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

They will never admit it until it's done, but here's a poorly kept secret: even a good portion of the "4 is fine" crowd once actually offered the option in the game would gladly bring along five companions, not three.

It makes for more interesting party compositions, more diversified battle strategies, gives to the AI more targets diminishing the focus on your "squishy characters" (or giving you more options to actively protect them) and gives you more occasions to inject the action queue between enemies moves; it gives you significantly more chances to use more types of valuable equipment, it allows you to progress concurrently on more companions quests and hear more banters and interactions between characters at any given time.

What's the downside, again? Oh right... It may upset the current shitty balance, for encounters that need to be retuned anyway.
And it MAY force the devs' hand into actually making controls out of combat bearable. Oh, the horror.

That's probably the only thing that bothers me for the moment in the game. I just finished my second run with Shadowheart, Astarion, Gale, and myself as another wizard. Cause i need someone to talk about magic in my groupe and Will is kinda thick in this matter. It's playable, and i think my next run where i'll play a warlock and be the only profan caster in the groupe will be playable too... So Larian/DnD5e made a good job at making groups of 3-4 playable. But i can't imagine i will ever recruit in my group something like a ranger, a sorcerer, a bard, a druid, a monk... And it's sad.

Just throw at me twice the numbers of gobelins and let fights last another hour, i don't care, because you made a great game and it's fun to meet your characters and lead them into battle, learning how they interact <3

6 is epic? Not saying you're wrong, but 6-8 seems like a common number.

Play nice - Im not stating bullshit im stating what I believe & 4 is perfect as far as im concerned - i dont believe a 6 member party is needed & yes it would change the game - you'd steamroll the content unless there were major overhauls to all the encounters - wouldn't that be the case ?
If its so easy & costs virtually nothing to implement then im sure Larian would have considered it already & be champing at the bit to tell all you 6 man party people that it's in the pipeline - in which case great ! just as long as I can play with 4 & it isn't out of balance for my game.

Im not a 5E expert but many things ive seen & read suggest 5E is based around a 4 man party - is that not the case ??

Im not against 6 people in a party & alot of people appear to want that - for me personally im happy with 4 it works really well - you wont change my view on that, but I hope you get what you want as this game needs to appeal to as wide an audience as it can - get massive sales & be hugely successful so we get more DLC & more D&D CRPG's.

Id love a 6 man party for all the roleplaying elements listed above which are more important to me than the combat, so even if no rebalance is done give us the option for 6 party members please.

Ok here's my reason - I get bored of managing 6 characters it just gets tedious after a while - 4 to me is more engaging, I really enjoy watching my characters develop & feel more drawn into the experience. To me the 6 party camp is also the - I like to switch out characters all the time ...probably because you're not as invested in them cause there's too many & it gets boring.....

I tried to enjoy POE 2 I really did - only turn based mode, but in the end it just couldnt hold my interest - BG3 on the other hand I find seriously engaging & I put some of that down to a 4 man party (& the fact its D&D).........for me it just works - I dont side with Larian at all - I just prefer a 4 man party.

Plain & simple ....

Fun fact: currently it's quicker and easier to manage six characters in Kingmaker than doing the same with even just two or three in BG3.
Point and click, drag to select and controlling multiple characters at the same time go a long way to make these tasks effortless.
And I should probably stress that I play KIngmaker exclusively with turn-based combat, which means that NO, I'm not talking about "slow turns".

So maybe let's address the shitty control scheme of the game, rather than ask to cripple the side of party management/composition to make thing simpler and duller.

Also, Larian has yet to confirm that they will allow "swapping characters in and out of the party". In the end I expect that they will, but so far the last official word on the topic suggested the contrary ("Player will have to commit to their choice after Act 1") which would make a limit of 4 characters even more shitty.
Imagine playing a long-ass single player campaign ranging anything between 60-100 hours and 3 companions would be the only degree of variety offered to you outside of lame custom "mercenaries".

@Taron. I get that, thanks. I'm hoping we can the option for either.

Like @jayn23 I like the additional banters and RP.

I would then suggest making a Party of six for/as
an EXTRA Mode called f.e. like LEGACY or similar and reduce the Character interactions to allmost ZERO.

No more Story Content for the 6 Mainchars. Treat them like you would have 6 Custom Characters.
But then theres the Problem about Character Storys like with Shadowhearts Artefact etc.
Those must be rewritten that those items or Storys are somehow connected to our adventure but found or introduced by another way in this LEGACY mode.

All Ideas which can bring this Gamemode on the run, make it work, can be either made by modders or Larian himself.
But i strongly think it would bring the classic RPG feeling back for many people even myself (also played Curse of the Azure Bonds in the 80ies last Century on C64). But dont make it have autobattles which take more then an hour

Still can't quite comprehend the insistence on an either/or on this issue. If the game only permits 4 party members max, the folks who want 4 will be happy - everyone else will be less so. If there is a 6 party member max, those who want 4 will be happy, as will those that want more. Where balance is a concern regarding party size, feel free to crank up or down the difficulty level in accordance with personal taste (or sadomasochism)- You (general you) should not have to play the game according to my desires, not should I be limited by yours. It's all about options - you want to blow up barrels left and right as your strategy, knock your socks of...while I have yet to use a single barrel in my play through. You'd think we were computers, with only a 1 or 0 as options.

+1

If it launches out of EA without some form of native support for a party of 6, it will be really hard not to feel that our EA feedback was basically ignored.

Whether or not this should really be the test case for how well they respond to EA suggestions, I think it will nevertheless end up being just that. Mainly because its so cut and dry, relatively straightforward to accommodate, and a very easy thing to point to. Either peeps will say "look! See how they totally listened" or "look! See how they didn't listen." And it will probably be emblematic in that way. Whether what so many people in their EA asked for week after week was taken up or not. It will color the whole "You asked! So we listened" angle, and likely serve as a bellweather for what kind of official support we can actually expect for other feature requests and EA critical feedback, vs how much the game will just be dependant on unofficial mods for its afterlife.

They can leave it to the mods, sure, but that will have knock on effects.. it would also signal to me that I'll probably have to wait another year or two even after it comes out of EA for some rogue gang of modders to do the hard work, build and balance the things that the team of pro devs should have just built into it in the first place. Some unpaid modder or team of modding enthusiasts will have to do the heavy lifting, and while I hope they can pull it off, it won't be the same thing, or engender the same kind of goodwill or sense of being heard by the powers that be.

I worry that the party management and movement control issues that I'm constantly fighting with right now will just go unaddressed, and that they will use their smaller "tighter" party concept as a cop out. Giving us fewer companions and just sticking us with a bunch of followers or random friendlies we can't control, because its simpler than fixing the pathing, targeting, UI, and combat scaling that would be needed to make a full party of 6 work well.

I still hope they're keeping tabs, and that interviews given in September before EA even launched aren't the final word on this one.

Best
Elk

I agree on a six player party. I am sure if it doesn't happen, then someone will mod it!

This. We need native support and not a mod.

It's clear they are going for a "easy to mod" option right now but that isn't sufficient. You can get a party of 6 by changing just one variable and it works pretty well except that items inventory screen is too small to be seen clearly (on my monitor at least) and 6 emphasizes the flaws with party management -- flaws that need to be corrected anyway.

What it would mean is they listened to the feedback from a very small group of individuals and didn't agree with it.
These threads can create an echo chamber where folks think their feedback is more popular than it actually is.
Out of the million plus folks who got early access what percentage have given the feedback that they want two extra players in their party? (Answer: An incredibly small percentage)

I would hate a party of 6 as it would lengthen every combat even if you only took three companions (as the game would have to be tougher to accommodate a party of 6.)
Party of 4 is perfect for me and I sincerely hope they don't change that.

Larian is not ignoring EA feedback.
Your feedback is just not universal (nor is mine)
In the end Larian will make the game that they want to play and that they think is the most fun for the most people.

Given that this is a successor to two of the most popular games in the history of RPGs and both of those were 6 party games it's unlikely that 6 person party is minority. "Give us less" isn't as a popular a slogan as one might guess.

6 party members outdated?? in what way??
Like saying having more than 5 classes is outdated...day/night cycles outdated....using the mouse is outdated...

The whole "just an echo chamber" fallacy, also known as the "just a vocal minority" defense, that a lot of people love to parrot on fan forums every single time it's convenient to their side of an argument is pointless, disingenuous bullshit, mostly for a reason:
since the dawn of modern entertainment "vocal minorities" are precisely what drives the inert masses.
Do you know why most of the casual audience will not even mention a 4 or 6-men party at all? Because they are not even aware it could be an option. They are blissfully unaware of what could be, in the same way they couldn't consciously tell apart any broken mechanic from a fairly balanced one.
They just don't have the tools: experience, knowledge, understanding of the impact of certain design decisions, etc.

Does that mean that doing things better is a wasted effort because they will be happy anyway? No, it doesn't. Not after the initial honeymoon.
Because they may be clueless, come in with zero expectations and set an incredibly low bar to be initially pleased (basically "as far as it looks polished enough"), but as they'll stick around for a while and gain familiarity with the systems they will learn to discern the faulty mechanics and their limitations.
No one will need an intimate understanding of "action economy" and to read an essay on "why disengage as a bonus action is unfaithful to the original manuals" to quickly get the grasp that a combat where the most effective strategy is to constantly leapfrog around has some issues.

In the same way, there won't be any need for a long history of familiarity with the CRPG subgenre to quickly realize that carrying on an entire 80+ hours single player campaign with just the same three companions sticking around will be POISONUS for the long term variety, sense of scale, etc.

And having a day/night cycle? Pff. Most of them barely have a vague grasp on the meaning of the sentence. But they WILL start to realize that the game world seems to be frozen in a single moment in time and it will grate on them over time.

This, all putting aside that your personal claim that "a six-men party would lengthen the combat" is generally speaking a baseless stinking pile of crap, but this was a point discussed dozens of times already.

Ah so you are much smarter and wiser than the ignorant masses. If only they knew what you knew.
Sounds like the start of every conspiracy theory.


People who don't agree with you are clueless?
Your arrogance seems to know no bounds.


So there have been no successful games with fewer than six party members. That's an interesting position to take -- wrong but interesting.


There's that arrogance again.

As an FYI BioWare ditched the day night cycle in Throne of Bhaal because they didn't feel it added anything to the game and more often than not players would end up waiting around for the shops to open causing frustration. Perhaps they only had a vague grasp on the meaning of the sentence as well.

The 6 person party will be modded in eventually.
I would suggest waiting until then or perhaps writing the mod yourself.

much love fam, but i find it ironic that you say that the threads create an echo chamber where ppl think their own feedback is more popular than it is - and then you go on to state your opinion/feedback thinking its the popular take (but that couldve been the goal, lol).

tbh, unless there is a larian official survey that posits these alternatives (4v6) for ea players response with results that are public facing (ie 67percent are in favor of option x) there is no way to verify any of the metrics that you cite in your post in support for either opinion (although i would be happy to be wrong here if just so we can get an official larian response). in fact, i would argue that the majority of ea users dont create accounts for online forums to give feedback so by extension you are already working with a smaller percentage (and usually also more invested percentage than your 'standard consumer') of the population to even begin with.

i would prefer having 6 open slots and allow the player to fill as they prefer, and while i dont have an easy answer to your balancing concern (which is a whole issue in of itself before you even consider player party size - which can apparently already go up to 6 in multiplayer so is making the game 'tougher' really a constraint in implementation here?), i would say that the process of balancing should be expected at this stage of an ea game so thats why ppl are here giving feedback - and since the updates we have gotten from larian largely dont respond to any of the hot topics cited in these forums, its understandable that a community that was eager to provide feedback for a long awaited IP have begun to become disenchanted with the ea process and feel ignored by devs/the studio - sure, we are still early in ea, but the sooner the better for video game development and its not that difficult to shoot out a quick tweet - how long can larian stay in character creation? they have time to tweet about their new board games

also, im glad we circled back in your original post and acknowledge that ppl have differing opinions, which is the basis for why we are all here posting in the forums so larian can reference and identify whats most important for the success of bg3 at this stage in development, but i think your last statement walks a dangerous line for game developers in general - they shouldnt be making a game that 'they/larian' wants to play they should be making a game that the community consensus wants to play, and that part about what is most fun for the most ppl should happen organically bc of the feedback that larian is getting from here and other community feedback portals helping to improve the game.

your echo chamber metaphor can also apply in reverse to larian here where feedback that may be critical of 'larian's fun' in an effort to improve the game may be ignored or poorly rationalized away to the detriment of the community and the final product.