After playing the beta with my friends and even though we were having so much fun, the party size of 4 seems that they’ve focused too much into the console players in that matter. And this is coming from a veteran D3 player who has committed more than 3k hours of their lives into it and didn’t have any issues on having a party of 4.
What I personally think is that when you have an open-world focused game where you can encounter random players, which is cool, there still should be an option to either make a private session for your party (where you could also have a bigger party size) or when you turn off the cross-play feature, you should be able to have bigger party.
Now, I do get that what kind of work that would involve but I feel that they missed hard on this one. There are even 5 classes to choose from and I’m used to have my friends choosing totally different classes from another and it’s so cool to have that variety in your party.
I really hope they would add these types of features in the near future because I’m not too keen on having my friends being left out from my party due to this. This is purely an opinion coming from a player, who has never enjoyed playing Diablo alone. While I like that the open-world could add more social aspect into the game, the party game feels that players who have friends playing with them are left with a choice of who to play with due to the restrictions.
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Just create a hierarchy of your friends and only invite the top 3 in the list depending on who is online at any given time. Make sure you tell them that you will be doing this so they compete for your favour.
I mean this was a thing in D3 and I gotta say that I just felt guilty of not being able to invite more people among my friends and on later Seasons even the party play became obnoxious due to the server lag that was caused by having a party which eventually I quit playing in a party. Regarding my friends, we are all somewhat similar in a matter of what I stated previously that playing a game like Diablo isn’t made for me if I can’t play it with my friends and yet I feel like a party size of 4 isn’t enough for a game that has an open-world system this big.
Afterall, I think that I will adapt to this state but I will still have that mindset in the back of my head and cross my fingers now and then that Blizzard would listen and test whether the additional party slots would break the game balance/social eco-system of the open world or not. 
This isn’t a rant but I sincerely hope that this reaches Blizzard and they would even consider this
could you explain what the party size has to do with console players?
you played 3k hours of D3, there was never a point in time where you could invite more than 3 people to your party…
its not new…
Comparing D3 into D4 is that Blizzard implemented console-support due to Couch Co-op, hence making 4 player party size eventually make sense in D3. Now in D4 when we have world-boss events that consists of maximum of 12 random players, why wouldn’t they give the PC players some privileges over the console focused gameplay. The open-world is afterall significantly huge meaning, that it would make more sense to have larger groups for players in order to fill the gap on having too much of an empty world (the only exception being the events). Back in Diablo 2, you could make a private session and have a total of 8 players in a same game. Now I don’t like comparing D2 into D4 but when you are going into “always online”-stylish game, it would atleast be more beneficial for the community to have players come together in bigger groups.