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

I just don't get it. I can create 4 custom characters and Lae'zel and now Shadow join them in the prologue for a party of 6, so it CAN be done and is already in the game, but as soon as we arrive on the beach, NOPE. 4 only. Why? So if I play multiplayer or create 4 customs, I can't ever trigger certain dialogues, like Wyll and the goblin at the mill or Shadow at the broken statue.

It's a bit frustrating.

The only thing I can say that is possible consolation is that dos2 is fully playable with all the companions in your party

Randomly, I'm already managing 8 "characters" cause by the end everyone has a familiar in my games. Shadowheart needing a feat of course. So the engine is shown both in the prologue and with summoning to handle way more than four. Add in the zombie glitch (take your pick of which one) and the engine can support an immense amount of player controlled entities without faltering, glitching, or failing in any way.
Essentially, the game can totally support 6 or any number within reason, but 4 ended up being chosen.

I'd be ALL for extending the default party size (or at least offer it as a proper option) because having to edit save files to make this work is a pain in the ass and it just got worse with the last patch where the "hack" stopped working for some unholy reason.

Honesty a four men party in a big-ass RPG like this feels so lousy.
But we've been talking this stuff for ten months at this point and to my memory despise claiming originally that they weren't adamant about enforcing this decision and they were open to listed to the players, it doesn't really seem like Larian cares that much of the general feedback.

Why? Dragon Age, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect all had 3-4 party size.

Just an observation on my part - I don’t mind having to commit to the party (I tend to do it in RPGs), and if Larian does something more interesting with abandoned companions throughout the rest of the adventure, it could be a neat thing. I do agree that D:OS2 kill-off felt artificial and unnecessary.

It would be neat if NPCs would temporally join out party, as some critical NPCs do in Solasta.

Personally, I feel Larian still has work to do, to makes us take a fuller advantage of 4-man party, so to me whenever there will be 4 party limit or higher, isn’t much of a concern.

You say that as if that made them any favor. Which it didn't. Or as if they were the gold standard for party management, which they weren't.

That aside... Entirely different systems, rulesets, type of RPGs, etc.
Not to mention that at very least Bioware understood the importance of having an extended cast outside of the active party and let you swap companions in and out across the entire game... Which if we have to believe their original claim Larian is actively planning against, instead.

I disagree I think that party size should stay as is. I feel like it’s a great amount. The only exception I think would be if we have other friends in the group and you should still be allowed to have upto 3 NPCs to experience their stories still. Making for a maximum party size of 7. You, three friends, and three NPCs. Just tuning up the monsters health with scaling would be adequate but also I’d be fine with taking less people and compromising.

Honestly, if I could have had a larger active-party in bioware games I totally would have.
But at least they never did a blanket wipe or dismissal of everyone you recruited to artificially reduce you to who is active (or at least in a single game, you could make an argument about the jump from ME1 to 2 and then 3, but they feel like separate games). Sure people could die because of my decisions, and there were ultimatum moments, but it wasn't ever DOS2 batch wipe levels, and individual character deaths and crisis add weight to the game compared to just deciding you can't have A,B,C,D, and E because you happened to choose to use F, G, and H at this arbitrary moment.

I'm not even sure what you are trying to say.

You "disagreed" (and the disagreement is mutual, by the way) except suggesting an even larger party one sentence later.

I feel like doing it that way only adds an extra step, because then people would do the roundabout way of having multiple BG3s open, selecting the origin characters, and then recruiting the three remaining. Just letting 7 there would allow the same effect. Though personally I find 7 to be that amount that starts to tilt difficulty too much, but if other people greatly prefer it, I wouldn't feel bad about it and instead work with 6 characters or try 7.

Err, essentially my philosophy here is too many is way better than too few.

On a side note, while I personally genuinely don't give the tiniest amount of shit about the multiplayer angle* I'm not sure why the most classical party of SIX shouldn't work in multiplayer.
Given that you can ASSIGN characters to the players at will, you could have two players with 3 characters each, two with three, three with two characters... Or any other arbitrary asymmetric combination, really.

There would be nothing intrinsically impractical about it. Well, apart for the game controls, that suck and are impractical by default. More aggravatingly so when you LOWER the number of players involved.





*elaboration: frankly I tried to play previous Larian games in multi and the verdict was always "Well, this was amusing but I'm not going to coordinate a schedule with multiple people over an extended time frame to play like this again".
So no, absolutely not a selling point for me and even less something that I would let DICTATE major design limitations.

Actually, even with multiplayer angle, I'm not sure why it'd be unreasonable for 6 players to be allowed?
Would it require that much resources to update the menus and code to allow for players 5 and 6…?

Maybe some netcode limitation. But I doubt. In fact I think some old mod already allowed multiplayer beyond 4 people for DOS 2? But I'm not sure, so don't quote me on that.

What's really relevant, anyway, is that even if that was INDEED a limitation, there would be absolutely no need to break it.
Just because the theoretical ceiling for the party members would be raised to six, no one would be forced to play with six players or even less to FILL the party even in single player.

BG1 and 2, as IWD 1 and 2, had a party of six and still a lot of people enjoyed doing even solo runs. It's the magic of scalable systems, you know.

That is all nice, but it aply to single player only ...
I belive that multiplayer is the real issue here, since Larian promised people split screen, it would be ridiculous to split screen in 8 squares. :-/

//edit:
Personaly i believe that give us option to allow another two members in single-player game only would be quite easy ... but for some unknown reason it seems like Larian simply demands to keep the game exactly the same in both options.

Simple. Splitscreen goes up to four players local for that fun couch action, with it also supporting two more over lan or internet. Normal internet/Lan/etc play allows up to 6 players.
Both allow 6 characters.
My whole thing was on characters not players there, I don't think the number of characters hinders splitscreen in any way and having one console only support 4 players but also allowing 2 others to connect over the internet makes sense to me. And honestly I feel like splitscreen co-op is a dying thing but keeping it afloat isn't a bad thing.

Because if we create a party of 4, we can't even bring any origin characters into the party to trigger dialogues like Lae'zel and Zorru, or Shadowheart at the statue, or Wyll and the gobbo captain.

No. No extra code at all. I had 6 party members in Prologue with 4 custom and Lae'zel and Shadow with a scrollbar for inventory. It's already there. They just don't allow it after prologue

I believe there is few important differences, you are missing ...

Mass Effect have 3 classes (Soldier, Technician, Biotic ... and yes, i know there are another 3, but they are basicaly just half/half hybrids) ...
So, when you wish to have full acess to your party potential abilities, you need 3 persons ... everything abowe, would be just repeating of things you allready have.
Also, it would cause problems since in this game you are giving them active orders, wich could proove dificiult with more followers.

Dragon Age have 3 classes aswell (Warior, Mage, Rogue ... and yes, again i know that they have 3 specialisations, but again when talking about interaction with the world it dont matter if your Mage is Fire, Frost, or Thunder type ... what matters is if you have Mage to interact with the world)
Its best seen in Inquisition ... Warriors are smashing walls, Rogues are picking locks, and Mages have telekinesis they refuses to use in any battle scenario for some reason. ... I honestly dont remember 2 at all, and its fact that in Origins, it dont quite matter what party members you pick as long as you have at least one rogue to pick locks (and either mage for healing, or realy easy settings and lot of healing bandages).
Still, once again ... adding another party member is unnecesary.

And Kotor ... well, we could say that there are Ranged / Meele / Force user ... but honestly, i believe it dont matter at all, who will you take with you. Maybe in their personal quests it do, but that is completely different story. :-/

In this game, you have a little more classes, and even if many of them are simmilar ... you can allways set them to stats ...
You have tank (constitution), muscle (strength) stealther (dexterity), brain (intelligence), eyes and ears (wisdom) and finaly face (charisma) of the group ... so, in order to create "optimalized" party, you are suppose to have them all ... its ofcourse possible to focus on one aspect, instead of another, aka. specialize ... but once you have to scratch 1/3 of your options it, to put it simply, becomes frustrating.

OR!
Maybe ... they werent expecting that people would demand it so hard ... and they started experimenting with this option just now (read as: recently).

What patch it was, if i can ask?