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

1) They both take place around and in Baldur's Gate. Where are you getting your information?

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 1- The game begins with Vahn, Adrianna and Kromlech arriving in Baldur's Gate, whereupon they are attacked by a group of thieves led by Karne (Michael Bell). The city watch save the trio and take them to the Elfsong Tavern to recover. There, the bartender, Alyth Elendara (Jennifer Hale), tasks them to clear the tavern's cellar of rats. In the cellar, they discover the thieves are using the tavern's sewer entrance to infiltrate the city

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2 - Upon entering Baldur's Gate, Randalla hires them to investigate a series of murders in the city. At Bloodmire Manor, they learn that Luvia Bloodmire has been combining the body parts of various creatures in an attempt to make a new species


2) On authority - Yeah, I think the people who own it, are invested in it, determine the rulesets, the licensing, work with it daily and are passionate about it can be considered an authority. Just like a Doctor would be considered an authority on the human body.


3) Generally this only comes from people who have lost an argument and don't know how to gracefully concede. I have refuted everything you have said. If I thought I was wrong or you had made a solid argument I would have conceded the point. I have done so before, and on this forum. Stop projecting your insecurities onto me.

you're so rude and full of yourself Blackheifer.


I notice you didn't answer, I won't dare make a supposition about the reason you stay silent after having used 10% of my comment to be rude with no reason.

Still waiting for your apologies (one can dream) or, at least, you gracefully conceding a point (or more) (one can keep faith).


Stop projecting your rudeness onto the others (you really need to have a break, maybe have a kitkat or eat a snickers).

You know I thought TheHero had a kind response for you that you ignored and he made some solid points.

see below:


I don't think it would be good for me to interact with you further. Good luck with everything.

Thanks for taking the highroad Blackheifer. Leave it there please, everyone and resume discussing the threads topic. Remember to be nice to eachother and attribute some generousity to try and understand eachother, and discuss opinions on their merits rather than the person. More often than not, what reads as rude or offensive to one-self, often isn't. Or at least isn't meant to be. From there in online text-based communications, it often escalates due to the lack of intonation and applied personal perception, and just turns into a pointless fight over nothing.

Don't let this become one of those typical online "gotta have the last word" moments. Don't be that guy.

SOOOoooooo

Back to the topic. Can we keep bringing up a party of 6 and not 4?

Answer: Yes! Til the day they finally shoot it down forever and say they aren't doing it, I will bring up a 6 party game.

Why?: So MANY reasons why.

Why not?: Can't think of any reasons why not. What reasons have others given? It's too hard to manage 6 characters. 4 is even a bit too many and takes too long.

Response to that?: If they implemented a good Inventory Management system that wasn't clunky, managing 6 characters wouldn't be a big deal. The issue isn't that it is too hard to manage a 6 character party or too boring or slow. The issue is Inventory Management right now needs a total overhaul. As one person said it, let's get some sort of inventory management that is Windows-like. Drag a box, highlight what you want to move, drag and drop. OR, hold down Cntl and click on what you want to select, drag and drop. Boom. Done. We don't need tons of images and such. Lists are fine for item management. If I want to look at the image of an item, then I can right click, select Examine, and then I can see the image I want to look at. Otherwise, lists are fine. We don't need all this pictures that slow down and lag computers. Even if you add icons, that's still a Windows thing too, so it's not like having item icons is a bad thing, but we don't need to see a full model of my character and a merchant model as well which slow down the management of buying/selling, etc. Also, if the world stops when you access inventory and/or merchants, then we wouldn't get all the lag from that either. Thus, managing 6 characters wouldn't be a big deal. You could have all six fit on a single screen, have a section for Equipped Items and a section for other inventory items. Drag, drop, highlight, drag, drop. KISS IT! Keep It Simple Stupid! Otherwise, seriously, get rid of all the clutter items and only allow players to pick up items they can really use in the game.

Why not?: Larian would have to rebalance the game.

Response to that?: Big deal! They need to rebalance the game anyway because they aren't using appropriate stats for the monsters they are using and as a result the monsters aren't really themselves anyway. Besides, rebalancing would be a matter of adding a monster or two per battle. We're not talking an entire change in the game design. Traveling with 6 party members? Battle at the Druid's Grove Gate might require an additional 4 goblins. Done. Battle against Phase Spiders? Add another Phase Spider or 2. Battle against Hag? Add some Redcaps to help defend her, or some other Hag minions. Battle against Githyanki? Don't change that at all. It's hard enough as it is. Battle against gnolls? Add a couple more.

I mean, honestly, there aren't really any downsides to doing a 6 party game. If you only create 1 Custom Character, you can take ALL the origin characters in EA with you in every fight after you meet them. If you play a 4 player multiplayer game, you can create 4 Custom Characters and still take 2 origin with you, thus still being able to trigger various cutscenes that you CAN'T trigger if you have 4 Custom Characters. So, if you play multiplayer with friends for the first time to experience the game together, you will miss out on tons of chances for character development because you can't even take origin characters with you at all.

All the negatives to a 6 party game are things they can fix that shouldn't influence whether or not the game is 6 party members or 4 and the benefits of 6 are SO much more.

Refuted everything like my only statement related to this thread that was "a party of 6 and tons of companions define Baldur's Gate 1/2" ?

Usually people that also wants to win a discussion when they have nothing interresting to say also try to derail it, bringing non sense arguments to win somewhere else... you know, like "authority", "sentimentality", "not native EN so the guidelines",...

Anyway you can refute what you want. But you're still wrong in this thread. :thumbsup: /end


Party size of 6 =
+ More variety in party composition
+ More replayability
+ More action/bonus action/reaction per round
+ More managament (equipment, level up)
+ More quests, more stories (companion side quests)
+ More personnalities in your party, a journey more "colorfull".

But it also mean :

+ More companions needed.
Not sure Larian will ever make other companions than their wierd and over complicated Origin characters (mercenaries >< companions)

+ Slower combats because of Larian's combat design philosophy (>< other 6 party based TB games).

Before patch 5 (that I'll try in a few days), the game's difficulty was perfectly fine with a party of 5 but it was a bit boring with a party of 6.

They could really reconsider how the XP is distributed so players can choose the number they like. That would be very Baldur's Gate 1/2 like and very DnD like.

Alas, a lot of people on these forum want to be special snowflakes. They want to bring out a different point of view and absolutly convince everyone that they are right. It's an ego problem, very common at that.

This is a video game, and its about fun. Which means, its all about feeling in the first places, there is no logics to what people ''feel'' is fun, though they can try to explain it. In my opinion most of what we know of game design is empirical. like ''that game did it and its worked, let do it and tunes it a little differently''.

anyways,

I support the 6 party size, which is closer to the original game, leave more room for interesting party combinations, and more room for decision making. I feel that 5 to 7 companions would be nice.

About the topic, 6 definitely cooler. It's just much more fun.
4 is so restrictive.
the more the better.

I can't wait to play Pathfinder kingmaker : wrath of the righteous.






Blackheifer
I answered TheHero

quoting myself :
" By the way and for the others, I wasn't giving my point of view of what is a BG game.
I was just answering Blackheifer who define BG game like this :

" Baldur's Gate Elements so far.
- The Main story takes place in and around Baldur's Gate
- The Plot revolves around the Dead Three , Bane, Bhall, Mykrul
- Its in the Forgotten realms
- People involved in the original crisis are involved in this story (Elminster, Minsc, Volo, Jaheira) "

So I won't argue again about what is a BG game, but obviously it can't be restrain at his Lore angle. "

So I din't ignore TheHero as you did with me.
I give to you the "facts" you was loudly asking for, I didn't give my opinion at first.
And so you didn't answer.
You just take one mistake over 14 right differences and used it to be rude (even mean).
More, you purposely ignore 90% of my comments.

TheHero made a point I wasn't trying to have.
I was following the same narrow-minded path you begin with your "facts listing of (quotation) Baldur's Gate Elements so far" by giving a "facts listing of No-BG elements so far".

By the way, it's funny to see how you was the first one to ask for "facts" and then how now you are refering as TheHero and his "feeling" approach as a reference. ^^
Try to be clear, cause you're not.

Besides, I guess it was simple to just take the one mistake I did and say "I feel like we are scraping the bottom of the argument barrel at this point, probably the bottom of a lot of barrels really." which was clearly offensive and rude (even if the moderator are too nice to say it directly).

You talk a lot about having proper argument, etc. But, you did what many did, changing subjects, taking one mistake to criticize an entire comment and talk about the bad written english.
Not really glorious or interesting.


Still waiting for apologies, it's never to late.

It is wrong. None of us knows enough about game design to properly argue about the difference having 4 or 6 companions makes in this type of game, in design and the way player engages with content, but game design isn't magic. You put things in front of the player and they respond to it in predictable ways. There is a lot of research and understand in why developers do things certain way - things we don't quite comprehend or think about when playing the game, but it doesn't mean there isn't logic, or "science" in there. Larian has 4 companions, not because it doesn't matter, but because it fits better to what they are trying to achieve.

And yes, different people find different things fun. But that game that is claiming to be Baldur's Gate3 isn't "fun" for (some/many?) fans of Baldur's Gate1&2 is a problem, even if those fans might find it difficult to articulate how individual changes change their experience with the title. Might not be problem for Larian, if they have large enough audience anyway, but it is something worth talking about.

While I certainly do miss the potential for a big sprawling party that the old BGs had, I do see some issues in increasing the party size further. In no specific order.

1) If there are 5 touring companions then who exactly are we not bringing along? With a party size that big then we either always have a full party with the same faces, which is not a whole lot of fun, or we need a *a lot* more companions. And more companions equals a lot more work.

2) With two more party members, group control becomes horrendous. Imagine six different characters that all have a summoned critter of some form. 12 different creatures just squirming around? That would very badly need to be sorted out somehow, which is non-trivial. Currently, with 4 characters it might just be possible to live with it.

3) Four characters and group / ungroup mode works reasonably well. The hotkey is unbound by default, but I am finding it extremely useful to just ungroup whenever I need specific control over positioning and regroup when I just need everybody to come along. But with six characters, it would end up being a lot of clicking. Basically, there's sort of a way to bypass the control issues but that way gets a bit rougher with more characters.

4) The gameplay is already a fair bit complex. There's a lot of stuff to constantly keep in mind, a lot of positioning and potential positioning to consider, and a lot of nursing the fragile characters. Having two more characters in the party (and their summons, potentially) makes that worse. I could overcome, you could overcome, probably most people on this forum could, but Larian has to design for a wider scope than that.

5) Given the turn-based nature of combat, a bigger party makes combat a lot slower, as more characters have to be part of each full cycle of turns. And combat can already be a bit on the frustrating side of slow.

6) Rebalancing. Lots of rebalancing. A lot of playing through with different party sizes will be needed to figure out if the balance is where Larian wants it to be, regardless of group size. Enemy group size, amount of enemy abilities, item economy, character targeting, there's quite a lot that goes into making an encounter "feel right". I do not think this rebalancing can be done through automation, either, so that's yet more work for Larian.

7) The game and the gameplay so far works reasonably well with a 4 man party. If it works, it works. Spending too much time on something that works risks not having the time to fix something that really doesn't work all that well.

And I would like to stress that probably neither me nor Larian themselves mind them having to do "more work", but time and resources are finite and there is an object lesson to be learned in Cyberpunk 77. I would personally prefer that they get the fundamentals of the game right and actually get around to building a wholesome game, even if I am limited to a 4 man party, as opposed to getting distracted and then having to rush the last half of the game.

Also, since people around here seem a bit testy, I will add that I am aware that points 2 and 3 basically boil down to a different problem, but that problem is so far unfixed and we cannot be sure it will be resolved properly. Without a resolution, I feel it causes further problems for an increased party size.

What make you assume I don't know about game design? you don't know me. And if you admit not knowing about this subject, how can you judge how right I am ?

About the second part of your comment : Doing a lot of research is precisely part of the empirical way I was mentioning. By the way, empirical observation is the basis of every science.


@Arvguy

Your point has already been debated a lot, but I'm gonna summarize my answers :

Baldurs gate 1&2 did it, so why would Baldur's gate 3 not be able to do it, twenty years later, with more money, more staff, and advanced technology?

this is what worries me the most tbh - that the cast outside of the vaunted origin characters (including our own player characters) will be sorely lacking in both number and quality of writing/story impact

I don't know if I really have "a point", aside from seeing some problems in a larger party size given where the game currently is. And while Larian certainly does have more staff and more money than the original BG team, that in itself is not an automatic fix to all problems.

Further, more advanced tech can be a double-edged sword. Advanced tech is pretty to look at but harder and more time consuming to create. NPCs used to just be a couple of voice lines, a couple of images, a creature file, and then text. Now they are fully textured, fully animated, fully voiced, and body and facial gestures has to match the dialogue too. An interaction between two NPCs requires multiple voice artists.

And the combat turn was rather abstracted in the Infinity Engine days. I am pretty sure they made it work by fixing certain actions to certain frames during the combat turn. Movement begins at frame x, attack 1 happens at frame y, spellcasting can start at frame z. A character that missed that deadline in the current turn would then wait until the next turn to perform that action. And movement was so much simpler, purely 2D, no disangage, no jump, no dash, no action surge, so AI pathfinding during combat was fine. Was there even attacks of opportunity in BG2?

Simplified combat turns allowed for everybody to execute their actions concurrently without everything becoming an imcomprehensible mess. This in turn made it feasible to many actors to be part of a combat without slowing everything to a crawl. The fine control over exactly what each character would do during a turn was lost, but that was acceptable back then. But would that sort of rules simplification still be acceptable now, though?

I love RtwP.

You see a mess where I see a fight.
You want to give order, you used the pause.
It was, in a way, more realistic and more intense.
And it never was less strategic, you just had to be careful and aware of your ennemies.

I play and appreciate both RtwP and Turn-based.
Turnbased is like chess, slow and all about the reflexion.

RtwP is more like an actual match, there is still reflexion but in a more epic way.

Actually, I love pathfinder which is RtwP. They put a turnbased mod cause they are nice and listening developers but I never used and will used it.


As the two of this systems are interesting, cause BG was RtwP cause it should have stayed RtwP. ^^

(And I think they choose RtwP cause it gave this realistic feeling, turned-base cant give you).

(And, by the way, when I played BG3 (months ago, I asked a refund since) I found the fights long, boring and not DAT strategic ^^" (though I liked DD 1 and 2))


PS: yeah there was attack of opportunity in BG, disengaging was risky ! ^^ (at least I believe from my memories... é.ê)

I agree with you that more tech = highter standard for graphism, but so far Larian has done the most beautiful computer C-RPG ever done, so I don't think graphism is a problem.
About animation, its mostly motion capture, so basically you hire some people to do the scene and you refine animation. Regarding voice and animation, doing a companion isn't more complicated than doing a random NPC, given absolutly ALL dialogue are scripted and have cinematic . Same for voice acting.

Combat was turn based as well in RTWp, basically it was ''fast turn'' system . I invite you to read this to see how Baldur's gate system worked https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Time_System . It was basically the same, except it felt more realistic, it was faster, and each fight didn't take 10 minutes to proceed, not to mention the infamous goblin fortress fight which take one hours and half to do and is way too long. Waiting six second for an enemy to decide what his move will be is too long in my opinion. But yeah basically RTWP is a turn based system, read my link and you'll see precisly how it was so well thought.

There was no attack of opportunity in BG2, not because of the technology but because it wasn't a rule in the second edition. Same for disengage. This could have been just as easily scripted, as its depend on the distance between two character. As a side note, I don't like attack of opportunity and I don't think they are an improvement over the second edition. Taste, you know.

No,the fine control over character wasn't lost in baldurs gate as you could pause time as many time as you wanted, to micromanage every single one of your party member. if anything, you had more control than in a turn based system. And the rules weren't simplified, they were adapted for video game medium (again, read link).





Pretty much this. +1

@Hachina

Your link to the time system in BG 1 and 2 is good, but it is a bit incomplete in the technical sense. For instance, how many attacks can a character have per round? The answer used to be five, if starting from the absolute beginning of a round. But if a few frames are wasted then the character won't be in time for the first attack and would not do their full round's worth of attacks until the following turn. How many off hand attacks? Only one, always. Use a +1 attack weapon off hand and you get another main hand attack.

Except BG2 did offer a way to break past this limit with Improved Haste and the Whirlwind HLAs. With those, you could have more than 5 APR, but only with those. Push to 5.5 APR normally and that's just wasted, but 3.5 APR + Imp Haste equals 6 attacks being executed. To my knowledge, it was done by letting the character perform two rounds at double speed during the normal round. And if you checked the log of a dual wielder during an Imp Haste round, you would find two off hand attacks. Just a funny little detail.

But the point is, I am almost certain that they fixed each combat round action to a particular frame during a round. The default was 30 frames per second, so they presumably divided the round into 180 frames and then fixed certain actions to certain frame numbers in order to get all the animation sprites to look sensible and end in time for the next round. I do not know this for a fact, of course, but I suspect it.

And this is what I mean with simplification and lack of fine control. There was very little in terms of controlling who went first or who went in what order or who took exactly what path in their movement. Combat was that lightning fast because each character's combat round was fairly simplified and all had their combat rounds at the exact same time. You either managed to be in range and time for your actions on that round or you did not and then you'd do it next round. You could pause the game, of course, but trying to maintain exact control over everything was like herding cats.

Now imagine 5E rules instead of 2E rules, meaning actions and bonus actions and free actions and reactions and turn order stuff and complex movement mechanics in the form of threat zones and disengagement and jumping distances and dashing and potion throwing and whatnot. Trying to handle that for six party members in real time (even with pause) while having to figure out what a throng of enemy critters are doing sounds like the kind of task that would make my hairline recede even further. I don't particularly like this added complexity, to be brutally honest, but it is part of 5E and I also don't think people would be happy if Larian just house ruled it away.

That being said, I absolutely agree with your criticism of how combat plays out in BG3 currently. Bigger fights are way too slow, too long, too drawn out, and enemies take way too long to get their backside going. There really needs to be some sort of fast forward until the next thing happens that actually affects a player-controlled character directly. I liked the combat of BG1 and 2 more than this. But that was 2E. I don't see how it could be done while preserving the flavour of 5E.

Fast Forward is an interesting idea. Skipping past things in combat the way we can skip past dialog or cut scenes might work, especially if its not a very engaging fight. Maybe it's not particularly 5e or D&D crpg, but I can imagine how it might work in a computer game. Like just roll for results, and it blows past all the opponents' stuff with some automated randomized result, and then shows the next up PC. It's similar to the randomizing elements that were involved in the "pause" + everything happening at once system from the old games. They just need a cleaner way to transition animations and to let the player know what has happened while they were fast forwarding hehe

I'm sure it would be more interesting with 6 PCs up than 4 though, at least for me, whatever scheme they end up adopting to make the combat play pace feel a bit faster.

Also, I really dislike how often the game uses AI "Allies" in the set piece combats. I feel like they are substituting all these NPC AI hangers-on to make the combats seem like they have a greater sense of scale, when I'd much rather it be more PCs in the party to balance off the hordes of opponents. Like especially the main EA battle, whether Gobbo or Grove, they both use a couple dozen rando NPC allies to balance for the number of enemies in the cascading combat arenas, whereas I'd prefer just having 6 PCs in the party who we could actually control.

Yeah, I het the NPC thing, but it is early game for the most part. Rando NPCs are actually good for early game to help show players strats and to help them when they aren't familiar yet with the system.

This is actually one thing I think Larian was quite clever about. If you notice, later, you don't get rando NPCs helping at all. It is your party alone facing most of the encounters.

One thing I will say about 4 party members that I do agree with, though I am a fan of 6. If you start with 6, and need to add a few more NPCs for stort purposes, suddenly, you have a REALLY big party. If you add 2 NPCs like Halsin or Sazza or whoever, and you have 4, your party becomes 6. If you add 2 NPCs to a party of 6, now it's 8. 8 is a pretty large party.

That said, they could, at that point, say that your party is full. In order to travel with an NPC, you must dismiss a member or 2.

Hello,

First, thank you for reading the link, I appreciate that you took the time to read it before continuing the discussion !

The number of attack per turn depended on the character. For instance, lv 13 fighter had 2 Attack per round (APR). the speed factor of the weapon determine when the character gets to attack in his own round. For instance, a dagger was very fast and would attack at the start of the round, a greatsword was slow and would attack at the end of the character round.

If I'm not mistaken, you could actually get a double attack on dualwield. For instance, Drizz't could double hit you, and if you had a highlevel ranger with for instance Cromfaer and Celestial fury, sometime you would hit with one weapon and sometime with the other.

You could determine who got to attack first with positioning and micromanagement.

I'm not sure it behaved like you're saying tbh. I think character all had their own round timer, and as such , what you describe couldn't happen. I only have a reddit post to support this right now, might look for more later .
https://www.reddit.com/r/baldursgate/comments /l1mp4v/does_the_party_begin_and_end_rounds_simultaneously/ (link is a bit buggy, you can glue the two part together if you want to see the thread).

Basically everyone tell that character had their own timer, and you could start an action whenever you wanted in the game, you didn't have to wait 6 second.

in my opinion, its more like : A character start a round when you give him an order. You can interrupt the ''round'' to move or do actions that don't requires round. (for examples, you can stop spellcasting during a round to move, but you won't be able to initiate another spell right away, you'll have to wait a few sec).

you have a definite number of action each round like drinking potions, attacking. performing one put your action '' on cooldown'', but if you decide to start idle, you can start you next round whenever you want, you won't miss ''the first step'' of your next round.

But if the game was indeed working as you described, that would be an issue .




Actually, threat zone existed in BG2 . Archer got a defense and thacos malus when threatened by a closed fighter. Backstab depended already on positionning.

Disengage and jump are two mechanics that are the counterpart of attack of opportunities. You didn't need disengage and jump in BG2 because there was no attack of opportunities. Now that these are in the game, jump and disengage are vital because you can't play the game without it. As I said, I don't enjoy it, they tend to codify gameplay when it was more free before, in my opinion.

I'm totally for the addition of dashing and potion throwing, those are great potential addition to the game that can add a lot of RP.

Im sory, if you allready answered this in the past ... but i just must ask: Why? O_o
I mean, as long as we are able to create full party, another companion would be welcomed addition to be sure, but i would never call it "needed". O_o

As long as it means more time for me to actualy do something, instead just watching npcs doing their busines ... i would be fine with any prolonging.