So I think we can all agree that the right way to increase party size without ruining game balance is to tie it to difficulty in some fashion.
I do agree that changing the party size (in isolation) will naturally change the difficulty so will necessarily be tied to it in some fashion, and that this should therefore be recognised in game in some way if Larian do make it configurable.
This may not be what was being suggested, but I wouldn’t, however, be happy with a Hard mode that forced me to take a smaller party and would want other ways to up the difficulty in the full release while still running with a party of four. Having party size as one of a number of configurable difficulty settings would make more sense, and probably is what was meant, and I do think this more flexible approach to difficulty settings would be preferable to just having a number of pre-defined modes.
But I would understand if Larian still didn’t want to make larger party sizes possible as part of difficulty settings. It’s not free for them to do so. We naturally have higher quality expectations when it comes to official game content than mods and I wouldn’t expect Larian to feel comfortable releasing something that wasn’t thoroughly tested and issues fixed, which would of course take time and resource. Though I’m sure that has already been said many times over in the last 101 pages.
I guess we’ll see on release, or when they tell us, whether they’ve judged that there’s enough demand for the ability to make larger parties across the wider player base to warrant them prioritising work on this.
Though I admit, it will make my life far harder if they do decide to permit larger parties. I’d be SO tempted to pick this option in order to get more opportunities for my characters to interact with the pre-built companions, but all my other preferences when it comes to party composition, balance, and so on would be pushing me towards four.
"You may call it 'nonsense' if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"