There are so many other ways they could tweak the difficulty scale, that I'm still baffled they chose to key it off the 4 person comp like this.
Like seriously Jaheira alone can summon 5 minions all by herself... The greater Elemental/Myrmidon who can Elemental Warp every turn. A pair of minor elementals. A Woodland being who can summon her own Wood Woad. Or with Shadowheart summoning Skeletons and Planar beings, elementals like the above from scrolls etc.
A party of 4 then becomes a party of 12 that way, so of course its going to skew wildly.
But then you don't get to equip and kit out all those summons or tool around with all the various sinks that apply to normal PCs, you know like equipment and healing and whatnot. They don't chime in with little quips or running commentaries.
I just don't see how it's all that different than having a party comp of 5 or 6 PCs, just with a cap on the summons or overall group size.
I think players will find the game somewhat frustrating in these giant cascading battles where the Party has 4 turns vs so many enemies at once. BG3 is frequently throwing temp Allies at us in fights where we don't really need them, to compensate for enemy turn order.
Also in a situation where we can game the iniative so readily, like if we had a party of 5 or 6, trying to juice initiative wouldn't be as relevant.
It's easier to balance encounters around 3 or 4 I'm sure, but that doesn't mean that's necessarily the best thing for a party based game with "Baldur's Gate" in the name. Managing the companions in the active party and kit'ing them out is part of the charm.
I want 6! I've had the same line for a couple years now hehe
Oh also, if you're struggling to hit with spells it probably means something else is going down. Could be the lighting or elevation, having stuff apply advantage/disadvantage, being outside normal range or in melee range without realizing it, that sort of thing. Cantrips like Firebolt and Sacred Flame scale differently than levelled spells. Spells that always hit like Magic Missile or Cloud of Daggers have that baked in. It's not just your own spellcasting modifier but the opponents saves against it, their resistances etc.
But again when you only have a few turns per round to the enemy's dozens, there is less time to experiment around and players are encouraged to burst with their burstiest spells to open, every time. So maybe a CC spell or something else works better in some specific fight, but as players we get habituated to using certain rotations and certain spells because they seem to be more reliable. It's harder to see why they suddenly start missing all the time in some enounters vs others. This could be fun, or just frustrating depending on how familiar one is going into it, but it's always going to be more forgiving with a larger party.
If they started with a Party 6, then we can go down to 5 or 4 or 3 as we increase the difficulty scale, but without having already primed our Exploration and Balanced players to key everything off the 4 person party comp.
I think it should have been 6 all along, I was surprised they went with 4 in the end. I was so convinced they'd do 6 for the Full release to great joy, but no dice on that one hehe. Alas. It's much harder for a mod to pull this off I'm sure, even if there are surely players who would get down. The fact that it requires modding will deter many people from ever trying it out. Also the current default formation for grouped exploration is pretty whack, but we don't have anything for that. The same issue would arise with a bunch of summons, who also lack formations beyond the big spawled out triangle.
But then I think we went over all this in over-exacting detail for like hundreds of pages back and forth in the mega-thread. They never tried it, or allowed us to test the concept in EA, so we can only speculate now. I still think 6 is optimal for a BG game.
Ps. I remain hopefull. Unlike just about every other Studio right now, at least Larian didn't get forced to shitcan like half their workforce just to save a buck for shareholders. So much talent floating around right now in free agency! It'd be cool if Larian was like the one company out there still hiring.
When everyone else is tightening their belts, Larian should go the other route and give us all the Girdles! Just to make a point! 6 belt for the win! Hehe
Last edited by Black_Elk; 27/01/24 11:28 PM.
