After i saw in this topic opinions like "bg 1 had interesting companions" and "simple, grounded companions in dragon age 1" (yeah, good old simple grounded Morrigan, phaha) i decided to leave you nerds to boil here in this old-timer nostalgic, with "when i was your age grass was greener"-ish aftertaste, fantasies-filled nerd-juice as long as u want.
Morrigan is a witch living in a swamp. That isn't exactly high brow. If you read a little closer, you will notice that I also pointed out that BG 1 and 2 aren't good examples of games with solid characters. Furthermore, if you bothered to read the long essay I wrote about my thoughts on the topic, I did not once bring up an example from another game and instead voiced my exact complaint about the execution of the characters, from a technical point of view when considering the quality of the writing. The quality of the companion writing is not very good, in the technical sense and no, I don't need to be Stephen King to critique writing and know the difference between good writing and bad, just like I don't need to be the world's best driver to judge when a car crashes into a tree that something went wrong.
I agree also with Sharp about this game has trouble showing and not telling when it comes to characterizing our companions. I guess I haven't played enough because I don't remember Shadowheart volunteering any information about herself before succeeding multiple wisdom rolls which is why I think Shadowheart has the most natural roll out of her character, compared to others like Gale, who has to give you...the talk...for us to learn his story. This point is what I'd assumed was the meaning behind "amusement ride"
There are definitely times when I was reading her dialogue and thinking that for a someone who is supposedly good at deception, she was very much in your face however, it might be less glaringly obvious than I am remembering. I think a part of it might be the fact that they stick dialogue options right there that are worded as if you should be suspicious of her. A way to get around resolving that is for the dialogue choices you have available to you, to be dependent on if you pass a check to begin with. So for example, when you pick up the book behind the Ogre Mage, you have to pass a perception check for some of the dialogue options to be visible. They could then have an easier to meet speech check as well as a fairly easy to meet perception check, to compensate for the fact that there is now an additional check in place.
