You guys found the companions of other games better? I mean, could you stand Viconia or Jaheira, or Aerie? Keldorn or Anomen? Edwin, besides comic relief? If your only experience with them was in a starting portion of the game, i would probably have ditched them altogether, but during the game, their characters blossom, and you can actually bond with quite a few of them. Don't get me started on the EE new characters, who were beyond horrible.
Also, evil characters would leave if you did good deeds and reached 18+ reputation, and the opposite for good characters. So it's not new to Baldur's Gate to have NPCs being against something. Keldorn could even try to kill Viconia if you didn't intervene, and there were other occasions where characters would not get along. You could also reach high reputation pretty early, if you were a good character and went after it.
We also have no idea how the EA area will be implemented in the official release of the game, so i don't really get why people are so concerned about the NPCs. Let's see how they are after we actually play with them, when they are fully fleshed out. Some people are already convinced that the writing is bad. They seem to forget how the writing was in other popular games.
P.S. I think to this day, the most annoying character i have ever met in a game has to be Morrigan.
Honestly? Yes. I'd take most of the BG II companions over BG III companions. They weren't as heavily written, but they often felt more real and relatable while still being interesting. Only characters I ever really found unpleasant were Cernd, Aerie and Jan, but in regards to the roster as a whole, there were plenty of options if you found one or two you couldn't stand. BG II has more than twice the amount of companions BGIII does if you include the Beamdog additions.
The thing about the reputation mechanic is overblown. It was only really a problem if you were playing a good character with an evil party, (since you couldn't pay money to a church to reduce your reputation)
That's a tough nut to crack - Larian is combining hand scripted, linear Dragon Age style narrative content with a free systemic sandbox. Those will be forever at odds. Perhaps, Larian should try to govern story content through some kind of reputation system to conpensate (like - reputation with Wyll for every grove NPC kill - so even if he won't witness the conversation, he would leave based on your actions. Or even action take against druid grove outside the quest), but with how disasterously such stuff turned out in Deadfire I suspect it could backfire even further. That said, Deadfire systems were still tied to conversation choices making the whole thing moot - and they didn't manage to react to players actions anyway (for example companions who would leave you if you refused to side with their faction, would still stick with you if you just murdered the whole faction instead). Maybe tying BG3 reputation to player actions would make more sense.
The sandbox stuff certainly grates against some of the other stuff they are trying to do. Shadowheart's box is probably the most obvious example of this, such that Larian even talked about it. The multiplayer stuff, encouraging players to do stuff while in dialogue cutscenes
like stealing the runepowder from the deep gnome etc
The origin system etc. Lots of things that have a multiplicative effect on the complexity of the game that the devs have to then account for.
