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

And lets not forget all these <failesd?> RPG games that have parties of 5+ :


Might and magic 3
Wizardry 7, 8
Ultima 6, 7
Planescape Torment
Baldurs gate 1, 2

Icewind dale 1,2
Shining force series
Fire emblem series
Lunar 1, 2
Lufia: the Legend Returns
Final fantasy IV, V, VI
Persona 1, 2
Neverwinter Nights 2
Temple of elemental Evil
Arc the lad 1
Romancing SaGa 2, 3
SaGa Frontier
Unlimited:Saga
Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song

Suikoden 1, 2

Final fantasy tactics

Tactical Ogre
Dark Rose Valkyrie
Wasteland 2
Etrian Odyssey
Pillars of eternity 1, 2
Pathfinder Kingmaker / 
Pathfinder WoTr
Advent Dark Force
Lords of Xulimia

"because having two characters put to sleep/incapacitated in a party of six is a relatively minor annoyance, having it in a party of fours can mean being forced to a reload" That is a very good point!

High level characters are much more complex to manage, no doubt, and after a certain point I just do not enjoy that, so I under-utilized the rest of the party in BG II. I don't have a multi-tasking brain, I guess. The Neverwinter Nights single campaign really tried to let you focus on just your PC, and I liked that aspect of it, but it felt really lonely because you could have only one other NPC join at a time. I don't have BG III yet, how is the party AI? As I said before, maybe the turn-based system makes this less of an issue, I just don't know.

Nevewinter Nights (2002) excelled with its multiplayer component, though.

Yes that is true ... my dial-up bandwidth out in the mountains was not very good back in those days, so I had to live with the single player campaign.

My only complaint with NWN2 party sizes, was actually with the Mask of the Betrayer expansion campaign, where they let you have a party of 4, but then gave you only four npc companions. At least in the original campaign you had a bunch of extra characters to mix and match, but in Mask you were leaving only one person behind all the time, which was just the most unnecessary restriction. We can double up in the tents or something. Okku/One-of-Many doesn't even need a tent anyway.

If you're going to give me 8+ npc companions to pick from, I'd understand the party size restriction, because taking everyone would be an enormous party, but if your party size limit is four, and you only give me four or five npcs, that's unnecessary, just let me take all of them.

So your argument is that party size in BG3 should be bigger because I exist?

There isnt any AI ... is it? O_o
Companions simply follow you (unless they are told not to ... and sometimes they stuck), when you are out of combat ... and you get full control over them in combat ...
You can also get full control over them outside of combat and make certain choices with them ... funny enough, those choices can be in direct contradiction with their believes and prefferences ...

Like:

For me the turn-based system makes managing multiple characters in combat more fun in BG3. 😊

I find the whole discussion repetitive and increasingly uninteresting but your post is a bit of an overreaction, and unfair.

If there are more people to deal with, the intensity of interaction with each has to go down in a given timeframe. If the difficulty remains, the meaning of any party member in combat dwindles, and the friends of "6" always claim that the game has not to be rebalanced (while denying problems for the highest difficulty tier). That we have not seen a game where big party numbers count, is obvious (cause they don't exist), so the cited poster here is wrong when he said that the game is not about combat. I don't know wether most fights are avoidable like the cited poster said, but a lot are, and I had to reload a lot to get my combat which I avoided against my will by "luck" of the dice; for the question "4" or "6" the possibility to avoid combat is however not important, ok.

But to the core of the cited poster's post, when you say, in a later post, that having 2 of 4 put to sleep is much more of a catastrophy than having 2 of 6 put to sleep, you are right but at the same time contradict your statements in the first and following posts, because obviously the game is much harder with 4 (given the same encounters), so in a group of 6 each char is not that important and the contribution less.

So although the poster you cited is not completely right in my opinion, you are even less in your answer. The state of discussion remains; some want 4, some want more, each side has arguments.

Its true that Tuco can be sometimes unnecesary harsh ... but this dont seem to be the case. O_o
Basicaly nothing Miravlix said was truth ... so how else would you call it, if not nonsence? :-/

As for the rest ...
What are you talking about? O_o

"The larger the group the more pointless each member becomes."
Neither logical nor true.

"You are basically asking for the game to be Warhammer and the "party" being an army."
Nobody has asked for this, and six is lightyears away from being an "army." Ridiculous.

"... battles is not the main objective of BG3. Most of the battles has a way to entirely avoid them ...."
From everything I've seen in the EA portion of the game, battles *are* the main objective in the game. And battles being avoidable is mostly a farce because the game clearly incentivizes the combat option over any and all other options.

"... what are you going to do with those 10 party members?"
How did six become ten? Again, who here has asked for ten?

So, exaggerations, strawmen, and false claims all over the place.

I swear, If Larian had implemented a party of 5 or 6 and 10+ companions...NOBODY here would of been complaining "Its way TOO MaNy...complicates combat and sTufF....we should of had 3 or 4..." (except Rag and Ice of course)

Dont you really have anything better to do?
Licking poisonous materials for example?

Certainly the players will always have the option to choose fewer than the maximum number of allowed party NPC's, so yeah 6 or 8 or 12 is fine with me if Larian can write them. I can say that in BG-I I was good with six, but in BG-II I found a full six was cumbersome and I was generally happier with a core group of only 4 or 5, depending on whether my PC was multi-classed.

But I do find much encouragement from Icelyn's comment that the turn-based system is still fun even with a large party. This will be something new for me, and I look forward to trying it out!

That's the second time (at least) where you've insinuated/implied that someone should kill themselves; you once told me to go play in traffic. Arguments here can get heated, sure, but there's no reason for you to behave as a child.

Hopefully you will like it as well!😊

If the difficulty is unchanged, then it's important for a 6-person party to be an option in settings, with a warning: "This game is balanced for a 4-person party. Your experience with 6 may vary." Then if people complain that the balance changes while playing with 6...who cares about their opinions? They were warned. Also, if the difficulty is unchanged, the meaning of each party member in combat remains the same (or increases). Combats will proceed faster because now the entire party is 1.5x as strong (more actually, because synergies -> "whole is more than the sum of its parts").

If the difficulty is changed for 6-person parties, then last part of your claim is moot. However, yes, in this case the relative effectiveness of each party member won't be the same as in a 4-person party. E.g., if each encounter has 1.5x as many enemies (or each enemy has 1.5x stats) then each party member effectively becomes ~1.5x less effective in combat. Although, again, you have to account for additional synergies between the 6-person-party, which increases overall (and individual) effectiveness.

I mean.. does it make any sense? No, but most RPGs out there have a cap on the number of companions you can bring along (DA, ME, NWN, IWD etc). Even in the original BG games, only the cap was at 6.
In my opinion, the best approach is to have a few highly characterised companions who you can bring along all together instead of having tons of them and just travel with the usual 3.

I think Larian has chosen a party of four because is the realistically maximum number of people you can recruit for an online cRPG campaign. They are going for the Multiplayer experience first, sadly, because at the moment we have 5 companions, so a group of six will be more than plausible.


Not a fan of it, I prefer to venture forward with all my companions, but if I could tolerate it in Dragon Age: Origins, I think I can tolerate it here.

Still, again, not a fan.

Yeah, well, that's one of the collateral effects of always bringing up the same old talking points: you'll get the same old answers.

Oh, but this is the easiest argument to retort:

A hard cap to six characters allow both groups to be satisfied and play how they want, while a cap to four simply does not.

Ahh, but you are forgetting the fact that i don't want you to be satisfied, it tarnishes my enjoyment of the game if you are enjoying it in your way instead of my way.