Feeds two birds with one cookie, wonderfully efficient.
Resources in BG3 are not leveraged efficiently and dialogue is not efficient. For example Speak with the dead options are a waste of time 90% of the time, it barely adds anything to experience and you rarely learn anything from it that you didnt already learn from books/notes/letters and npcs. And you cant even use every option, while most options like "who are you" and "who killed you" are redundant especially when you know who they are and you killed them. This is another thing i'd easily trade for more dialogue with companions, and i think most people would agree.
Besides talking with companions is optional, if you are a such a special case of a player that doesnt want the dialogue, you can skip it. Youre here acting how more dialogue would actually make it worse for you, meanwhile there are hundreds of random npcs that give you rather pointless one-liners when you interact with them with no option for dialogue.
Wizard dialogue options werent great, because [wizard] is only one type of person, and you cant express any different ideal of a wizard - for example someone like Elminster.
Calling dialogue with companions, that make them more believable and interactive, "dialogue for dialogue's sake" seems ridiculous to me. I'd agree if you described Speak with the dead that way, or talking to random rats - ultimately pointless, just shows "Look you can do this thing, isnt it cool?"
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what I flippantly called a desire for the companions to fawn over your PC
Yeah no, the other poster already explained how wrong your interpretation is here. I feel youre just being defensive of BG3 while lacking experience of other games, so you are in denial that another game couldve done something better. What we're saying is not a controversial opinion at all, Dragon age did companions better and had more reactivity throughout the game. If BG3 was like that it would be a better experience for me and you as well. You're not gonna understand that until you have experienced it yourself.
And talking about bloat in context of BG3's act3 is ridiculous. BG3 is longer than all Dragon age games combined (or feels like it anyway), while having less reactivity per companion than a single game and spread throughout a longer game. There is a reason why lack of reactivity, banter etc - how companions are too quiet - are some of the top criticisms of later Acts (especially act 3). More of content that people actually want and need can't be bloat.
Ill give you another example, note that this is just random banter as you walk around the game, just like in bg3, the cutscene/dialogue format is fan-made. Here you can see conversations companions can have about single romance - if companions speak as much about Shadowheart romance in the game i certainly didnt hear it in 300 hours of playing. It would be more "efficient" to invest in more content like this, than features that barely anyone utilizes or add a bit of flavour to the world at best.
