Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Is there a chance party size will be increased or are we stuck with 4 ?

If so, they have yet to provide a valid argument.

Yup, exactly that.

Also i noted that even tho UI is able to contain 8 companions ... its certainly not created for them, once you recruit your 7th character, party window dont get wider, but you get small up and down arrows to slide.

I would appreciate an ability to skip animations/accelerating combat dynamically - the game already plays too fast for my taste, with NPC doing their moves before the camara manages to pan over to them. I would prefer a cleaner, default experience with an ability to speed it up.

In general "skipping animations" or "moving in fast forward" may be useful options to have, and I know that in every tactical turn-based game ever made there's always a subset of "extremists" who would give up on ANY type of eye candy only to erode away few fractions of seconds.
Personally? I enjoy having something that looks good, so I'm not that far into "optimization".

What I'd advocate for on the other hand (aside for the obvious speed-up of the AI planning that I'm sure developers are already pushing as far as their capabilities allow for) is try to make things as "snappy" as possible in general.
For instance the Barbarian berserker animation could remain fundamentally unchanged in its visual appeal but just made few fractions of seconds shorter, the "Dash" could do without the 1-second-wasting Supersayan-inspired power-up, the jump could feel a bit more "smooth" and agile and less "stompy" and so on.

In some games I noticed that sometimes it's not even a matter how much time an animation takes, in general, as much as how quick it is to start or to give back control to the player after finished. Basically how responsive it feels.

I feel like I'm fine with 4 because Larian's quality of life for many things making 6 just not fun to even imagine.

It's sad to say but many people asking for 6 aren't thinking about having to manage that in Larian's schema. It's just too cumbersome.

Maybe if you had 6 individual players.

I mean, many people asking for six ALREADY played the game with six characters, since it's something you can do right now with some extra steps, and are just asking for Larian to smooth the edges a bit, so all these faux concerns à la "Be careful what you wish for" seem at very least inopportune/redundant.

That said, that the Larian default scheme is garbage (even with 4) and it doesn't make the process particularly pleasant is another side note, and MAYBE if that's the problem Larian could take a cue from the last two years of feedback on that specific topic and address it, as well.
I don't think a defeatist attitude helps anyone.

If nothing else, given that clearly the toilet chain is not going anywhere at this point, they could at least introduce a system for custom formations. Which is ANOTHER feature that was asked by many.

Tuco is right ... we ... or at very least some of us ... know exactly what are we asking for.
And we still want it.

You would know very well that we have thought about controlling 6 characters with the current UI, if you paid attention to the numerous threads about this topic over the past year.

I just want 5 for diversity sake in my party, could roll with 6 though, Four works at a base level by my estimation but gives me no variety for classes as I always cover my base roles (Tank, Healer, Caster, Rogue) and while yeah maybe I could make the rogue a bard and get a little extra mileage out of 4 that way I find I prefer a 5th slot for something that can be fun without having to cover a core role. Six would give me alot more variety but might seem a bit cumbersome for my personal preference. But I would role with 6 if that was the party size.

But Four for me is basic setup.

Less than 4 and I feel like I am missing key components.

And while I fully well expect someone to mod a 5+ party and WILL use the mod. I would prefer Larian to code a 5+ party to avoid or at least cause less errors and code conflicts.

The sad thing is that most tried 6 and still want it to be implemented into the game.

The actual problem for me of having 6 is a question of difficulty/rebalance, still not answered sufficiently in hundreds of posts. The most common answer seems to be, "let difficulty as it is" and use the usual settings (like Story Mode, Easy, Classic, Hard, Masochist, Real Man, and so) to overcome the consequences of having 6.

Unless someone makes a mod for it I'm pretty sure they are sticking with the four. Sadly.

Split exp.

I mean, I WOULD take a game mode balanced specifically for six if Larian was willing to offer it.
The point many of us are making is that IF the excuse is going to be "Too much work" THEN our reply is "Eh. Fuck it. Just give us some basic support for 6 and we'll take care of the rest".

Is the correct answer… a Cookie for you!

Adding more party members doesn't decrease difficulty linearly. Some encounters could be trivialised just by having more tools to play with. An encounter made for a 4 members party simply isn't designed the same way as an encounter for 6.

There's a saying among DMs: "If encounters are too easy, just add more goblins." Larian could just add a couple more foes to the encounters. Now that Larian has implemented the Swarm AI, longer turn times is no longer an issue. So I don't see the difficulty in balancing a six man party.

Don't split exp linearly then?

But jokes aside, it's NOT that important, in case you missed it.
People already openly stated that they would be willing to "take the hit" to the overall balance as long as they can have it as an optional feature.
What we are discussing here are just "quick and dirty" fixes that can *mitigate* the issue, not achieve the perfect solution.

Or give one extra "level" to one or two humanoid enemies or whatever else can apply, frankly.

The concerns about "keeping the perfect balance" are a bit of a joke in a game that is not exactly perfectly balanced to begin with.

But if you get less xp, there will simply be a moment when the encounters naturally balance because you won’t have the levels a party of 4 would have.

It’s a pretty tried and tested mechanic. Does it work 100% of the time? No, but it’s a relatively easy initial fix.

In the tabletop too, for the record.

I am absolutely fine with Larian going wild with custom settings, I love being able to tweak a ini file to fit the game to my envies. I just want for Larian to pick a number, stick to it and design everything around it. Adding more options expose them to having to do more balancing, UI and gameplay work, and potentially a bad experience out of the box.