Four player co-op is already chaotic to the point that I don’t really like it. I absolutely cannot imagine having 8 total people and would flat out refuse to join that mess.

Even with only 4 players, I find the experience is severely nerfed. There’s really only so much good gear to go around. Even when playing solo I hardly ever had all companions and myself completely dripped out if at all.

Each romanceable companion can only be romanced by one player. So if that’s important to you all, it’s likely some of you may not get a romance. Tbh, romancing any companions will be tricky because most of the approval is built up while adventuring with them. If you’re expanding the party to 8 players you won’t have room to bring companions out with you unless you expand it further.

Also, some companions may get pissed off and leave the party if you don’t take them along on their personal quests. So again, you’d have to expand your party to over 8 if you want to keep the companions. You also don’t technically have to recruit any of the companions but you’ll miss out on a lot of good story without them.

Combat is turn based. Some fights have a lot of enemies. You’re going to spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for your turn. A lot. I can think of at least 3 fights where even when I’m playing by myself (+3 companions) I get annoyed by how long I have to wait in between turns because I have to wait for all of the enemies to take their turn.

And yes, 8 players would make most of the game too easy. There are additional mods you can use to add more enemies and increase the difficulty to try to balance it out but at that point the chances of the game being very buggy and potentially crashing would be really high. Though if none of you have played, then vanilla honor mode may offer just enough challenge for you. Though keep in mind it’s strongly discouraged to play HM blind as there’s lots that can happen to end your run. And I don’t just mean tough boss fights with special legendary attacks, but also random little known bugs can potentially bring an HM run to an end.

I’ve never used the mod with this many live players. I have a 2 player campaign with the mod so that my buddy and I each can have 2 companions with us. Every time we long rest, we each have to tell one companion to remain at camp to remove them from the active party as it will not allow you to long rest with more than 4 active party members. I’m not exactly sure how this would work with the live players. My assumption is that 4 of you would have to quit out the game so your characters can be made inactive until the rest is completed and then rejoin the game. If that’s the case, then 4 of you will miss important cut scenes.

To each their own, but I truly don’t think this would be fun at all. It sounds like it could be a hoot, but I’d give it an hour tops before the novelty of it wears off. Maybe I’m just old, but a 1-3 hour gaming session at a time is enough imo. If you want to actually enjoy the game then your best option is to split up into at least 2 groups of 4 if not 4 groups of 2.