I'm glad you agree with my amateur assessments. I don't know how to write either, I just flail at the keyboard for a long time until I see a lot of words on the screen, and assume that no one will read them.
I also read and agree 100% with your assessments.
One thing with Shadowheart, Astarion, and Lae'zel is that how friendly or insulting their dialogue is GREATLY depends on what and how you speak to them. In the very beginning SH says she wishes to remain private (when asked why she was on the nautiloid). This is a HINT that you shouldn't pry into her affairs/background. Most of her nasty comments are when players ignore this and ask her all the questions. If you just give her time she opens up to you and will respond to questions. Lae'zel is also like this . . . waste time asking about random crap and she gets pissed off . . . she wants to deal with the tadpole and anything not directly furthering that end she doesn't have time for.
Larian provides us with lots of dialogue options . . . but unlike many other RPG games where we are conditioned to 'ask all the questions', ie select all options on the left before progressing, this isn't the case with Baldur's Gate 3. It's important to be preceptive and approach your companions in ways they will respond well to (assuming you want to foster a good relationship). You know, kinda like people you meet in real life! 😉 Actually Larian does this in all aspects of the game (gives us lots of options to get ourselves into trouble!)
And I love this about the game!
OK, I buy into that, but at the same time they should give me some reason to interact with them. I honestly couldn't tell if the dialogs were bugged, there was nothing more coming or if I pissed NPCs off to the point they didn't want to share. Adding to that that none of them seems to really connect with a big part of the audience, well at least with me, makes me hope I will be able to create a fully custom party because I, for the first time in any party-rpg, have no interest taking along any of the presented companions.
I'm far more interested in the random tieflings and Haslin than any of those 5. I don't even want to bother with their over the top questlines that have nothing to do with my story and they don't even feel like companion quest from other games because they feel far bigger and more important than your own character.
The origin characters all feel like the player characters that most DMs dread - far too big background stories with far too much happening for level 1 characters AND on top of that they are all solitary (evil) edgelords... and that filling spills over into the main game, drowning the player's character own story and putting him/her into a place where you need to be gracious the companions share something with you because you have no story of your own.
Never the less the obersation in the quote is a good point on how they are written and that this would be an interesting new way to develop characters (though other games had it as well, but maybe to a lesser extend communicating more clearly to the players when to interact).
