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

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Not sure why i'm not allowed to post anything here. Keeps getting timed out whenever i try to comment here. Anyone knows why? Maybe max. page reached? Need thread v2?

Can confirm party size mod still work in p7 as long as you create less than 4 char in multiplayer...
PRAIZE THE MOD.

The tweak I used NEVER involved multiplayer, though? It just involved tweaking a save file variable to allow a larger party.
It's this one: https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/181?tab=description
Also, "changing method" doesn't really fit my needs, since the idea was playing with all the currently available companions in party like I did in the past, not with mute custom droids.

Very glad we can mod a larger party without using MP/player-created characters. If having a bigger party is only possible by using empty-suit created characters, that would be counterproductive and pointless.

Arguments for a 4 man party:

1. The game's difficulty, environmental (such as hallways) is balanced around it, changing that now is just plain dumb tbh. It would delay the development by a long time.

2. Even having 4 characters gets crowded in many places, when you need to jumo over your characters in narrow areas to get to the enemy. 6 characters would eb nightmare.

3. Cycling through characters in combat takes even longer, beng detrimental to game's combat speed whihc is already on the slow side. Especially when you have one character go alone ins neak mode, it's really annoying already to press end turn to skip the turn on the remaining three every turn, Doing it five times would be plain hell.

4. As stated before, the need to specific roles are much less needed in D&D so you can play without a healer etc (I do).

5. Replayability increases by a lot because even after you finish the game there will be a couple more new fresh companions to play with ij your next setup, with their unique storylines to explore.

6. It's more challening, which means more fun.

I used to miss 6 characters as well, but now because the game's so fun and enjouable even after 6+ playthroughs, I prefer 4 man. I will replay this game many times, no need to have all companions with your the first time, and it adds more variety.

I am sure a mod with add 6 man party for you to enjoy anyway.

Sorry, rejected.
NEEEXT!

For the record I managed to make this work with Patch 7.
Turns out the culprit of my constant crashes was the tool I used to edit the savegames, that needed to be updated at the latest version.

Too bad I realized this just yesterday, after already going through my entire playthrough of Patch 7 with a LAME 4-men party.
"More fun" my hairy ass...

We've discussed many of these before. I'll only touch on a few. You are certainly entitled to your opinion, and I'm not suggesting that there is a right or wrong answer here. However, I have many reasons for liking party of 6, so I will defend it and try to point some things out about your reasoning.

1. Difficulty is based on Larian's homebrew gimmicks and rules and monsters. Proper 5e rules, monsters, etc. would change the entire difficulty in a hot minute. Encounters that are currently challenging, as you say, would become deadly if they actually used the right rules and stats. So, a party of 6 would be required to NOT have an OP encounter in this game if they used the proper 5e stats and rules. Also, I've played party of 6 mod, and it works just fine as far as environment, hallways, etc. Would it delay the development? Not really that much. Change some numbers and such. If a simple mod can do it, they can do it. Change Party Max Size to 6 instead of 4, like the mod does. The hardest part would be to implement 5e rules and stats, but they need to do difficulty settings for the game anyway. So, provide us with a Core Rules difficulty, party of 6, and we're good.

2. Jumping is only an issue because Larian is still needing to work on the whole mechanic of it. They require you to jump because they don't let you pass through other character's spaces. An enemy should block you. A friend should not. They should allow your own party members to pass totally through each others' spaces. So, if someone is blocking you, it should only be an enemy. THEN Jumping like a superhero wouldn't be necessary just to maneuver around the map. You wouldn't NEED to feel crowded by 6 characters or 4 in tight spaces because they wouldn't get in your way as much. This CAN and HAS been done in games like Solasta.

3. I've touched on this before. 6 party members would not slow down combat as much as people think. In fact, many times it would speed it up. Imagine teaming up on a single ogre with a party of 6 as opposed to a party of 4. 6+ attacks in a single round as opposed to just 4-ish. One ogre could be potentially taken out per round if 6 members gang up on it, each taking 1-10 HP off of it. Meanwhile, it may take multiple rounds to try to take out the same ogre with only a party of 4 especially if it gets to go at some point and knocks out one of your 4 before they get to attack. Sure, the skipping thing is totally true. If stealthing or doing something similar, if you have to just skip the turns of everyone else, that can get a bit more annoying than only a party of 4, but how much slower are we really talking? Especially as they are speeding up combat more and more, I'm thinking the end result probably won't be THAT painful. But, of course, that's a matter of opinion.

4. TRUE D&D REQUIRES class distinctions. This is something else we're fighting for. You SHOULD require a healer. By the Nine! The fact that you don't is just sad. Larian has severely crushed the classes, making them so they really aren't unique or needed at all. Imagine playing the game and not being able to throw potions to heal. Imagine not being able to use every scroll no matter which character you are. Imagine a potion being an Action to use. Imagine that when a party member falls, you have to make a Medicine roll to revive them before they die. If you fail, they continue to roll to see if they die. Imagine that you don't have magic items that give you the ability to use spells that your class wouldn't normally be able to use. You see, part of the problem is that Larian ISN'T being true to D&D, and that's why you don't need all your bases covered in your party. You don't need a rogue because everyone can pick locks, disarm traps, use potions as Bonus Actions, etc. All these things are NOT D&D.

5. With the Party of 6 mod, the characters interact MORE with one another when all traveling together. Things you normally would not have happen actually happen. They talk to one another and have banter and everything SO much more than with party of 4. This is, of course, another matter of opinion, but I much more prefer the party feeling like one cohesive group actually talking to each other and bantering than having some sitting at camp doing nothing because a party of 4 is, for some reason, "full up." Never mind you have a tadpole in your head and you're all in the same boat. Wyll and Astarion'll just sit back and do nothing while 4 people try to take on a goblin camp of 30 or more, some of which are ogres.

6. Challenging, again, is based on difficulty settings and the fact that they don't use proper stats. Trust me when I say, this whole game could be so much more fun if party of 6 with proper stats. Very challenging still and lots of fun. I played it out via tabletop. It works and encounters are still rather deadly at times. The big difference is, there's more balance with proper stats and rules without people jumping like superheroes, shoving people 30 feet through the air, spiders spitting poison and teleporting like mages, imps with actual resistance, intellect devourers that use devour intellect and try to body thief you, mud mephits that don't multiply like a virus, wood woads that act like wood woads, drow with sun sensitivity who only fight at night because the sun hinders them, goblins who don't have thunder arrows that knock you into explosive barrels and blow you and your whole party to kingdom come...

Ahem. I digress. The point is, this game COULD be truly balanced and awesome with party of 6 fairly easily. They just need to implement a Core Rules difficulty and set the monster stats to what they should be using more appropriate monster tactics and abilities.

Having the possibility to play 6 adventurers is far from being my top priority (the low quality of the gameplay makes me put a lot of things higher than this). But I don't like seeing bad arguments. And this argumentation is flawed on such a large, large scale.


1.a. At the moment, the game is anything but balanced. You can't break something that was never whole to being with. (Note/digression : I don't necessary view this as bad. I'd prefer that Larian waits until they have implemented all the classes and the game's max level, before they move to the balancing/fine-tuning of encounters.)

1.b. That it would take a long time is light years from being obvious. In fact, adjusting a game that would be balanced for 4 adventurers to a game balanced for 6 adventurers can start with a simple rule of thumb. With 6 turns per round instead of 4, the player has 50% more actions and thus firepower : increase enemy HP by 50%. Also, the player's team has 50% more HP. Increase enemy damage by 50%. Bam, first draft done, 30sec of dev time. Of course, that may need testing (perhaps adding goblins is better than buffing their stats, etc). But the first draft is fast.

Also, nothing prevent Larian from saying "hey, we balanced the game for 4 adventurers. If you have 6, nothing in the game will be adjusted and you'll have a much easier game. Feel to increase the difficulty to whatever seems appropriate for you". Indeed, the game will have difficulty options.

2. Really bad argument. A poor movement/party control system isn't a good reason to keep the number of characters low : it's a poor feature to ditch and rework while it's still Early Access. If anything, your argument would call for playing BG3 single player with a solo adventurer.

(Side note : in DnD 5E, allies can move through each other. Larian just didn't get this part right. But their engine allows character to move through each other, as can be seen when they climb ladders.)

3. Really depends at what you choose to measure. If the number of enemies is unchanged, having 6 adventurers instead of 4 means you spend a larger fraction a round's time actually playing.

4. Agreed, you don't need 6 classes. But if some players want more companions and banter in their games ?

5. Artificially increasing replayability by limiting the number of companions you can have is a very poor tactics.

And speaking for myself, given how horrendous the UI is across the board (and how shallow the ruleset feels), I'm not sure I'll want to be forced to make a 2nd/3rd/4th playthrough to experience more narrative content.

6. False. As you mentioned in your point 1., there is this notion called balance. Playing with 6 adventurers does not have to be less challenging. Also, for the record, different players find their fun in different ways.


p.s. : sigh ... I'm really much too slow at writing.

If literally all that's required to increase the party size to 6 (or 8!) is the adjustment of one variable, then it shows Larian is at least testing it out, if not working toward larger parties. I take this as a good sign. Personally, 5 is the sweet spot for me.

Are they though? That's part of the problem. We've been told that they're going to produce the game however they want and the modders can do whatever they want.

If it is easy for modders to make it a party of six, will they waste their time on it themselves?

But the problem I have is that I hate mods. They cause the computer to crash or the game to crash. When there's an update, it may mess up my save file and I have to start all over again. I don't always trust the site I'm getting the mod from. How do you know there aren't viruses?

And then there is the matter of how the game is not really balanced for a party of six. I mean, I had fun with it even though it was super easy, and some fights were still challenging. However, there are some battles that are just so ridiculously easy because they aren't giving the monsters the proper stats and stuff.

Example, the three devourers after the beach. If I have a party of four customs, those devours are super easy. If it's just me and Shadow heart, it's a little bit more balanced but only because they're just dumb brain dogs. They're not actual devours. If they were real devours, a party of six would be severely challenged even if they're wounded. Resistance to just about any weapon, plus their devour intellect ability, these alone without body thief make them hard for four or five party members. They become ridiculously impossible for two level one characters.

The variable is called DB_Origins_MaxPartySize(1) – and normally has a value of 4. You can change it up to 8. That's literally how easy it is, you don't need modders to work on this. Which means Larian has built the engine and the UI to handle parties of that size. I understand it's so you can have followers etc too, but basically larger parties are effectively already in the game, it just needs to be enabled.

It would be nice if encounters scaled based on party size (in reverse too for people that want to run a smaller party). Hopefully that is something they are working on, assume we will be getting difficulty levels at some point anyway.

Totally agree

Know it has been said before, but it needs to be six. Stay consistent to the IP Larian. Oh right you only want the IP for window dressing.

The idea smaller smaller makes choices matter more, no it doesn't It makes the party more cookie cutter. The limitation means people will select more often, only the top performing classes, rather than adding classes that don't perform as well for fun.

With the 4 limit that pretty much means unless I'm play a cleric myself (which isn't very likely) that that one slot is always filled. So the only factor is am I playing a melee or spell caster myself on the rest of the makeup. If I'm a melee that means 2 spell casters for CERTAIN. If I'm playing a spell caster that means most likely the same, maybe I sub in 1 melee, that most like will be a fighter since our cleric NPC fills the role of a thief for locks and traps just fine.

So the smaller party didn't make my choices more meaningful at all. It basically made me not have a choice at all.

I don't want to have to rely on mods for this. It should be baked in and let players decide and players adjust the difficulty as needed as well.

That is interesting opinion if nothing else ...
I wonder why do we even need arguments for something that is there while nobody (afaik) wanted to change it.

I mean i dont want to say everybody since there is possibikity that i obersighted something ... but as far as i know MOST people here were asking for OPTION ...
There was even some mentions of warning sign.
Wich (sory i have to be the one who tells you) completely negate everything you said bcs once i activate the option its just the same as if i use the mod ... just easier, and with much lesser risk of crashes and corupting files ... basicaly we say by choosing the option "im aware that this will affect my game but i want it anyway".

You do have to wonder how many of these things are already on a list of Gift Bags that Larian will bring out sometime after release.

Im asking this question a lot allready.

Of all the recurring excuses about why a party of four would be great the one that I detest the most is quite possibly "Less slots encourage diversity between playthroughs". No, they fucking don't.
When you have basically no room for any type of role redundancy or for less than optimal classes for your need, more often than not you'll find yourself reserving some crucial slots for the same key companions (or a custom-made equivalent) and constantly excluding the same sub-optimal ones.

And NO, having room only for two characters in my party wouldn't make me wish to play the game six time to experience all the twelve classes, it just makes me look at classes I don't particularly love and say "Well, tough luck, sucker".

We don't even know how many companions are going to be available in Act II and Act III.

This is SO true. You know why Wyll is hardly ever in my party? This. This right here. To me, he's not worth it. Why? He's squishy, doesn't deal much damage, and he can't cast a lot of spells.

You know who else tends to get kicked? Shadowheart. One of THE main people because she has the relic. Why? If I'm a druid. I have healing. Don't need her. Even if I don't have another healer, potions can be thrown and sometimes heal better. Anyone can resurrect.

So, if restricted, bye Shadowheart. This is a shame, because I like her, for the most part. Wyll too, really.

This is why especially I hate party of 4 in Multiplayer. Can't bring ANYONE THEN.