Long resting appears to pass time because some encounters disappear if they're triggered from a distance and you long rest before engaging them (e.g., Edowin.) Maybe those are bugs?
This seems intentional to me and in line with what you want: a sense of urgency & consequences to long resting..??
Here are my suggestions for addressing these issues in both single player and co-op:
- Combat encounters don't need to be retuned for a higher maximum party size. Leave combat tuned for a party of four, but make combat progressively harder for each party member exceeding a party size of four. You can use something like (1 + ((CurrentPartySize > 4 ? CurrentPartySize - 4 : 0) / 2)) as a scaling difficulty multiplier.
- Players can travel with all companions and endure (or not endure) turn-based combat with a large party. Allow the player to travel with up to 8 members but limit the number of combatants by allowing the player to assign up to 8 members to combat roles. This means players can decide for themselves the size of the party they take into combat. (You might ask what noncombat party members would do during combat then. They probably should not be controllable at this time. They could idle, look bored, trash talk, call out enemy actions, fade out, or perform some other action that does not impact combat mechanically.)
1.) I've mentioned this before, but imo split exp between *participating* party members is the best solution to the difficulty. It'd be a single equation that automatically makes a bigger party lower level and vice-versa, and doesn't deal with any complex situations of how to make BG3's handcrafted combats more/less difficult (Add enemies? Their turns are now too long. Increase monster HP? That just becomes boring. Overhaul each encounter individually? That's a lot of work.).
- Although, I admit, this would be somewhat incompatible with the below...
2.) Non-combat players in your traveling party should 100% fade out. Otherwise it would make absolutely no sense that they're not joining in. Fading out can be interpreted as "they're actually fighting other invisible enemies over there, which is just not being shown."
- Traveling with 8+ members whose inventories you can all access and who you have to worry about stepping in traps, etc, just sounds like a huge hassle. Especially with BG3's current inventory UI and chain mechanic. I would not want this without huge overhauls to those systems, and even then I still likely wouldn't play as more than 5.
- In general, your suggestion is a good way to avoid the arbitrary "your party is full" nonsense and the fact that some companions just stay at camp doing nothing, when they have a tadpole in your head. Just have the game (NOT the characters) say that you can only control 4 (or 5 or 6 or 8) party members at one time. The others will travel with you, but are not available for combat/dialogues. Although perhaps they would force themselves into view *only* for their quest-relevant cutscenes..?
I think the cutscene issues are probably the most challenging, but if the game's ahead of schedule, they're solvable
That is a big IF and likely not true. Aside from the fact that there's not really a public "schedule" for BG3, I fee like Larian has said that BG3 is requiring much more work than they planned. Also, in general, assuming any game is behind schedule is a good guess.
