If they suddenly shift to a 6-person party - given that all encounters are presumably intended for 4-person parties - how can this not affect encounter design/difficulty? Surely encounters will be too easy so you'd need to rejig them?
Each character in a 6 person party will have 4/6 as much exp as characters in the 4-person party. Game auto-balances itself. If this doesn't do a perfect job of auto-balancing for different party sizes, Larian can adjust the exp formula for differently-sized parties.
Yeah, I undertand the XP splitting, but I suspect it is not quite that linear in practice? A large group of goblins (if they win initiative) could still take out a 4th level party for example. I've been surprised (weirdly) once or twice and quite badly mauled by low level goblins before I even got a chance to counter attack (I was surprised rather than them...somehow). Maybe it's not an issue....but I would rather they just say 'hey, parties are now six!' and give us a chance to play test that. I would enjoy playing with 6 party members - did that in BG/NWN/PF:Kingmaker etc. Perhaps they are concerned about not having enough origin characters, if they don't allow us to roll up more than 1 character?
