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

Depressing if this turns out to be true but not really surprising at all, given that every interaction is cinematic. A poor, poor decision to insist on Origins characters only and a pitiful number of companions at that.

that's the price to pay for going full cinematic and full VOs. cut and limited content tailored for cinematic and voice overs. the best they can do more are probably just like codexes, books, etc. branching dialogues, options, banters, all would have to be sacrificed for cinematics. of course the total number of companions. many would argue quality over quantity. yep. let's wait and look at the quality. and of course those are subjective and arguable as well. you may not like x and think it's bad but someone said it's top notched.

Given that I couldn't stand any of the currently available companions in EA, it would appear that if I ever played the game again I would be stuck with the remaining 3 companions. That is a stark contract to the previous games where there were probably only a couple of characters I never travelled with.

It was fun to swap out your party members when required and exciting that on first play through you never knew when you were going to meet a potential new companion. In BG3 we meet all companions in a very short period of time.

This thread should really be in the megathread.

Party of 4 - can't have ANY origin characters in the party if you play 4 player multiplayer.

Party of 4 - monsters need nerfing and don't have proper stats and behaviors.

Party of 4 - you don't get as many dialogues as you adventure.

Party of 4 - you have to constantly switch out party members just to do basic side quests related to certain characters.

Party of 4 - characters sit at camp "idling away the hours" when they have tadpoles in their heads and should be helping you not die against tough enemies like the Gith patrol.

Party of 4 - the grove is getting attacked and everyone is going to die, but characters like Wyll don't participate because you left him at camp. Guess he really didn't care that much after all, eh?

Come on. Party of 4 makes no flipping sense in the game. The only time I'd actually ONLY travel with 4 is if I was on a stealth mission. If I have 6 party members at camp, I'm gonna take all 6 to face potentially difficult situations like having to defend a grove against a goblin horde led by a bloodthirsty Drow cleric lady... Or if I'm going to waltz into and raid a goblin camp and kill their 3 supposedly big bad leaders and then face 30 minions as I'm trying to escape.

We dont exactly know if what we have right now is "all" companions ...
Actualy, concidering datamined info, and some old interviews ... we can be quite sure it isnt.

But yes, we meet them all pretty soon ...
And many of them we can also pretty soon either loose, or even straight forward kill with our own hands.

I still dare to presume that we will leave most of our party (in my honest opinion everyone except single Origin character we will follow to Act II.) ... since once our tadpole problem will be solved, we would no longer need to stick together.

Agreed ...
I asked for merge few days ago, but sadly no response. :-/

Its basically directly tied with how little companions we will get in the game, aka, less than 10. (probably 8??).
Also tied to, yet again, the baffling decision to make a Baldur's Gate game dialogues... ALL into Tell tale cinematics; the work involved is probably HELL.

At the very least, 5 playable and around 10~12 companions would of been a perfect balance imho.

Larian, remove 40% of USELESS cinematic dialogues, use voiced text. And redirect the work into NEW COMPANIONS. Its that easy. Keep SUPER HIGH QUALITY cinematics for key storyline moments, emotional moments, action scenes etc...get rid of the overwhelming slooooow cinematic FLUFF in this game (its everywhere!!) to produce more quality content.

And then be acused (and found guilty) from not delivering what you actualy litteraly promissed ... its that easy.

Also what do you all have with that 8 companions? Where did you get that? O_o
There is 12 classes after all. O_o

+1
i think pathfinder wrath of the righteous has it about quite right. full VO and cinematics for essential chapters and important events only. Others doesn't need full cinematics IMHO. doesn't need full VO too. full VO might be nice for the first or 2nd playthrough. i find myself skipping conversations and just directly choosing the dialogues after 1st or 2nd playthrough. more content can be added, more branching dialogues, decisions and consequences vs cut content for the sake of cinematics. Even with full cinematics, game feels weird for me too as a silent protagonist.

more companions are actually better as it increases replayability with different party composition. so far we have cleric, rogue, fighter, wizard, warlock.
left are paladin, monk, ranger, druid, sorcerer, bard and barbarian. there may be some missing classes from companions unless main character assume that role. has larian confirmed how many total companions would there be in bg3?

I haven’t seen anything recently about number of companions, although I would like to know! A couple of years ago, one of the writers said that there were at least 8 companions, possibly more and possibly nonorigin characters.

For me full VO is essential and cinematic dialogue is strongly preferred. I want more companions, too, though. I want it all!

You have to be really careful with the 'wanting it all' philosophy though because that is sort of the definition of how scope management disasters happen right!

As for full voice acting - there's a really interesting game developer post-mortem with Josh Sawyer where he argues that full voice acting was so so bad for POE2. In many ways it's actually Larian who set the market expectation that cRPGs now have full voice acting with Divinity Original Sin 2. It's a total disaster for writing complex branching/reactive narratives though and can take focus away from other parts of the development cycle that are just very likely much more important to the overall quality of the game. I'm actually incredibly worried about this trend and I think Larian going full VO for something with lots of reactivity like BG3 was very likely a mistake.

The tradeoff is likely to be that you get a more cinematic feel but inevitably some reactivity and choice and consequence will go which is basically always a terrible trade - because the former ages rapidly whilst the latter is timeless.

Let's take a poll. Go to the megathread and give your answer.

Who wants party of 6? If you do, go to megathread and post +1. If not, -1.

No reasons. Just +1 or -1.

We as final consuments are actualy the only one in whole development process who can affor wanting everything.
Disasters happens only when someone higher will take that wish too literally.

BG3 isn’t POE2, and I think BG3 having full VO will work out well for Larian. 😊 AAA games have the budget for it.

He argues pretty much the opposite and his point is only that their pipeline to implement it a the last minute was incredibly stressful.

This seems the opposite of how it should work. I would think that adding voice acting at the last minute - after all dialogue is ~finalized - is much much better than recording voice acting first, then having to re-record lines when dialogue changes..? Can you explain so I don't have to search through that video?

As long as all the companions get classpools that fit with their story and arnt hard locked i think it'll be fine.

If we get dos2 level party restrictions without having atleast a portion of the classing wiggleroom it'll be rough.

But if we can roll shadow as a cleric/paladin/Sorcerer

Or wyll as a warlock/fighter/bard/ranger i think it'll be fine. Every companion has atleast 3 classes that would fit

I was about to respond to that, but I think @agad meant that. And if not, then yeah - ship combat/relationshipmechanic/topic system were far more damaging then full VO.

It's not because dialogue doesn't record itself. For details: go here, time stamp: 41:50

Thanks for the timestamp.

However, that's not my takeaway from this talk. He says it was so stressful mainly because of time pressure due to fast-approaching deadlines as owners wouldn't push back the deadlines. Obviously there's a relation between starting VO earlier in development and having less deadline-related stress, but it's not clear if that compensates for the additional work due to having to re-record things and take away time from writing early in development ("the writers aren't writing any more [...] because they're recording VO and that takes all of their time.")

If he was given 3 additional months from the start to put into VO, removing the main source of stress, would he put that near the beginning, middle, or end of development? I don't think this question is answered by (at least that section of) his talk.

So funny to me people defending less content is GOOD nowdays...Shows the state of the industry. People are so used to it and auto-equate this to better quality?!
ooooh 4 is fine! ITS HIGH QUALITY. 8 companions no problem! ITS HIGH QUALITY. Fewer classes great! ITS HIGH QUALITY. Why have more? Its already so HIGH QUALITY! And simple! And you can make MODS ! and we have DLCs ! Its perfect!

Expectation are now so low even shit smells like roses.

Just watch everyone lose their minds when Larian announces A SINGLE NEW COMPANION! OMG THEY DID IT! LARIAN YOU TRULY ARE THE BEST ! See nay-sayers, they delivered!
I mean common, as we've seen just adding a SINGLE class to the game gets its own special <world event> LOL.

Remember that Sony PS1 conference when he went up to the mike and dropped the "$299" Bomb?

Where is the :

"30 companions"
"party of 6"
"103 subclasses"
"500+ spells"

game? (Pathfinder WoTr came the closest, and BRAVO for that!) Thats what I expected from a new age BG3 game. In a cRPG more is definitely better. BECAUSE THE QUALITY CAN IMPROVE.

BG2 was designed from the start to have a boat load of content. And thanks to that base concept even 20 years later the modding community is strong, the game better, more fun and longer for it. Yes it aged, but like a fine wine; and not everyone drinks wine...sadly...homebrew new age beer is more popular

I'm not sure you're arguing the same thing. Building tall is not equal to building wide. Party size is about combat encounters and dialogue bandwidth, and doesn't really have anything to do with the quality of either except as a matter of preference.