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.
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.
Originally Posted by jonn
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.
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.
