and the party banter got thrown out of the window together with real coop feeling for the sake of 'competative gameplay' possibilities.
I vaguely recall this being mentioned somewhere before. To me this is just another instance of poor design decision, if I'm to be blunt.
To be honest, playing this game again, I feel companions are pretty much machines scripted to say one generic line -
exactly one line - at specific points in the game, and exchange a few lines with specific NPC's when they run into them. Other than that, they don't care what you, the main character, do whatsoever. This gets old fast. They don't care if you're being kind, or cruel, or nice, or mean, or rude, or reckless, or when you're making a dumb decision. They really feel like puppets or programmed bots. You can go on a killing spree and kill everyone in the game and they wouldn't give a whit, unless you're killing the NPC's they're scripted to interact with.
Believe it or not, to me, companions in DOS2 are rather.... soulless. I wish they'd make companions more like the kinds in Baldur's Gate or SWKOTOR. Those are the kinds of companions that are remembered by players for generations.
I do like the status-blocking armor, but I think that the system could be tweaked more.
Actually, yes, it's not the "armor" that's the real problem, but the binary nature of its implementation in this game. The armor thing could work, if it's tweaked to have more complexity.
