@Arvguy:
I would assign all those feelings to nostalgia. Most people have it for something. As someone who has not played the old games in their time I found the characters pretty bland. But go on any forum with old garde fans and they will jerk oneliners like "I serve the Flaming Fist!!". I have a special place in my heart for some other old games and their characters, but I'm honest: if you would implement them the same way as 20 years ago, it would be a disappointment. That was my point. What they implement now is another standard. Its fully voiced and often animated stories, not just a few sound one-liners and some quirk. If you would do the latter thing, you could easily make double the potential companions, if not even more. They just would need a model and a few lines of sound and characterization. Today, I'd rather have less, but more fleshed out companions.
And yet I, and a lot of others, can actually remember those characters in some detail. Do you think you'll remember Laezel 20 years from now? Or Gale? Or Wyll? Do you think anyone is going to jerk oneliners like "Made room for the Blade of Frontiers!!" or such? Mind you, that flaming fist oneliner isn't a companion quote, it's something the random fisties would likely yell enough times during a playthrough of BG1 that you'd remember it.
That being said, you obviously cannot do a carbon copy of something that was done 20+ years ago and still expect it to work. 3D versus 2D, and then there's the whole fully voiced dialogue versus text. Outside of a very niche segment, you need full voice over. But I reckon the general principles of what worked then still works now. A few interactions with the player, a couple of interactions with the other companions, maybe a companion quest that sort of illustrates who they are, and a little bit of personality is really all that is needed. Games like Mass Effect and KOTOR did that too, and it worked just fine. Okay, the latter had mostly rubbish characters, but that was mainly a writing problem.
You don't need to spend a fortune on making every character able to react to every last thing the protagonist could possibly experience, and you don't need to make it a giant pain in the ass to make companions talk about themselves. Not everything has to be complex and massive and dark and brooding. Not every companion needs to have a world-altering dark secret that they will only tell you if you've managed to pass 14 different charisma skill checks to build up rapport and the sun, the moon, and 20 different stars are aligned just right.
By the way, at the risk of sounding like Tuco, who does perhaps eat his fair share of red meat, please don't fucking tell me that what I feel is just fucking nostalgia, unless you actually think that you can provide a proper and merited analysis of that claim. If you think you can, go for it. But it better not be "but I played those games too and I didn't feel, therefore your feeling is wrong!!!", because then I'll start eating my share of red meat too. I try to be polite, I really do, but please don't dismiss other people by hand-waving their thoughts away as merely nostalgia, unless you want them to hand-wave your commentary away as merely, well, insert perjorative explanation of your choice.
For clarification, I'm in the latter half of my thirties, I am neither entirely unread nor entirely without education, and I didn't play BG1 until probably 2010 or so. I tried BG2 early on, but I didn't really grasp it then. I got a lot more into it probably in the mid naughties, if I were to guess. That's when I started having the calmness of increasing age to take my time and "feel" the dialogue, and feel its implications, rather than just speed-read it and pick whatever. And suddenly a lot of things in the game worked a lot better.
