Yes, I know. But you are assuming that this is a simple thing that can just be easily added without affecting anything else.
No, I'm not. I'm saying that it's something that it's absolutely worth to aim for with a full understanding of the amount of work needed for it (starting with a revamp of controls, which as I already said it's something already direly needed regardless of party expansion, and passing for a mild UI tweaking, which is still work in progress anyway).
And people are VASTLY overestimating the difficulty of "rebalancing encounters" with modern tools, to begin with.
That's quite literally the least of the challenges ahead, both because encounter design is still a a work in progress too and because "perfect balance" in encounters is a pipe dream, anyway. There will always be ways to break and even trivialize them, which is not even a real issue since doing so it's half of the fun at times.
It’s not that rebalancing is especially hard (although it’s certainly work to do), it’s the effect of that on gameplay. I see you skipped my question about whether you are proposing rebalancing all encounters for a party of 6 and making fights bigger, or keeping the balance about the same and leveling less?
I know many people don’t like that. But we don’t know what happens after act 1 and whether or not that makes sense.
It doesn't really matter. Whatever they have in mind, it's most likely a forced narrative device they are deliberately making happen with the purpose of that design goal. Consequently something that they could (should) reconsider on, if they wanted to, if they decide that the goal (namely "getting rid of the extra companions in one broad sweep") was questionable to begin with and managing an expanded party beyond who you are grouping with at a given moment can be far more gratifying.
Whatever they have in mind doesn’t matter compared to your desire for bigger parties and being able to swap out characters at will? That quite a statement. Larian should make the game the way they think is best. They’ve asked for feedback and will likely change things that they agree will improve the game. But when you start saying that their design decisions just don’t matter, you are being totally unreasonable.
Except if the game is designed to have 4 characters of equal importance
But let's be real, it's not. There will always be one main host and his partners as secondary characters like in the previous Larian titles. You can't ACTUALLY go "full competitive" against each other in these games, they always work just as far as there's some degree of cooperation between players and some agreement on who's in charge.
Cooperating doesn’t mean that one character is the leader and everyone else has to fall in line. In multiplayer, the players can organise themselves how they like (designate a leader, take votes, try to make decisions behind each other’s backs, etc), but the characters are all equal. Similarly in single player, you don’t have to play with your main making all the decisions. If you want you can role play each character separately, and make any decisions according to what whoever is talking would do.
This is actually the biggest difference between BG3 and DOS games compared to other titles. It’s not just one protagonist doing all the talking and making all the decisions with some interjections from your followers, it’s whoever is talking at that point who gets to decide.
I’m amazed that no one ever mentions multiplayer in these discussions, as I’m fairly sure it’s a big part of why they make their games like this (DOS1 also had 2 main characters who couldn’t be swapped out and it supported 2 player multiplayer. Coincidence? Probably not.
