4 is such an arbitrary low number, like I know it’s multiplayer but cmon, theres absolutely no room for npcs in a human party. Also what’s the point of locking the appearance of the hirelings if they don’t get a backstory? Pillars of eternity 2 let you create custom party members and they had custom made companions that werent like full party members but some of them actually talked.
I know mods can fix this but I would really like to just be able to create 4 custom characters at the start even if im not playing multiplayer. Also maybe let us change the race and appearances of the hirelings if they gonna be blank slates.
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.