I just want to stress that me writing "Larian doesn't care about the story" is a bit provocative way to frame it. If I were to write it in a more nuanced way, I would say that Larian's design philosophy emphasize experiment and exploration. They seem to put player freedom at the highest regard when designing a game, and are willing to "sacrifice" story integrity to do so. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, I'm sure a lot of players like this design philosophy. I do wonder though (and I hate being that This-isn't-Baldur's-Gate guy) whether most BG players played this game for the same reason. If so, BG is kinda restricted and not a very good choice for this game style.
Except they are ruining experimentation and exploration by not rewarding players for it. What's the point if the result is the game breaking or not acknowledging your choices with pertinent NPC interactions?
They certainly haven't made their job any easier when your party contains multiple story characters. Each exponentially increasing the possible outcomes. You should be able to select one companion then find, interact with, and gain and understanding of each other companion while on the ship and then save only one of them in the escape IMO. This would cut down the amount of flags required.
Why? It's not like this kind of thing has never been done before, and done successfully. In fact, the end result of one of these times will go down in history as one of the most memorable missions in a game, probably ever, the Suicide Mission in ME 2. There were little side missions in ME 1, but they could, for the most part, be done accidentally, such as Wrex's family armor. The Lord of the Rings jumps around so much in the books that a speed reader could get dizzy, and yet, it works. From where I'm sitting it's way too early to tell what Larian thinks about the narrative, or the plot, since we don't have a third of the main plot, and we're significantly short of plot on the companions too.
