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It's also stupid because you have a tadpole in your head and everyone is telling you that you can turn into a mind flayer if you take too long. So, when I first played through the game, I thought, "I'm not resting if at all possible. I'm not going to end the day. I'm in a race against time. If I can push on, I'm going to." Thus, when I learned I missed out on tons of dialogue because I hardly long rested, I was pretty upset.
Long rest and conversations need to be untied.
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But ultimately, we HAVE to uncouple the dialogue/story/character development aspect from long rests. It's ridiculous to have a character hardly do anything and then say they need to rest just so they can spark a conversation. I've literally had sessions where I adventured for 5 minutes and suddenly they want to end the day. Dumb.
So much this. Let companions talk to us on the road, or implement short rests where your party sets up a little camp wherever you are right then, and you can talk to companions then.
And Larian needs to do something about the conflict between tadpole urgency and resting. If they really really need us to rest and get that cutscene showing that the danger isn't as immediate as we suspected, then find a better way to force it. Give our characters levels of exhaustion (we were just kidnapped, put in vats, implanted with tadpoles, fought our way out, and then fell out of a ship), or in the Gale/Lae'zel introduction scene have one of our characters hear a horde of goblins approaching and heavily imply we need to find a place to lay low for hours, or something.
As it is now, like GM4Him, in my first playthrough I tried my best not to rest, thinking that there was
some sort of time pressure. I first rested significantly after leaving the Grove, which resulted in the game never showing me that "hey, we're not all turning into mindflayers!" scene, so I continued rest as little as possible. This resulted in me missing even more cutscenes/dialogue.
