You might want to ask me about companion conversation triggers
Yes! Do companions chime in more in conversations now? Or do they still stand around like lumps?
To be honest I don't know on that point because I didn't experience all that many conversations and banged through the ones I had at top speed.
But what I was referring to and what I did notice was some very clear evidence that there had been changes to the way that companion conversations with the protagonist were handled. A number of us on these forums, me included, found it very frustrating that many of these conversations were tied to resting or that what one companion had to say got usurped by another with higher priority, so you almost had to spam long rests unnecessarily to progress companion relationships.
And I on that front I have some good news and some ... not bad news, but caveats to the good news.
Even on the little I managed to play it was clear Larian had listened to feedback and made changes. For example, at one point while walking through the grove both got exclamation marks over their heads to indicate that they had something they wanted to say to me. And Gale gave me his spiel about needing certain objects in a conversation when I then spoke to him out in the world rather than this being tied to a camp conversation.
The caveats are that, first, I only got to play a very little of the game and rested once so didn't really get to experience how this really worked in practice or whether the new approach successfully addresses all the problems we had with this in EA. And second that it still seemed rather buggy and therefore was still presumably being worked on when the build I played was packaged up for us to play. For example, Gale had apparently grown to trust me enough to share his deep secret in the course of a wander through the druid grove without even a rest and evening to chat first - I know I helped haul him out of a weird portal, but still! And Shadowheart wanted to come clean to me about something that I don't think had actually happened yet, though admittedly as I've said I skipped through a fair bit.
But still, I'm taking it as a huge positive that the approach to companion interactions with our PCs has been reworked, and hope that remaining issues with the changes can be ironed out before the release.
"You may call it 'nonsense' if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"
