games

It's the year 2000, my D&D game has six character parties, it's hard as shit, and it is a renowned masterpiece of gameplay and storytelling. Jon Irenicus scares the shit out of me. His hot vampire sister also scares the shit out of me idk if I'm even in to it. Will spawn the beloved Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale II that will be named the best squad level tactical combat games of their era, challenging players to achieve mastery of Black Isle's excellent implementation of the AD&D 2nd Ed system in the Infinity Engine. Remastered decades later to enchant a new generation of players. Boots of Speed go Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I can count to 4!

Balance reasons. It's probably pretty fucking hard for them to create open-world acts where you can run into all sorts of trouble and shenanigans, and have them be challenging instead of just allowing you to steamroll them with your 8 party members. Or, imagine if the world was designed for a larger party. Enemy counts would have to be that much higher to compensate, and battles could take much longer.

They had to compromise somewhere. 4 was a good amount in DOS2. It works for BG3 just fine.

I just wish there was a better way to change party members besides talking to them

Its such a pain

No I just dislike the game

I believe the battles etc all balanced for a party of 4. For games like this, creating a challenging battle for a larger party typically elongates the combat duration waiting for more enemies to make their moves or enemies becoming damage sponges. This may make the game's combat a bit too exhausting/boring for the general audience.

There maybe overhaul mods that could allow for larger parties without impacting or even increasing difficulty, e.g. long war for xcom EU and xcom 2.

Personally I would prefer a bigger party since I want to use more classes in my party, or troll around with a 6 paladin crusader party for the LOLs.

Idk why they insist on making tactics games with only 3-4 characters. It's absurd, you can't do anything with that many. That's not enough to pull a flank attack, do fire and movement, anything. Any mistake becomes disasterous - If one character goes down you lose 50% of your force - The character who died and the character you have to detail to revive them.

And, of course, Baldur's Gate didn't have this issue bc you could have 6 characters in a party.

I wish I could access the inventory of characters not in my party at the camp. One of the larger reasons I've been mostly running the same party the whole time is I don't want to deal with shuffling gear around and talking to people to get them to leave and join the party.

Oh yeah, I've been playing with my friend and it's fun to each have control of a second character. But then we had a third friend join us and it was pretty weird having just one of us with the extra character. It's probably just much easier to balance the game around 4 characters instead of scaling to arbitrary numbers.

Definitely for balancing purposes, but yeah, if all 4 people have a custom character, the only NPC storytelling you’re getting is in-camp or by meeting them outside your party.

It’d be awesome to see an update or mod that allows for 6-8 characters and increased enemy density.

IMO they probably chose four party members because there are a gorillion dialogue options and interactions to account for in story mode. I do wish there were two more slots though.