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

+1 on this. The fact that there seems to be eight confirmed companions, paired with their earlier statement that we'll need to commit to a party at the end of Act I (don't know if this has changed or not yet) makes a 4-man party (meaining, only 3 of these companions at most once you factor in mercenary characters) seem really limiting. Plus, if it works similarly to how it was done in Divinity: Original Sin II, it means we may need to do three separate playthroughs to see the stories of each of the eight companions.

+1000.
In DOS2 at least only 2 companions were gone once you committed to a party. But you cant give us 8 companions and expect to commit to 3

Great idea really instead of the having to shuffle companions to the camp to just sit there. Increase party size for single player use and yes let us create our own companions.

+1

+1

and

+1

(Quote from an interview with Sven Vincke:) "The studio has still opted to use the common Kickstarter method of going to early access before a main release. “It was never in doubt,” Vincke says. “We've seen what early access did for Divinity: Original Sin 1 and Original Sin 2, and so we know how much a community can add to the game. That is the case already for Baldur’s Gate 3, so I think it was the right decision.”

I've seen all the companion questlines and right now, I'm mostly interested in testing different team combos. If they want to use EA for player/community feedback, then let us do that. Let us actually test things without having to use these clunky workarounds.
Let us test 4 man parties, 6 man parties, 3 PCs and 1 NPC parties, 2 PCs & 2 NPC (1 romance for each, why not?)... see what works for us, what is ridiculously OP, what is plain unfun.

At this point I pretty much gave up on the idea of Larian ever testing anything in this area.
But I would be glad if at very least they could be kind enough to remove the HARD CODED restrictions they put in place here and there.

I'm playing once again with the "save hack" to allow a party of six characters and you have these occasional bottlenecks like when you take the boat in the underdark where they automatically kill the two extra characters you have during the cutscene.
The workaround is to remove from your party two companions BEFORE taking the boat, and then group them again.

Not a big problem in itself, but I can see it becoming one if they keep doing this in other places going forward.

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Not to go on a tangent, but out of boredom with how little they introduced in the updates of the vanilla game, yesterday I started to fool around with some mods.

I installed some stuff that added more levels, more spells, revamped a couple of classes and added a subclass in particular (Hexblade).
I have to say I'm impressed. I never touched this stuff so far because I expected for it to be in a much rougher state, but in reality most of it already feels almost impossible to tell apart from the native content.
Not even sure what parts of this additional content are datamined and what are custom made, so far.

If this is the level that can be achieved now with an almost complete lack of dedicate tools, it bodes reasonably well for the future.

Still, please, for the love of god (or whatever other fictional entity you are into), I know that expecting some modder to remove the toilet chain is just asking too much, but can someone come up with a way to change the stupid default formation?
I have that default wide pyramidal formation with fierce passion.

Maybe, but they might be holding the six man party back as suprise for when the game is released. I'm pretty sure Larian knows that a good number of us want to play with a larger party.

Nah.

Of course they know. They just don't care and think we are in the wrong.
It's funny because if it was a matter of "what the majority prefers" it was incredibly easy to put it to the test: just add the option early in the EA process and track data of what most players would go for. We suggested this and they didn't do it.

Same with the chain system to control the full party: it's terrible and one of the most widely unpopular things I've ever seen in any game, but somehow they are absolutely adamant even in the face of overwhelming evidence that there's something good there.

Well, we don't know if they are contemplating any solutions as Larian's lack of communication is a source of so many problems that the company could've been without. And I just don't find the argument about balancing convincing when Larian has confirmed that you can roll for stats (something that I personally prefer over point buy, but realizes that this will throw a monkey wrench in the balancing department).

This is still my hope. Of course I'd rather they did it before EA was concluded, but if the game launches with 6 I'd give them a nod.

Being able to create a custom party of 6 would also be great.

I'd like to choose party formations, and also have a solo driving cam view for non combat movement and exploration.

Larian has already expanded the UI so that you have room for six character portraits. It would't be dificult to make a six man party available for the players. Those that want a four man party need not take any more, but we who want a party of six would be free to do so.

As we pointed several times in the past you can in fact ALREADY play with six characters just by tweaking a variable in a save file:
https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/181?tab=description

But there are a couple of marginal problems with it:

- first, there are some occasional "bottlenecks" hardcoded into the game where you either ungroup the extra party members temporarily before doing something (i.e. taking the boat in the Underdark to reach Grymforge) or they get automatically "killed and glitched away".

- second, the DEFAULT formation for the party absolutely fucking blows, as it's this awkward, inconvenient widespread triangle, and I'm not sure if modders will be able to help in this sense:

Yeah that's an obstacle, but I'm pretty sure that Larian could easily fix those issues if they put their minds to it. Also we need to be able to change our formations.

Yeah the formations issue is its own separate issue, yet another one of the great many issues with the game.

It certainly wouldnt ...
But its even easier to simply say "we are counting with that many people will use 6member party mod, so we counted with it when we created our UI ... but that is all support you get from us" ... wich is basicaly what they did.

Any problems related to that mod will then follow the mod and not them.

That is a valid option for Larian, sure. But it doesn't mean much if the game still doesn't reasonably support 6 players; e.g., the auto-removal of players 5 and 6 on the raft scene.

Lack of formations is something Larian *could* leave as an issue because it doesn't break the game, it's just not liked by some people. And it's an issue not specific to 6-players; we can't change formations with 4 players either.

I believe i know why the game automaticly kills your 5th and 6th party member ...
Since our party just spawns on that raft dont walk there on their positions, the game *most likely* just dont know what to do with others, since Larian created only 4 solid spawning points ... so it deals with them as if they would fallen.

Therefore fix will be for moders quite easy, but problems like this have to be find first.

Right now, we only altern one number ... that is hardly sufficient for fully working mod.

Yes and no: You cant have a 6 full custom party with the mod. Only 3 customs at best and origin characters. Thats an issue for me personally because thats what im looking for.

Hi!, been playing since first day and all i can say, 5 custom is a must pleaseeeeeeeeeeeee, it's so sad to get an item and not having the clase to use it =(, there's so many items that go to waste just because not enough party members to use them!!!. it's so uninmmersive to go back to camp and change party members because i needed a specific race or class to continue on that one specific quest =(.., since all origins have their own story, but i wanna experience the bg3 story, not theirs, i mean, i while in the meanwhile, but the core is the baldurs gate stuff, and i'll have to make a charisma char because of persuasions which is the most important, so that only leaves three-four classes okish for a face, i could certainly adapat every class and race to it but it wouln't be as powerful in battle and just be a drag after a while, and it's really supposed to be a dnd game, it has felt very strange to have 4 people only, most stories go along with 5 or 6.
Origin characters are ok but """"" """" they need to be more present in the party while in the world, just 3 is not enough for them to interact, they feel empty and without nothing interesting to say most of the times., and they only start to speak when interesting stuff is happening around,

Thats possible ...
But completely unrelated to what i was talking about. O_o

Well, of course they COULD.

The issue, like with party controls, is that they don't seem to particularly care about it.
Or more specifically, they seem to think that it's perfectly fine as it is and we are complaining about negligible cases, I guess.