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

Fair enough. But the question is will some QUALITY modder come forward to do this? I myself have no such skills, but I also want whatever mods I add to my games to be of a good quality. And in the case of BG3, I see a need for a great MANY mods before the game becomes something I could enjoy.

Im not a big fan of mods. It is up to the game designers to give me a good game, not the modders.

6 characters would be fun, but if not, Im good with it. So 6 is preferred as Im used to D&D with 6, but I'll love with 4.

It is an interesting (even if disappointing) design to go with a 4-person party, but it seems to tie to two key things that might explain Larian's reasoning. And there are pros and cons to both of those elements.

1) There is going to be a story point where we *permanently* lose the companions not in our active party. Thus, it comes down to picking which character's personal questline sounds most appealing to you for that playthrough.

- The UPSIDE is this adds a bit of flavor to roleplaying. My pragamtic and rather shady half-elf rouge does not care at all about Gale and Shadowheart's respective goddess obsession, so she will be leaving them behind to hunt for either a cure with La'zael or a chance to control the tadpole with Asterion. Wyll gets to come along too on that adventure, because he is no stranger to the darkness despite his good boy act. On the other hand, my elven druid is intrigued by Shadowheart's mysterious past, and is sympathetic to Gale's predicament. She is also fascinated by Lazeal's culture. She also thinks both Atserion and Wyll are abominations that disrupt the balance. New companions could cause more iterations with whatever type of char I build. Etc ad nauseam.

The DOWNSIDE is that many players want the chance to experience the full game (or at least all the companion side-quests) in a single playthrough, and have no desire to fire it up again and again. Plus, to get all of their banter, one would have to play through many times to get different party events. It is already annoying to miss so much when half of your companions are stuck at camp, let alone when they are totally inaccessible somewhere midgame. Definitely sucks. Also -- just as a side note to this --- I really hate the idea that a story event separates my party --- I would much prefer that my choices make some of them leave in frustration/anger/resignation. That would make much more palatable and perhaps even exciting. But that is for another topic.

2) From what I understand from reading other threads, the 5e ruleset coupled with the "extras" (what some call cheese) that comprise the core gameplay means that you really don't have to build your party with all that much thought.

- The UPSIDE is that you don't have to have a rouge/tank/catser/healer set-up anymore to win fights. From the EA, it seems pretty clear that you can take whoever you like in your group out adventuring, and you will probably be OK. So there is actually a bit more freedom in party builds because the game is quite forgiving, and thus a 4 person party is not all that problematic.

- The DOWNSIDE is that this is less challenging gameplay overall, and would likely be more fun with a 6-party build and more stringent DnD rules (although I am talking out of my nose on this one...but I imagine it would work that way).

In summary---- both justifications for having 4 vs 6 person party have pros and cons. We could have a 6-party build but would need more challenging gameplay to balance it, and we would end up doing companion quests that are likely out of character from a role playing perspective (at least for some roles). OR, we could have a 4 party build which means missing out on content on a single playthrough, but having a more relaxed gameplay experience that does not overly punish us for our team choices.

Anyway -- sorry if this has already been stated by others. Did not read all the posts yet! Just trying to sort through my own thoughts about it more than anything. But on the modding note --- I think these two key points are important to consider for whatever mods are even possible. If a mod expands the game to 6, we definitely need some upping of the difficulty as well (ie, beyong more enemies or more sponges). AND, it might break the game's narrative structure, from what I understand from the inevitable party split that is coming.

After months without touching the game anymore, I just finished my first playthough modding the save games for a party of six.
Turns out that even with the terrible Larian controls and the hideous chain/unchain system, the UI problems with the inventory and the visual glitches during conversations (with the extra companions overlapping each other) it was by far the most enjoyable campaign out of of the ones I had so far.

More classes to play around with, more companions bantering with each other or giving me quests or other minor things to do, a better flow during combat (especially the big fights with a lot of units), with more chances to intervene to do something instead of just watching 20 enemies in a row, plus the fact that six men killed enemies faster.

Of course, the downside is that the game was a bit easier for it, but I can't really say it bothered much, if at all. And it's something that could easily be addressed with a custom difficulty balance, IF Larian actually cared about it.

I personally have no stake in this argument, but one has to point out the irony in defending the 4 character party system while simultaneously praising this game's writing and freedom of options in the same breath, when the 4 character party inherently limits that by its very design. As Tuco up there just found out.

It kind of reminds me of what a big deal it was when Pillars of Eternity 1 had a 6 person party, and PoE2 downscaled to a 5 person party for 'balance' reasons. I think realistically, PoE2 combat wasn't any more balanced than the first, though for entirely different reasons (there was a far greater emphasis on AoE cleave builds in the latter).

I would certainly like to see a 5 or 6 person party in BG3.

We all would.

This sounds very promising. Thanks for sharing.

Larian's indifference to this request is disheartening, however, because I would so very much prefer that this be a built-in option. There is no way I would ever play this game without using a mod to increase my party size. But at the same time, I hate having to use any mods in my games.

Honestly, I think if they allowed 6 character party and implemented the 5e rules more accurately, that would balance the game out very well. That means enemy stats more true to 5e as well.

I've been testing as Tabletop, and I think the enemies they throw at the player(s) fit better with 6 characters IF 5e rules applied. 4 characters sets the difficulty to Hard if 5e rules are applied.

We already talked about this in the past, but one of the most bizarre things about Larian simply refusing to consider the option (mostly under the assumption that most of the casual audience would prefer four characters) and Swen saying explicitly "We'll leave that to modding" is that... Well, we are in a goddamn early access.

What better chance there could be to put both options to the test letting players choose at the start and then tracking actual data of what people prefers to do?
Especially since as I said it's already trivially easy to "hack" the feature into the game with some minor savefile editing and it would be even easier for Larian to implement it properly in a more orthodox manner.

Honestly, not just with party size, but with other things I would love to see this, give players two alternatives to represent the two paths the mechanic could go and just let us mess around with both, and see what our opinions are with them.

Maybe they are watching numbers of people who do that "hack" thing (i mean they should see how many companions we have ... it should not be hard to filter X>3)... to determine how many of us would like 6member party ...
That would explain why they think that majority likes it as it is ... im kinda currious how many people are as me just affraid to corupt their saves, or even worse game itself. :-/

I genuinely don't want to touch modding BG3 til its actually out of EA. So that metric of gauging how people want it would at the very least exclude me, making me believe it would be very lacking.

Well, that would be about as smart as counting how many students go for an archeology degree to decide if people in general like dinosaurs.

The answer is simple, they don't want to get into a situation where they will have to balance the game in several different modes for each difficulty level. Neither the schedule nor the budget is rubber.
In some places the locations are too tight to allow for a meaningful fight of more characters.

Which Is a weird thing to worry about, given that:

- none of the encounters are going to be considered final and set in stone at this point in development.
- going by their track record Larian is going to include multiple, partially even customizable difficulty levels anyway.
-if people want the option even at cost of making the game easier or harder on themselves it’s not clear why they should take an issue with it.
- my own experience playing with six characters openly contradicts your last point.
- they admitted themselves a lot of people will mod this stuff, so once again why not test the general preference now that it comes at virtually no extra cost rather than going “Fuck what you guys want.It is what it is”.

What is EA is certainly not even half of what they actually did. Since the game was to be released this year, they had to work on Act 2 before EA's launch.
If they rolled out this thing in EA now and found it didn't work then people would complain that they had been lied to if it didn't come out in full. If Larian introduces the option to choose the size of the team and it is unbalanced at the same time, people will start complaining. It's safer to just not complicate the matter and let people who want to play with a non-standard team to use the mods.
The game is designed for cooperation and such games usually have either 2 or 4 players. I have not come across a game that would allow more people to play. As a rule, it's hard to find more people to play so that the dates suit everyone. It makes no sense for some players to control more than one character.
Another thing is that the game is also to be released on consoles.

Basically, to summarize, any excuse is good as long as we can come up with some convoluted pretext to not give to stuff people ACTUALLY want from a Baldur’s Gate sequel a fair chance.

It doesn’t even matter that concerns about “nailing the perfect balance” sound laughable at best, in an incomplete game where nothing is already properly balanced to begin with and given how trivial it would be to tweak things around at will.

Because apparently having four vastly different difficulty settings by default is perfectly doable, but changing things around to adjust for a different default (or even just leaving people to deal with the “imbalance”, really, if that’s what they want) is out of the question.

So we don't actually know if it is going to come out 2021. A general consensus is that this game is likely going to be done sometime in 2022 with many hoping for late 2022 for the best product.
Them having worked on further Acts sets nothing in stone, especially the difficulty of the game, they can easily adjust encounters by adding and subtracting enemies or changing enemy statistics, like they already have done.
Tuco's playthrough and many people's observations find that a 6 player party doesn't actually break the game and in fact feels more balanced to the encounters presented to us. And nobody is complicating the matter, this is EA feedback, and a large amount of people are providing the feedback that in fact they want a 6 person party to be the standard party.
I argue co-op would not actually hurt the 6 person party at all as you just distribute the extra characters. If two people are playing then both players will control 3. If three players are playing, each will control 2. And if four are playing, then 2 players can control an extra person. (And personally I would like to abandon the notion that coop must be 2 or 4, cause a 6 person coop game in BG3 actually sounds fun and akin to dnd).
Also how is console releases going to affect a 6 person party in anyway? I have Icewind Dale Enhanced Edition for the PS4 and it controls perfectly fine and plays perfectly fine. i use a 6 person party in that game and in fact it actually controls much better than BG3, so honestly I don't get why BG3 being considered for consoles be even a factor here?

This is almost certainly NOT coming out in 2021.
Spring 2022 would already be a conservative estimation.