Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General 4 Character Party Limit Too Small?

You didnt really bother much to search ... did you?
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=672266#Post672266

Another +1. 😁

Even if larian sticks to only 4 players. I think mods will allow for extra members.

Honestly, no, not really. There is so little identity to classes that I never miss having someone in my party. It’s just irrelevant - no matter what party I have the game plays more or less the same.

Perhaps the benefit of 6 party would be that having 1/6 of your party pushed to death would be less painful then 1/4.

Yeah there is fascinatingly little in terms of class diversity here. Everyone can cast spells and many class features are gone or tweaked and all that...

Yeah, it is too small for several reasons and under several metrics, but we already discussed all this what feels like a million times.
It's not really a matter of difficulty, either. It's just that a 4-men cap feels awfully restrictive in a big ass CRPG where you'd hope to meet new characters left and right, try different compositions, experience as many companions sidequest at once as possible, etc.

That's mostly a problem tied to playing with low level characters capped at 4.
That aside, class variety is just part of the discourse here.

This is kind of how I feel about it. However fine tuned the encounters need to be for a certain party size, the bigger draw for having more party members is seeing how they'd interact with each other and the the world.

I even wouldn't be totally opposed to a slightly unrealistic system where every one in the roster was 'present' for dialogues and banter, but only a few were 'on deck' for combat. You might even go full JRPG and have a system where you swap people in and out during combat. Maybe that's a bit too much.

I think a problem with a lot of RPGs is how you could find a good party composition and never really veer from that for the whole campaign. I'll give BG:3 some kudos, a lot of encounters become less difficult if you match the right people to the challenge, it's just a bit of a hassle swapping them in.

This is how Tower of Time did it, and it worked really well IMO.

I don't particularly like this approach. I never understood why you would journey together and NOT fight together.

Big mama boss spider. You COULD have 6 people fighting together to kill it but for no reason you just fight her with 4... So that it's more of a challenge? If you COULD have 6 fighting tough enemies, why wouldn't you? It just bugs me in video games. I don't mind if there's a logical story reason, but when there is no legit logical reasoning, it bugs me.

That's why party of 4 in BG3 bugs me. The whole, "You're full up" with only 4 people makes no sense. None. It might make sense for a stealth mission into the goblin base, but if I'm wandering a hostile countryside, the more party members, the wiser you are. And especially if you know you're going up against a serious for, like a Gith patrol, why would you NOT bring everyone?

I just think it should be left up to the player to decide. The game should not limit you for no good reason.

Now, if they gave us a reason, like you need to leave people at camp to guard it or random encounters might occur and you might lose food and resources, that makes more sense. But again, that should be a player decision, not the game forcing you.

+1 This is usually my headcannon for games with more companions than party slots. Everyone is there and fighting enemies offscreen while you're fighting, but you only manage 4-6 characters against a subset of the enemies.

In this approach (at least my version of it), everyone is fighting together. The combatants are just limited to [4, 6, or X] for gameplay reasons. Take DAO: real-time combats while managing ~10 characters, with combat encounters that are balanced for 10 characters? Ugh that would be terrible: the combats would likely either be long&tedious or incredibly swingy because of high enemy damage to compensate.

This dialogue means that this "4 person limit" is an in-universe thing, which is incredibly dumb. If the game just brought you to a party select screen with only 4 total party slots, that'd be better. Games can and should have limitations (something something "players will optimize the fun out of a game"), but not all limitations need to be explained in the game world.

By that logic the game would allow player to run with every companion and mercenery possible in the game. Even games where you manage a whole army have some kind of cap - be it a "supply limit" or "upkeep" cost. A hard cap of "you can have X number of characters" might be a crude limitation, but I don't think a game like team-based RPG need a more nuanced system. You pick 4/5/6/8 characters for your team, and that's it. Easy for player to understand, predictable for devs to design around.

gather your party.. of 3... which of course the total including yourself are 4. the original baldur's gate both 1 & 2 has 6 party characters. 4 is too restricted. i really like the original 6.

I agree. You are right. I was only speaking to the mechanic working well in terms of party interactions. But I also was rather bothered by the immersion-breaking nature of it, and have posted as much on their game forum.

I also do not like this concept of everyone is fighting, you just can't see them. You only see and control 4. Why?

Because only the 4 are wounded, use spell slots, and use items. Everyone else is full everything no matter how many battles you fight.

For people like you there is only one possible answer ... no answer, deal with it.

A big reason behind this I'm assuming is Larian is pretty noob to DM'ing actual DnD and every monster is rated against a party of 4. Makes the balancing of DnD pretty easy in that sense. Of course, all this is out the window when they go and homebrew the shit outta the rules and even the monsters.

Mods will be the answer. I'm pretty much banking on relying on mods to even make this remotely DnD 5e tbh. Sure, I would like them to make it correctly but I have faith mods will set me straight.

It does feel small to me. But the total number of recruitable party members is only going to be 8, if the party was any bigger the small roster would get really noticeable, IMO.

Source?

Datamining, Larian's statements. All companions are going to be origins characters, and there are only eight origins characters. Aside from the five we have, there's . Which itself is deceptively large, because unless Larian changes their plans, we'll be losing a minimum of five of them at the end of Act I ala DOS2.