Did you have a particular group you used?
I’ve done 4 playthroughs and I’ve mostly used Tav / Astarion / Shadowheart + swapping out the 4th as I see fit / fill gap depending on my Tav’s class (berzerker, paladin, fighter, sorcerer).
How could you forget Minsc and Boo?! They were the only things I remembered from the old games, lol (aside from the terrible real-time with pause 2nd Ed combat).
Fer sure.
It is amazing how much there is that you do not find on a single run of the game. Even a second or third play through will not show it all. This game keeps giving! Truly fantastic. Glad you had fun.
Same here.
“Go for the eyes!”
Though it helps that they had other cameos in other games and media, since they were fan favorites.
Yes, I settled pretty quickly on Gale, Karlach and Shadowheart and I decided to stick with them through the whole game without swapping anyone. I opted to romance Shadowheart and we had a happy ending (so to speak) 
Because of that I’ll probably try my next run without her in the party.
Does she get less annoying as the game progresses? She’s kinda a whiny pain at first…
(I ended up swapping out all the companions for storyless hirelings in my first playthrough. For a future one I might have to check out their stories…)
I found myself weirdly attached to her, honestly - trying not to hurt her feelings, etc. Maybe I’m a sucker for a love story 
It’s very worthwhile to play as an origin character. You get a first-person view of their story. In particular, I recommend playing as Wyll and romancing Karlach. Very rewarding. Wyll as an NPC annoys me, but he’s a lot of fun as a Warlock with an in-game patron.
Why? If it was for class reasons, you can respec characters.
Hmm, that’s an interesting idea. I haven’t done any origin characters and I hate Wyll (last playthrough I yelled at him until he left permanently) so might be a way to make it palatable.
I was doing a storyless playthrough where I just tossed everyone off the nearest cliff. I min-maxed the heck out of my fighter such that he could pick up most enemies and toss them, then nudge them, then the warlock would Eldritch Blast them into the abyss.
One of my favorite games I’ve ever played, but I have no idea what the story is or who the characters are, lol. Didn’t talk to anyone. I plan to do another playthrough at some point, but every time I’m halfway through Act 1, I start getting impatient and wanting to toss again…
An excerpt…
In my younger days, I used to spend weeks and weeks on these deep, story-driven RPGs, like Baldur’s other gates (exactly how many does a man need, really?). These days I’m not so young, and through my long life, I’ve come to realize that most epic story arcs can be summarized as “people meet people, people talk to people, then everyone dies”. I decided to skip to the “then everyone dies” part.
Fresh off the boat – some sort of octopus spaceship, apparently – I crash-landed straight into a Divinity reference, with debris and survivors scattered along a beach. I met a few heroic-looking companions and I pushed “skip” as quickly as I could. Some of them had more than two lines of dialogue, which bothered me, so I made them jump off a cliff and die. Others had the good sense to stay quiet after our initial encounter, so I let them stay in the party and be cannon fodder. The wizard guy kept wanting to eat my weapons, so I decided to let him tank. He wasn’t a very good tank, but he was cheaper than buying another health potion. Another guy apparently wandered off the Twilight set and tried to tell me his sob story, but I was already plenty traumatized by Twilight and wanted to hear none of it. He was ambushed one night in camp, and that was the perfect opportunity for me to join the ambushers and kill him. He whined less after that. Eventually I got sick of all my companions, so I replaced them with generic story-less hirelings, who had inferior personalities but a superior respect for silence. This is a single-player RPG, after all. I don’t need other NPCs trying to pretend to be players.
[…]
I just realized that Astarion is Jasper Cullen.
My copy is going a 12 gig patch right now. I don’t see anything but a hot fix posted recently. I was on top of my updates so this must be something newer. Anyone know what it is?
The most recent hot fix included a native Steam Deck build, so it’s probably that.
Oooh!!! Very very very interesting.
It’s working really well on the deck for me as well, even in act 3.