Im honestly wondering how hard it was back then to create a companion ... "compared to BG-3"
I mean, all characters looked basicaly the same, only few collors was changed so we can distinguish them. As for voices, i heared that old BG games contained only barks and some cruicial dialogues and the rest was silent. Not sure about personal quests, since i didnt play it.
To answer your question: probably easier. Characters in BG 1 were mostly a bunch of portraits attached to a class and race. The amount of dialogue varied a lot per companion but voiceovers were largely relegated to maybe the first lines of some key dialogue and other than that they had some oneliners for being tired and so on. Still, most characters had their own quests asociated with them and not all 15 companions had equal substance to them.
For BG2 the canon party, e.g. minsc, jaheira and Imoen were a lot more fleshed out etc and they introduced romances and so on. So yeah characters evolved between tge two games, while many were mere cameos in bg2. Well written characters on the whole, but in more modern games the approach to companions is quite different than in 1998 and early 2000s. Game development took less into account too lol. Way fewer efforts to try and make dnd appeal to a wider public, but times change.
