Originally Posted by Sharp
Games are designed so that people "struggle" and then they overcome that difficulty, when in reality there was never any difficulty at all. Its all an elaborately orchestrated trick. I cannot think of a single RPG I have played that could not be soloed, provided the game did not force party members onto you.
Well, sure. This is something I argued myself in the past: you can't balance a game's difficulty over fringe, overly-optimized strategies.
But no one should make the opposite mistake of thinking that any degree of challenge is going to be detrimental to the appreciation of their game.

In the DOS 2 post-mortem I posted few pages ago in answer to another user you hear the man himself, Swen Vincke, pointing out that they made some mistakes with the difficulty curve in DOS 2 and that led to LOADS of user reviews, forum posts, etc, complaining that they were quickly over-leveling all the content and the game became boring.

You shouldn't fine tune for speedrunners and pro-players, but you should definitely keep in mind that at least the RESEMBLANCE of a challenge must be there to not bore most of your audience.
Incidentally the same part of your audience that is most likely to stick with your products rather than giving you a 10 out of 10 on Metacritic, play 30 minutes and move on to the next popular thing.

Party control in Baldur's Gate 3 is a complete mess that begs to be addressed. SAY NO TO THE TOILET CHAIN