POE convinced me that the entire RPG 'companion' trope is bad. I was already on the fence about it after Mass Effect 3, but all the poor writing and heavy dialogue of these two games alienated me from the whole concept. I think people saw one game do it well (Torment) and then tried to systematize it with the later Bioware games, and it just never turned into something compelling.
The wild thing about all the dialogue from the companions is that it winds up being more :words: than a lot of novels, but with far less bearing on the narrative than you would see in a novel. Unlike in a novel, in these games, the action entirely freezes whenever a dialogue window opens. Whereas in a novel, conversation is going to be dynamic, in video games, unless it's an animated cut scene, you just have characters standing around talking to one another to interrupt the action continuously. A conversation that would be paraphrased as an aside in a novel (because it's a boring conversation) would instead be typed out laboriously in a POE style video game, interrupting the action. In POE2 this is really accentuated by the fully voiced and narrated scenes of mundane quest givers that, in a novel, would have been paraphrased in a few lines.
Voluntarily inviting word salad dispensers into your party just makes the game worse and detracts from its positive aspects especially given that this game is nice enough to give you the alternative of creating a full party. There are thousands of acceptable novels out there and hundreds of great literary works that are worth your time. Companion writing in video games would never pass muster in a pilot for even a bottom tier cable TV network from affirmative action scriptwriters. There's an entire popular category of game that caters to the type of person who loves companion dialogue in video games: the visual novel, written down to their comprehension level, with no gameplay to distract them from the parasocial interaction they crave to distract them from the loneliness of their actual lives.
