If we're going to compare then we should do it fairly. The original BG games were made more than 20 years ago, and on budgets that--even adjusting for inflation--were a tiny fraction of BG3's budget. So it is eminently reasonable for me to have expectations of BG3 that greatly exceed what I got from BG2. Eight companion choices, some of whom may even be locked out after Act 1, is utterly piss-poor by any standard.
What about Planescape: Torment? It has some of the best companions (personnality/banter/interaction/quests) of any RPG ever, DnD or otherwise, and there is only 7 of them, some of them available mid to late game and most of them being really memorable. People seem to forget that Bioware had taken the approach of ''less but better'' concerning companions with PS:T, wich was the exact opposite of BG1. I hope/think that Larian is going with the same approach with BG3, as I greatly value quality over quantity.
Honestly, there is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the companions in BG1 and BG2 that I never took in my party in over 20 years of gameplay.
Ps:T is also not quite comparable because even though it is D&D it actually is a highly bastardized version of 2e D&D, with only three "classes" being represented in the game and even those classes having been considerably simplied and changed from actual 2e classes to where they really didn't mean much of anything. So it was a D&D game in which neither classes nor alignments were truly present or were extremely watered down.
To repeat what I've said before, which seems to be escaping many of you commenting on my take here: I am tying # of available companions to # of available class and alignment options. So a game having a small # of companions (ex. DA, D:OS, Ps:T) is OKAY when the game system has only a very small # of classes or no classes (and/or no alignments). But when a game has at least 12 classes, and the good-neutral-evil alignments dimension on top of those classes, then I expect a sufficient # of companions to allow me, the player, to play my game with a party of my choice based on alignments as well as adequate coverage of the different party roles represented by all of those different classes.
The number of classes does not matter in the least. The only thing that really matters is that every role in the team can be covered. It doesn't matter if the healer is a cleric, druid or anything else.
Of course, considering that it is 5e, it has even less importance.
In 5e, you don't even need a dedicated healer.
The argument about the need of many companions that because of the aligment also makes no sense considering that even in the older dnd games if you had evil characters available at all, you were not able to get the whole team.
And for the record in bg2, neutral characters also left the group if your reputation was low and from what I can remember, the difference was a whole 1 point compared to the goods.
