, but I’m not so sure it would be universally popular. Early fights would very be easy, and level progression slow. That would need to be handled very carefully.



Sure, and those games were designed that way from the beginning. They are also very different games, with completely different combat systems, level design, no of encounters, character movement, etc. I’m not convinced that adding more party members would be easy or necessarily better.



Yes, I know. But you are assuming that this is a simple thing that can just be easily added without affecting anything else.



I know many people don’t like that. But we don’t know what happens after act 1 and whether or not that makes sense.



Except if the game is designed to have 4 characters of equal importance who can either be human or NPC companion, then those 2 extra NPCs might make a big difference to the story, especially if we are swapping all the companions in and out of the party at will which is what many want. At the moment, we don’t really know so we’re all guessing.

It's absolutely wrong to think that more characters in parties absolutely means more ennemies...

BG1/2 (and nearly every games...) has many encounters against 6 opponents, but also versus only 1 or 2...
The number of opponent is not what define the difficulty

And it's absolutely not necessary to rebalance everything because you add 1 more companion...
Every combat doesn't have to be a "main event" after which you have to rest, use all your heal/spellslots or potions or even worse : rest to deal with the next one...

At least, one more companion would totally rebalance what actually don't work in the game and won't when it will be release.
(resting after each battles, very slow combats, lack of variety in parties, extreme difficulty of some combats in this "normal" game mode, help companions that fall on the battlefield everytime...)

No, I'm not. I'm saying that it's something that it's absolutely worth to aim for with a full understanding of the amount of work needed for it (starting with a revamp of controls, which as I already said it's something already direly needed regardless of party expansion, and passing for a mild UI tweaking, which is still work in progress anyway).
And people are VASTLY overestimating the difficulty of "rebalancing encounters" with modern tools, to begin with.
That's quite literally the least of the challenges ahead, both because encounter design is still a a work in progress too and because "perfect balance" in encounters is a pipe dream, anyway. There will always be ways to break and even trivialize them, which is not even a real issue since doing so it's half of the fun at times.



It doesn't really matter. Whatever they have in mind, it's most likely a forced narrative device they are deliberately making happen with the purpose of that design goal. Consequently something that they could (should) reconsider on, if they wanted to, if they decide that the goal (namely "getting rid of the extra companions in one broad sweep") was questionable to begin with and managing an expanded party beyond who you are grouping with at a given moment can be far more gratifying.



But let's be real, it's not. There will always be one main host and his partners as secondary characters like in the previous Larian titles. You can't ACTUALLY go "full competitive" against each other in these games, they always work just as far as there's some degree of cooperation between players and some agreement on who's in charge.

4 is bad more is merrier!
Please give 6 Characters like in the old BG1 and BG2 games.
More people more fun less work to be done to balance the 4 now force ´t upon us voiced companions to crater to every hubris and idea some one has.
I guess you already started to brake DnD rules by giving mages the abilities to learn healing spells because if some one goes ranger the party lacks maybe a rogue or cleric as a mage is the way to go for damage and the high int rolls.
More characters make for a more balanced and well rounded party. Less characters make it harder on the dev and players. Braking the DnD rull´s in wrong places will kill the game. 6 characters is by far less of a evile then giving mages healing spells.

Please let us create a full party of player created characters like in BG1 and BG2 for old times sake.

It’s not that rebalancing is especially hard (although it’s certainly work to do), it’s the effect of that on gameplay. I see you skipped my question about whether you are proposing rebalancing all encounters for a party of 6 and making fights bigger, or keeping the balance about the same and leveling less?



Whatever they have in mind doesn’t matter compared to your desire for bigger parties and being able to swap out characters at will? That quite a statement. Larian should make the game the way they think is best. They’ve asked for feedback and will likely change things that they agree will improve the game. But when you start saying that their design decisions just don’t matter, you are being totally unreasonable.



Cooperating doesn’t mean that one character is the leader and everyone else has to fall in line. In multiplayer, the players can organise themselves how they like (designate a leader, take votes, try to make decisions behind each other’s backs, etc), but the characters are all equal. Similarly in single player, you don’t have to play with your main making all the decisions. If you want you can role play each character separately, and make any decisions according to what whoever is talking would do.

This is actually the biggest difference between BG3 and DOS games compared to other titles. It’s not just one protagonist doing all the talking and making all the decisions with some interjections from your followers, it’s whoever is talking at that point who gets to decide.

I’m amazed that no one ever mentions multiplayer in these discussions, as I’m fairly sure it’s a big part of why they make their games like this (DOS1 also had 2 main characters who couldn’t be swapped out and it supported 2 player multiplayer. Coincidence? Probably not.