Certainly. I get the point that sometimes, in any party-based game, you just have to suck it up and play with whatever companion options you have been given by the game devs even if those options are all sucky. The issue here at hand, though, is whether those of us who want to play with a good-only party can expect to get enough companions that we LIKE and WANT to have in our party. These five companions we have been shown thus far are all universally unlikeable to me. They are all irritating and annoying at a minimum, and I really don't want to have to play with any of them. But I also will not play with empty-suit mercs. So I am stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. By contrast, in the original BG games, we got so many companions, and an amazing range of them to boot, that pretty much any player was going to be able to find that certain group of companions to take along with them that made them happy. I sincerely and seriously doubt we will get that in BG3.
Well, in the case of BG1, most of the companions were literally a few sentences of history, which is not much different from mercenaries.
BG2 improved it significantly, but from what I can remember it reduced the number of available companions by about 50%. Still, the characters were terribly uneven, and some got much more than others.
I omit that some of the characters were written only as memes.
The full version of the game has to be at least 8 companions, which is a good result for a group of 4 and considering that the game has full voice acting.
