Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Four is a party. Six is the crowd.

Please don't listen to all these "up to 6" issue
I want a possibility to play at least twice with different companions, which means we desperately need the sixth one (unless it already exists and I just haven't found it)

Not to mention the fact that you will not have to rebalance all the encounters

The idea is to commit and not to change companions after the first act.

4 is a bit tight, if not for everyone, at least for many users. Especially since this game seems to favour large numbers of enemies in battles.
But if 5 or 6 were allowed, that would not stop you from only having 4, so why are you posting something like that? So that other people cannot have what they would like? Isn't that a bit selfish?

Balancing is not only an issue of number of characters but also their levels since the world is open, so it's required anyway.

I like 4 better than 6 tbh.
That has to do with how pen and paper based games scale.

A party of 6 is not twice as good as a party of 3, but most likely 4-5 times as good.
D&D and Pathfinder as 2 of the biggest fantasy Pen and Papers got most of their campaigns designed for 4 PCs right now and there is good reason for it. I feel those games work best with 4 PCs.

But i admit, that "balancing" is not a strong argument at this point in time. The balance is getting thrown off by things that are WAY worse. E.g. by throwing people off (cliffs) as a bonus action

Why the hell is that a problem to you ?
Let us play with 6 and play with 4 if that's what you want...

Balance blablabla... Nearly every CRPG that introduce a party of 6 can be done even with only 1 character... So why not with 4 ?

So with regard to companions, unless you've heard something I haven't, I think a reasonable estimate would be that we'll have 7, maybe 8 companions in total, so as someone who is advocating fo a 5 character party specifically (I actually do feel like 6 would be too big somehow, not that I'm outright against it) there's still the reasonable possibility you could play twice with different companions. As for them not having to rebalance encounters, they're going to do that anyway, it's inevitable. Part of the point of early access is figuring out how to properly rebalance the dificulty by seeing where and why players are having trouble.

fair point.
But with the same argument you could argue for party size of 15. Yeah im exaggerating but thats the point.
The developers are supposed to pick a party size the game is designed for. Setting up a game, that is supposed ot be kind of a DnD adaptation, i would also go for 4, wich seems to be the sweet spot for DnD or Pathfinder.

Only going for 6 because other games do that to is no strong argument too me. I like it that you have to deal with weak spots in your party and make your call what you prioritize. Like giving up a dedicated healer or blaster.

mechanicly i dont even want to image how the party movement is gonna be working with 6 characters, constantly having to detach and re attach them to the group^^

yet again, that is only my oppinion.
I think there is an argument to be made against 6. Chances are: 80% of the players are going to use the maximum party size possible. So if you allow 6, you need to balance the game for 6, and thats not "state of the art" at least in DnD5e.

Maybe just a little bit.
In this subforum, everyone suggest what they want to see in the game. Yes, I'm not an exception.


I agree. This is a difficult work. So why make it much more.


You mean with only 1 unbalanced build. Boring.


Sure. But I'm talking about the fact that it is impossible or extremely difficult to balance at the same time for 4 5 or 6 characters


So that was mine. I've seen a lot of requests here to make a six-sized party.
And by posting this I want to say there are those who think that 4 is better.
Just an alternative opinion. For balance )

Not if you properly implement the 5e rules, which are very easily scaled to party size... just saying.

+1
4 enough

+1

You're ignoring that bit (on purpose?): "But if 5 or 6 were allowed, that would not stop you from only having 4".

We see that regularly on forums. People don't like an optional feature so they say "I don't want that, please don't make it". And what about other people who like it?

You already have what you want, so just let it be and focus on something else, please.

That's right...

I'd much rather the money be spent on making this awesome game even better than spending it on the implementation of 6 characters. 4 is great - you can do many playthroughs - stick to your guns Larian.

Counter-argument: the possibility to group "UP TO six people" doesn't force anyone to reach the number of six.
The old Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale games were often played even with solo characters or parties of 2/4 members by dedicated powerplayers. That was achieved simply allowing small parties to level up faster.
Bogus reasoning here.

At some point during my first playthrough, I had 7 characters to manage. My four party members, two familiars and a mushroom dude from the underdark. Can you imagine what it could become if the party goes to 6? You could potentially get 13 characters to manage. Insane.

I easily can. Temple of Elemental Evil could go up to eight actual characters.
It was awesome.

The claim that more party members slow down the combat is also mostly bullshit. More characters clean up encounters faster. Especially in a game where initiative is a mixed queue and you don't move just one team at the time.

IMO, 5 characters would actually be ideal and is a pretty common number in tabletop too.

But we need a lot more potential companions and shouldn't be getting forced into using the same ones through 2/3 of the game. What's more, we need some more likeable ones and I really hope they drop the origin character idea and just make them true companions, then focus on expanding how custom main pc is relevant to the story beyond how the others are.

That reason, for the record, is that it's pretty fucking hard already to gather four people in real life to play a D&D campaign regularly, let alone six.
Also the human factor (people in general being noisy, joking, talking pauses, distracting each other, etc) slows down the pacing considerably.

Neither of the two apply to a videogame adaptation.

More characters whatever we're talking about 5 or 6 is even better than 4 for some people.

Yeah the forums could do with a Poll feature!

Many prefer 6 becasue it is nostalgic to the series and it allows for variations in player builds and party composition that they/we think is limited by only having 4. But we are in danger of having multiple threads saying the same thing, maybe similar to the RTwP raging thread, we need a one stop party size thread @Vometia?