Like I said earlier and I'm trying to be very objective here, I think some elements of the story are improved a lot. The pacing is much much better, you don't feel like nothing happens and all the things you do feel important enough and not like filler. The companions roster is the best in recent years at the very least, and of course not all of them perfectly written but the good ones are really good. Moreover, some of them are actually unique.
The story is still not too great at least until chapter 3, which is a significant chunk of the game, but the companions are good enough to carry it imo. And since I don't care for the gameplay almost at all, and outright despise buffinder system for the most part, if the story was bad I would have ditched this game a long time ago
That's pretty much my stance on this too. There's a reason I haven't mentioned much about the actual gameplay. The combat being balanced around RTwP already lowers my standards by quite a bit in that department, so any thoughts about balance I would have for such a system would be a foregone conclusion. Thankfully Kingmaker's characters and aytpical plot premise was interesting enough for me to tolerate it, and the superior overall pacing of WotR and the amazing interactions between its party members are stellar enough that I don't even care (along with turn-based being available from launch). Though I will say that some party members are very unique on a mechanical level if you leave them single classed, which deepens my appreciation of them. Like Seelah potentially transitioning into a mounted tank/bruiser, Lann being a tank archer that later gets a personal dimension door and ability to attack of opportunity with a bow so that he can potentially warp up to and shotgun enemy mages and archers, and Camellia essentially being a front line tank druid-type character that trades shapeshifting for hexes and elemental weapon enchants.
(I really hope the next game goes even further with mechanically unique companions. We've had a ranger in both games so far, even if Arueshalae trades an animal companion for the ability to share her favored enemy bonuses with the party instead. If it's based on Iron Gods, we'll probably get the gunslinger Lirianne as the featured iconic, but I hope there's also an Eldritch Archer or a similar spellcasting archer somewhere in the cast too. WotR actually has one big gaping hole among its known cast, and it's that none of the known companions use two-handed melee weapons. Or well, Regill does, but I think on a mechanical level, his hooked hammer is treated as dual wielding for feat purposes despite being a two-handed weapon. Haven't used him in my main party much, even though I really appreciate his writing and the perspective he brings to the cast.
Also, let's just say there's a reason I specify known companions up there. There's strong hinting in-game at one more that does wield two-handed weapons, which would bring the non-path specific companion total up to 12. One could say this might be too many companions and that they all can't be written that well for that reason alone. A younger me would have believed such a thing, but WotR unexpectedly blew me away in that regard, especially in a way that it appears that all of the companions are framed as pieces of a larger whole through their party interactions. While most other cRPG companions seem to be written as if they exist in their own bubble, I somehow never got that impression from the WotR companions at all.)
I'm a lot more harsh on BG3 in comparison because it's a turn-based cRPG adaptation of a turn-based tabletop game, so there's not much excuse to make gigantic balancing missteps like high ground advantage/disadvantage. The limited pool of companions have yet to grip me in a similar way as WotR's have too. Considering Larian has long made their reputation based on the combat systems of their prior games, of course people are going to be especially harsh on the combat design while not having much expectations in regards to the writing.
We most definitely should have another companion or two available during the EA phase of BG3, though. I remember during WotR alpha testing last year, there was one early game companion that wasn't available during phase 1, and she just showed up out of nowhere in our party after the prologue during phase 2 (the wizard Nenio). The biggest criticism of phase 1 was that we were hard locked into using Woljif or an arcane caster MC if we wanted one in our party, and Woljif was actually unavailable during the last dungeon featured in alpha phase 1 for plot reasons. Beta 1 began implementing her quests, party banter, and a proper introduction into our party, and it was a lot different from what people expected.
