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

@Hachina

This is shocking. I actually went back to test it out, just to be absolutely sure, and I am indeed completely wrong about the syncronicity of rounds. I must have gotten mud for brains at some point. Good grief.

But regarding the number of attacks per round, if you are dual wielding then you would get up to 4 main hand attack rolls and one off hand attack roll. Or 8 and 2, with Imp Haste / GWW. I distinctly recall having spent time on checking this out as meticulously as an impatient teenager checks anything out, way back in the day when damage optimization discussions were all the rage. You know, Chrommy off hand and FoA main versus Belm off, FoA main, and a strength girdle. Made a huge (as in, YUGE!!) difference how many hits one could get with each, back then. Yeah, I was one of those people, I'm afraid.

Anyway, back to topic. Baldur's Gate 2, with AoO, jump, dash, shove, verticality, and thrown stuff, all in real time, all refreshing every six seconds? It would be necessary to define some default attack options, though. Having to manually do all that cantrip casting every round would get tedious otherwise. But it might just be plausible. Completely nuts and chaotic, almost goes without saying, but probably more fun than the current state of affairs in BG3.

Because the freedom you have to create your party depends the number of open slots AND the number of companions.

Here's something I wrote somewhere in this thread... The values are good.

"1 custom + 3 companions out of 10 possibilities => 120 combination
1 custom + 5 companions out of 10 possibilities => 252 combination"

Now this may be wrong because I don't remember the math but to give you an exemple : if the 10 possibilities become 9 possibilities, the 1+3 party may lead to more possibilities than the 1+5 (and if it's not 9, it may be 8 or 7).

Anyway both values are important and we just don't know how many companions are planned so it's hard to be accurate.

Of course this is pure math and doesn't care of companions alignement, companions that cannot be in the same team, companions that come in your party with their friend or husband (minsc and dynaheir, khalid and jaheira) and so on.


This would definitely give us more things to do during combats. Playing more, watching less...

And there are other video games that have a party size of 6 and turn based combats that are definitely not slower and easier than BG3's combats.

Wasteland 2 is the best exemple I have in mind.

If you're interrested you should really try the mod that allow you to increase the party size. I had a playthrough with 5, another with 6 and plenty with 4.

6 break the fun, the game is not balanced at all for 6...but 5 is really really fun. Of course the game is a bit easier but what we have in this EA can be hard and is probably not the "hard" mode.

Isn't this exactly how it is done in the original games?

Larian seems to be entrapped in the same mindset as some on this forum, which is that a game being made in 2021 must not have anything even remotely similar to what was done in 1999 because to do so goes against the spirit of a new and contemporary game. So every single thing in BG3 must be something "new." This is an asinine mentality. There are many things that were perfect in 1999 and still remain perfect in 2021, and the "new" alternative is actually a downgrade.

Good thing if it made you come back to the old classic !

Okay, I didn't know that for off hand weapon, that good to know. Ahah yeah I'm familiar with that, glad to see another fellow adventurer optimizing build.

Yeah, that's a great idea , you would certainly need to do auto cantrip casting (as if attacking, the character would keep casting a pre-selected cantrip instead of a sword or bow attack), and maybe you could use gambit like in FFXII with ''mage use this cantrip, then this cantrip then this one'' on attacked enemy.


I really like shove and verticality, they are a great addition to the game. Would just like to balance it so they're less abusable by player. Didn't play since beta release but at that time hightground and shove were pretty strong.

Yes, i get this ... maybe i expresed myself poorly again ...
Let me ask a question ... in case that party size will be incerased and we didnt get any more companions, so our party will be stuck with either multiplayer-cheat for "more custom characters" ... or with simply everyone EA offers so far ...
On scale 1 to 10, when 1 is totally fine and 10 is totally awfull ... how much do you honestly believe it would ruin the experience?

I would gues 2, 3 top.

I certainly am ...
But last time i tryed to install mod, i had to reinstal whole game -_- ...
So i would rather wait until someone come with easier way ... or, hopefully, until someone in Larian says something like: "What the hells ... they want it, lets give it to them" I wonder wich will come first.

Here's another riff on it though, just to the question about 'what if they want temp NPC hangers-on for story purposes?' and doesn't going from 6 to 8 make the party then too unwieldy? My thought on this is that it really shouldn't, at least not if it was done well. What made Baldur's Gate unique and entertaining at the time, was really the god mode aspect of controlling multiple characters at once. Even in addition to the 6 standard PCs, you add on to that the idea of familiars or sidekicks, plus the various Koraxes and such, plus standard summons, and the game really needs to work with a party of at least a dozen, not just 6. ​I mean that's how it was in BG2.

In BG1 there was no limit to the amount of summons, other than the number of spells you had memorized, and how far you wanted to push your computer's ram lol. You could storm Nashkell with a couple dozen wolves and a gang of bears, if you wanted to, and your character had enough spellslots. That was wild, and a blast towards the endgame there. But the BG2 limit seemed pretty sensible. It still left room for plenty of companion characters to each have their own buddy minion. Or to fill out the extra slots with summons if you went with a smaller party. Even soloing still usually meant making use of summons, whether through spellslots or special items or consumables like scrolls and wands.

I just think they should aim higher. The kinks will be less pronounced I think if they go big with it, and the possible party combinations will be much greater (even if we only end up with a dozen possible companions to choose from) as mentioned earlier. So I just don't see how they can go wrong setting up support for 6 sooner rather than later. Gives us something fun to test, and would many happy, or at least it would make me happier lol

But BG2 also required you to kick out a party member to add in a required NPC. There's nothing wrong with that approach. It works just as well today as it did in 1999.

Six People should be okay - although a "Maximum" that can "NORMALLY" not be overcome in terms of adding more Members.

I mean how powerful is a single Party going to become? A Party should stay a Party and "NOT" become a small Army.

I am good with a party of 5. The classical Fighter, Priest, Mage, Rogue plus a non typical class - bard, warlock, psionic, etc.

i really like a party of 6. i know larian wanted 4 because of making the game appeal to mass audience and for multiplayer. in pathfinder wrath of righteous, i played the game entirely on turn-based for few playthroughs. it wasn't slow but i do need to speed up the animation.

i like a party of 6 in bg3 but i think the biggest problem would be balance and the encounter design probably need to be revisited to add more enemies, fine-tune the HP and abilities, etc. here's hoping the mod community could make this happen.

i be really willing to donate to the modder too if they did that.

They actually added this in Beta 3 for WotR.



It goes up to x3 speed. I think going that high makes things TOO fast... (You can also press the enter button during movement or the enemy turn to make things go so fast that you might as well be skipping the entire animation, and you can also use it to skip cutscenes. The game never tells you this. At least for now.)

I'm not sure if they were already there before beta 3 for WotR. I been using the animation speed and it really works great. I only completed BG3 EA once (before druid announcement) but i already completed WotR beta twice and looking forward to the 3rd playthrough.

I think perhaps it's a trade off? Larian made those animations to be longer and make every actions to be more impactful? As such i think it will have more longer animations compared to a basic attack like WotR. I'm not sure how Larian can further reduce their animation time. But to add more party members, they have to perhaps solve the animation time IMO.

If you mess around with the framerate and cap in the video options here, you can sometimes make the BG3 animations appear like a sped up Chaplin flick, or kinda slow mo depending on the numbers. It's kind of inconsistent though, like at first I thought maybe the option would make it appear more classic cinema, or maybe soap opera video or something if trying like 28 or 33 or just messing about at the low end. But it seemed to speed up more at the high end. I was fiddling around with it the other day and noticing different impressions of speed, but then I ended up just resetting defaults again after a while, cause it started to wonk out a bit lol

I am definitely in favor of 5-6 party members. At 5 you can get a balanced party via companions and then have a space extra for your character to be whatever you want to be without feeling too bad about doubling up because you like a particular companion but also want to be that class as well.

I'm just gonna keep going back to multiplayer. 6 party members allows a four player session to include at least 2 origin characters, allowing players to enjoy more of the full story together.

4 party members allows no room for a 4 player session to enjoy ANY origin story elements at all. You cannot even have a single companion character in the party. You can argue many other points, but this one always remains.

As I've brought up in the BG3 VS WotR thread, there is an argument to be made in that a party of 6 will ultimately lead to a lot more party/build variety at the end of the day. Obviously.

I remember when PoE went from 6 party members to 5 in PoE2. I also remember that the community reception to the Druid class in particular completely shifted overnight in response. It suddenly went from a great utility/crowd control caster with a shapeshifting ability, to a class considered to do some things well but not worth the party slot compared to more specialized classes like Clerics, Wizards, and Ciphers.

I actually would not be surprised that if BG3 ultimately remains at 4 party members that the metrics will start showing some classes/companions just being completely ignored by most of the community in response. There's a reason why no one is really asking for the Monk or Sorcerer classes and companions in particular, while most people are asking for the Paladin and Bard.

Well, there is an argument to be made about that, indeed, and in fact we already made it a thousand times, give it or take it.

Yep, and hopefully we won't have to say it a thousand more times before they finally implement a 6 party game.

I've been following this discussion from the beginning, but I have to say that the game would be a mess with 6 characters at the party. For the following reasons:

1. Having to manage 6 inventories with the current system would be a nightmare (and especially with the chain/unchain movement system).

2. 6 party members can work well in Real-Time with Pause, where you can let some of them just do what the AI ​​tells them to do, but in Turn-Based Combat the fights would last for hours, damaging the pacing of the game.

3. Larian has expertise in making 4-character games. Asking them to change and manage it now can irretrievably damage the balance of the entire game (which is not yet perfect).

I know the current 4-character system is quite limited and makes experiments more difficult (why would anyone stop using the same tank-rogue-mage-cleric party?), but this can be improved in other ways. In some quests, we could have an extra fifth character, linked to the quest, or have to obligatorily use a different character to try out other ways of playing. I like how in PoE (first) we occasionally need to send a character on a quest, and that makes us have to put another party member in his/her place.

Lastly, maybe I say this more because in my years playing table-top RPG I rarely played with more than 4 people, and when that happened the game was always a mess. I particularly believe the game has a lot to lose if you place a group of 6.

Point 2 is the exact contrary of the truth: a party of six works better in turn-based combat than it does in real-time, especially on any system that requires any degree of participation above “EVERYONE AUTO-ATTACK!” and with an appropriate difficulty threshold.

Don’t even take my word for it:you can go and check Josh Sawyer himself claiming that they lowered the party cap at 5 in POE 2 precisely because some people were having a hard time keeping track of the party and he explicitly stated he wouldn’t have done it if Deadfire was a turn-based game (which hilariously enough it became, at a later date).

Point 1 may have some merit, but if anything it just adds to the pile of arguments about why the UI sucks and should be revamped. It’s not a GOOD argument against the extended party.

Point 3 is whatever. Basically a tautology. “Larian is right to do X because Larian has a history of doing X”.