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

This has been already argued extensively in the past months actually, but just to reiterate: frankly the "wannabe armchair game designers" that seem to worry so much about "breaking the perfect balance" come off a bit ridiculous, for several reasons:

- because the current balance isn't set in stone to begin with.
- because there's NO proper balance to talk of, only a first tentative effort
- because worrying that this kind of game would strike a perfect balance is a futile goal in itself.There will always be super-knowledgeable players who will know how to break down an encounter exploiting any possible trick in the book even playing solo, while there will always be people who will struggle to get past the tutorial fight at "carebear difficulty" without exhausting their entire reserve of consumable and with two companions dead in the process (mostly Polygon journalists).
- because "Bu-but this would make the fights a bit easier" should be none of anyone's fucking business, if that's what the player prefers, anyway.
- because Larian has a long history of implementing SEVERAL difficulty options, occasionally even significantly different in structure (i.e. "Tactical mode" in DOS 2) aside from just buffing/nerfing numbers. Nothing prevents even the average player to, say, just step up in difficulty a bit to compensate for a bigger party. The implied worry that the "perfect balance" of these multiple settings would be compromised is frankly a bit of a joke.
- because tweaking encounters adding/removing/replacing enemies is not exactly a gargantuan amount of work even to do manually, not to mention that there are even formulas that could somewhat automate the scaling (i.e. how many secondary enemies appear during the fight) to certain extent.

Basically, anything that presumes that the current (or even future) build of the game would be in some sort of holy state of untouchable perfect equilibrium is delusional in itself, even before even beginning to talk about how to "solve the problem".

The only real worry about expanding the default's party (or making a bigger party an option, at least) is that it would also beg for a revamp of controls/UI, because the current ones are already almost comically inadequate for a party of four, making it six would only worsen things.
Which , IF ANYTHING, I would count as an ADDITIONAL reason to push for a party expansion, by the way: it would a perfect excuse to pressure Larian into giving up on their shitty chain/unchain system.



P.S. On a marginally related note: just yesterday I was watching a Youtube video of Felicia Day, the actress, playing BG3 on Twitch.
One of the first things she complained about (even if admittedly just briefly as a passing comment) was how annoying the auto-following companions were.
The second moment she loudly voiced her disappointment was when she met Lae'zel and learned that she could have only three companions with her.

And believe me, watching her play should prove beyond any doubt that she's as "casual audience" as you can get, so can we please drop the bullshit about how "only hardcore out-of-touch forum grognards" want some of these improvements?