In DOS2 the exclamation points were mostly triggered by proximity to a particular trigger. So, if a character wasn't close enough you didn't get to see their response.
I always hated this as it felt like we (I played in a multiplayer group) were missing some of the story and flavor when someone just happened to be too far away (for whatever reason.) If fortunate and we'd had a recent save we could reload and make sure everyone was closer together... but we shouldn't have had to savescum to get flavor content like that.
If that's what's happening in BG3 they need to fix this and make any exclamation point be equivalent to the trigger that triggered it... so you can walk up other characters and get them into the scene.
