Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Party Size Discussion

When you are playing in rl then 4 players can do most things as players have unlimited minds. They can do anything they can think of and if they can surprise the DM they might even live through some of them.

Computer games are severely limited in that respect. For me 6 is better in a game like this as you get more playing options, instead of just tank, heal, trap, cast (or variations there of). With 4 you feel you are leaving things out of your party.

And as they have decided to call this BG3 and are selling the game as BG3 then it should at least be similar to BG1 and 2.

Its only a pity we don't have 2nd ed rules as well as a six man party.

Pretty much.
That's precisely why "Pen & paper sessions are usually tuned for four players" is a bogus argument to bring to the table.
Because they are two very different scenarios. In tabletop sessions four persons agree on how to build up a team from scratch and they are limited only by their imaginations on the way they can interact with each other.
In a computer game you make up your party out of the limited options offered by a certain number of premade companions and their mutual interactions across the entire campaign are limited to a (more or less dynamic) handful of pre-established scenarios.

It's like arguing that in a RTS you shouldn't control more than a vehicle because in reality driving more than a car at once is almost impossible.

Why on Earth are people saying that the game would have taken years longer to develop if it had 6 party memebers? That makes no sense. How would increasing the party size from 4 to 6 require years worth of programming? Don't be silly.

4-man party size in D&D video games has always been awful because the game is designed around the assumption that a party will contain at least one of each of the four core archetypes, so when that's already a full party, it leaves very little room for party makeup variety. While you can play through the game without a rogue or warrior or whatever, it's pretty obvious that D&D isn't meant to be played that way. That works alright in tabletop where there isn't the same need for replayability, but in a game that belongs (nominally, at least) to a franchise whose entire essence is the notion of replayability for literal decades, a 4-man party size is an extremely bad design decision. This is not D:OS where every character can learn any skill.

The gameplay would be broken as it is now if there were 6 party members. Larian would have to completely remake every single aspect of the gameplay to accomodate 6 party members. Even the terrain does not accomodate more than 4 at times. All the fights would be severely broken and ridiculously easy with 6.

It is an enormous task to ask Larian to rework the game to have 6 party members.

Maybe when the game is completed, but when they are still making the game 4 party members is enough. Unless you want the game to be delayed and delayed and dealyed some more.

You're right. It doesn't.
Even the argument that it would make battles "longer and more tedious" is mostly baseless bullshit. In particular in a game where the initiative queue is mixed and if anything having more characters under your control would mean that you as a player can "inject" more often in the mid of lsequences of NPC moves.
A lot of people just love to make up this sort of stuff, for some reason.

No, it wouldn't. And no, they wouldn't, either.
Also, all this "concern trolling" about upsetting the current balance is laughable, as there's very little balance to begin with and all the encounters currently available are basically an open work in progress that will require more tuning for months to come regardless of possible party expansions.



Another made up and entirely baseless claim, that among other things ignore that managing a party of six wouldn't even be this "crazy experimental idea" but a standard countless games already road-tested for years.


No, it's not. Modders can already have a six-men party working now, and that's without even a mere fraction of the resources, manpower and access to the game's code Larian would have in its favor.
It would require a rework of the controls, on the other hand. Which it does anyway, because the current ones are the stuff nightmares are made of.

I was just watching this interview with Sven from back in September and they are aware of modders upping the party number, and he implied they would leave that to mods, saying they can offer a better experience with only 4 characters.

https://youtu.be/S5__muccL1c?t=1498

Yeah, I know what he said. It's just one of the many times I disagreed with him.
I disagreed with him about the brilliance of the chain/unchain system to control the party (see my signature for more details).
I disagreed with him on the merits of the armor system in DOS 2.
I disagreed with him about a day/night cycle being superfluous and a low priority for immersion
I disagreed with him about randomly generated loot being better than unique handìplaced items in DOS 1 and 2.

This is just going to add to that pile.
I wonder if even this time the epilogue is going to be the same: with Larian sticking to their guns and then coming back two years later saying "Boy, we were wrong and that feature surely sucked, but what's done is done".

And to be clear, no, I'm not happy nor satisfied with "leaving it to mods", because while having a theoretical limit of six can easily be scaled back and rebalanced for a smaller party or even a solo game (as, you know, the previous BG games did) the opposite is not true: a game tuned around a max of four characters is going to feel TRIVIALLY easy played with six.

Yeh I have been accompanying that thread as well, hopefully they will take all this feedback into consideration, specially with this intended companion lock on Act 2 and on, I don't know how would the system work with mods if the story is getting affected by that, even if they left the option in the system, there are limitations to what can be done. I wish I had recorded when I summoned Connor the zombie and he started playing chase with Gale and Shadowheart for a solid 3 minutes to corroborate how bad the movement is currently, on that note.

This is very encouraging.

6 is preferred, 5 is OK. 4 is too low and too constrictive for the Baldur's Gate feel and play.

As it stands now, my fears that this is DOS3 seem to be accurate.

Also, stop merging DOS mechanics with 5th ed. You're just doing yourself a disservice by saying you're going to do a 5th ed game and then just break mechanics from DnD.

Encouraging, sure. But not good, really.

Just making the game for six, heck even five, would be very encouraging and make this game great again.

As it stands this, plus the divinity arrows, divinity barrels, divinity skills on weapons, and divinity surfaces is a dealbreaker. I won't enjoy the game and am not inclined to buy it.

I wanted the advertised 5th ed experience. Not a DOS3 with DnD flavors.

Anyone can try for themselves -- I found Norbyte's Divinity engine export tool on github.

Make a new PC, get to the first autosave (don't know why it needs to be an autosave and not a regular one), close the game, load the export tool, find and load the autosave, scroll down to line 841. Change the party size value from 4 to 8. Save the autosave file and see if you prefer running a game with 4, 6 or 5 members. You will get pops telling you the save has been modified but it worked for me right up until the point of starting the "we saved the grove" party. Your mileage and all that

For me the battles were more fun and ended sooner because the larger party could take out large numbers of enemies without using barrelmancy.

Unfortunately, DOS3 is what we're getting. I think DOS was a pair of crap RPGs that catered to the lowest common denominator that thinks it's awesome that everything is weird and silly and meme-filled, and when it was announced that Larian would do BG3, I was immediately concerned that it would just be more of the same. I gave them the benefit of the doubt, but my fears came true: this game really is just Divinity 3 with different mathematics under the hood, and I don't think they intend to change that. It'll remain what we see now in EA, just with bugfixes coming up. The spirit and soul of Baldur's Gate is gone, because Larian never intended to carry that torch, they just wanted to boost the sales of their new RPG and chose to hijack a beloved franchise to accomplish it. This game has everything that was bad about DOS and little of what was great about BG.

Just look at the trash-tier writing. If this game had been a movie, it would be laughed out of the insdustry. The acting is so painfully awful and the story itself is like something written by a 14 year old who just wants to cram as much superficial epicness into it as possible with no sense whatsoever of taste or pacing. Nothing is believable, nothing is immersive, nothing is grounded in realism. It's just all a bunch of the most low-hanging fruit of RPG clichés. Every character over-acts to extreme degrees, every NPC is a hamfisted stereotype, every area feels fake and videogamey, and there's just not a grain of organic quality to the product. It's one giant pile of campy bullshit concocted by people who can't write for shit and don't have the slightest interest in respecting the legacy of the franchise they hijacked. This is to D&D RPGs what McDonald's is to the restaurant industry.

The 4-man party size is just one of countless examples of what I mean. There's no ideological reason to stick with that. There's no sensible argument for it. Reducing party size from 6 to 4 does not improve gameplay, but it's what they had in DOS so it's what we'll get in BG3. That's the sum total of what it boils down to. That's how it was in DOS and so that's how it will be in BG3, because BG3 is really DOS3. It's awful for the game, but Larian never truly meant to make the next Baldur's Gate, they simply meant to make the next Divinity and rake in some extra money from calling it Baldur's Gate 3. It's pathetic and disappointing, but it's very obvious as well, and we saw it coming a mile off. Ever since the first preview, I knew this would be the case, and they did nothing to acknowledge the complaints that were raised at the time of how this game felt nothing whatsoever like BG.

This is not a good game. The writing is garbage, the mechanics are weak, the gameplay is boring, and they haven't even lived up to their own promise of respecting the D&D rules. There's a superficial likeness to the ruleset, but they've taken so many liberties with it that one cannot conclude anything other than the fact that they didn't really give a shit about D&D. Eating food for healing? Elemental surfaces? Unlimited consequence-free rests anywhere, anytime? Half the spells and abilities are different from their D&D counterparts, and the more I scratch the surface, the more I realize that they only did just exactly enough to be able to say that the game is even based on D&D at all. There's a few things that they might chance throughout EA in this regard, but a lot of it is clearly how they want the game to be. Don't expect much more than bugfixes. What you see is what you'll get.

I see that we're of the same mind here. Reading that they WotC turned down Oblivion in favor of Larian is gutting when I get to see what Larian is doing with the BG3 name (and by extension, legacy).

Larian can still turn this ship around, I think. There IS balance in the 5th ed rules. Just copy them - it's probably not overly hard when you've reached this far in development. You don't really have to deal with different power spikes for different classes either if the game ends up at (guesswork) 12-15th max level as early spikers mellow out and early weaksauce gain significant power later on.

Larian should really start to consider the possibility of a PR disaster from deviating this far from 5th ed rules and general Baldur's Gateness. I know there are many DnD-lovers out who are just assuming it's gonna be totally 5th ed and all the Baldur's Gate goodness. Disappointing these people (who are certainly not few) could tarnish the Larian name quite well.

One of the worst things is that purchasing the EA can make Larian feel validated in their decisions to disregard all DnD stuff in favor of DOS3. However, if they had not released an EA, we would not know the potential shipwreck this could be. Double edged sword galore.

It is no longer true that you need a balanced party of certain specific roles. I think it's been untrue for a good long while in D&D. It's just something that people believe. With good tactics that play to the strengths of the party you HAVE, you can do well in D&D (and in BG3) with virtually any party composition. Some parties may have to be more cunning, may take longer, may need to use more consumables, but I don't think any party will be completely un-viable to complete the content.

Any worry about "perfect balance" is worthless in the first place because this has never been a perfectly balanced system to begin with.
Any degree of intimate knowledge of the system can help an experienced player to break encounters in countless ways, and sometime breaking things is precisely part of the fun.
So when people act as worrywarts about how a change could "compromise the current balance" in a game that is still one year away from release and incredibly far away from being finalized in most of its aspects, they deserve to be mocked for it.

Aside for any personal preference, a sudden realization just hit me a couple of hours ago while checking the "six-men mod" (which is actually more a save edit than a proper mod).

Why is Larian NOT taking advantage of the fact that this is an Early Access build, precisely to give us an option at the beginning of a new game to pick between the "standard and supported" party of 4 and an "experimental and unstable" six characters mode"?
No rebalance or tweaking of any sort required. Just that, an experimental option.

That would give them a chance to see what people choose, what they tend to stick with, how much they enjoy it, etc. All through client-integrated telemetry.
Isn't that what a EA is supposed to be about? Or is it more that they just can't be bothered to try it regardless of what people want, at some point?

I'm starting to wonder that myself. When they announced BG3 for EA I though Larian did that because they genuinely wanted player feedback abut game mechanics, rules interpretation and impelentation and stuff like that. But it now seems that they just wanted people in the EA to test out pure technical issues.

Just meet in the middle and have 5 characters.