Seems you are playing armchair developer as much as anyone, by dismissing any concerns about increasing party size and saying it’s just better.
Yeah. But I'm not making shit up and I know what I'm saying.
You said earlier that’s it’s not a problem for people who prefer to play with fewer characters than standard, but also that fights balanced for 6 characters wouldn’t take longer because they could “clean up” faster.
These sound like mutually exclusive arguments to me.
No, they aren't. 6 men clean the same encounter quicker.
With the correct system in place, 4 men tend to level up more on the long run and become individually more powerful. That doesn't make the battles with six characters "slower". Not in a game where Initiative queue is mixed between allies and enemies.
If anything makes the player intervene more often on the action rather than watching long sequences of enemies doing their own things.
You people are giving gravity to a "design problem" that simply doesn't exist.
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.
If you can clean up faster with 6 characters, then playing with fewer surely puts you at a disadvantage. And that means most people will play with a full party, even if it’s more cumbersome.
You just make the total of exp gained split among the number of party members.
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.
Which is precisely what BG1 and 2 and what made viable playing the game with six party members OR playing it in solo with a single character leveling up way faster.
A lot of people played Icewind Dale with 4 custom characters rather than six just to have them level up more, for instance.
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.
As I said in the other thread about this topic (the GOOD one, with the proper arguments for it) people should not misunderstand one thing: the request of having a party of six does not come from the NEED to have them to achieve things, but from the enjoyment that comes from having more variety, more interesting tactical options and mix-ups and carrying on more companions questlines in the single player campaign.
Yes, I know. But you are assuming that this is a simple thing that can just be easily added without affecting anything else.
We also don’t know how this will affect the story once we commit to our party.
We know that Larian's current plan is to force the players to COMMIT to their selection of three party members and get rid of the others after act 1, like they did with DOS 2.
Many, myself included, think that is a terrible mistake and they should revise it, but even if it was a final decision it would make for an even stronger argument in favor of carrying more companions with you.
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.
BG3 is not a story about 1 protagonist and a group of followers. It’s a story about up to 4 protagonists, because it’s a game for up to 4 players.
And absolutely nothing is preventing these four players from doing what they were doing anyway. Maybe even having two additional NPCs to carry around, if they want.
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.
