Personally not into meeting all recruitable companions within the first 30 minutes of playing the game, both from a narrative and immersion sense. I like spontaneity and surprises. And I like a large pool of companions from which to recruit, swapping out as I see fit...but then again it's just what I'm used to from previous games. Hopefully Larian will dispense with the God awful notion of party locking after Act 1.
This is fine, but only if the game provides a large pool of companions, which is exactly what BG 1 and 2 did for us. Then, those people like you who are okay/like recruiting companions late in the game can do so. And people like me can recruit just the early companions and ignore the late companions while still having a full and balanced party to play with.
So the bottom line is that yes, it is quite fine to distribute companion introductions well into the game, so long as they give us enough companions in a balanced spread of classes early in the game to fill our party. And no, mercs that we can create do NOT count. I want real companions, and will not play with empty-suit mercs in a game like this one.
