The companions, yeah, that's another thing. They all feel strongly like the star of the show.....which they are actually, because of the origins system. But if this is going to be the story of the player character, wouldn't it be best to build the story around...the player character rather than a cast of 7-8 other characters they have to share the spotlight with? It's also very front loaded. 8 party members all right off the bat, but you gotta choose your 3 soon, cause the rest are gone in act II. It's limiting and overwhelming. I think this could be alleviated much by the inclusion of some additional non-origins party members down the line. I have the most hope for this to be addressed some time. Hopefully Larian will talk about it some in the future, since this seems to be a pretty common observation/complaint.
Correction- it’s the story of up to four playable characters, because it can be played in co-op with up to four players. DOS1 has two main characters and up to two followers, as it’s playable with 1-2 players, DOS2 and BG3 have up to four main characters because they are playable with 1-4 players.
Before anyone says it, that’s not really a DOS thing, it’s a how Larian implement co-op thing. I have little interest in multiplayer myself, but it seems perfectly reasonable that those who want to should all be an equally big part of the story, rather than one player being the star of show. And that means that the story has to fundamentally be built around a group of characters, not just one.
Personally, I quite like that I can go into dialogue with any one of the origin characters, or even separate them off to do something on their own.
However, I do agree that it would be good to also have a bunch of regular companions we could meet along the way with their own stories and personalities, but without the full control of origin characters. They could be functionally just be a combination of mercenary and camp follower, with their own dialogue and potentially quests.
That probably wouldn’t mess too much with whatever reasons Larian might have for fixing the party origin characters, but still allow a pool of companions. Additionally, it should be much easier to add more regular companions than origin ones and they could be spaced out a bit throughout the game, making them feel more like companions from the original games and others like it.
Of course, Larian might be deliberately trying to get away away from the Pokémon “Gotta catch them all” type gameplay that tends to happen. If so, they could still probably find ways to stop you recruiting absolutely everyone.
