Baldur's Gate III - Spoiler Edition (please read updated OP)

I always found it more realistic when you couldn't please everyone and always thought more games should have some party members get fed up and go their own way for whatever reasons etc. By relatively early on I'm pretty settled into a certain group of party members anyway no matter what the game.

Everyone do that in RPGs, when party composition matters at least. At best (worst?), you will be swapping for companion quests, especially in recent games that force them on you for those. I call it the revolving party slot.

And that's a gameplay habit which appear after the D&D cRPGs were a thing:
BG1: The only character that bug you to join the party is Imoen and you can reject her. You have to initiate dialogues for the others and while the game "guide you" toward some of them, you can't really "collect" them unless you have a map with a X where you last saw the ones not in the party. It also has a bunch of constraint to keep certain companions "happy" and in the party.
BG2: There is a single character that will initiate dialogue and ask to join: Yoshimo. The rest is like BG1, except if dumped off the party most will go to the Copper Coronet, so easier to "collect 'em".
Icewind Dale series: no companions.
NWN: basically mercenary recruits and they are useless . I think the Underdark expac did it better, never played it.

KoTOR is the first game where BioWare really forced companions on you (Bastila and Carth) with the Gotta Catch 'Em All mindset. Subsequent party based Western RPGs followed the same design afterward. And over the last 15 years, devs have just made it harder for optional companions to leave. I blame DAO, too many people complaining they killed the healer or were left with just Alistair for the final battle. 

Yeah, I restarted about a dozen times (no kidding) to figure out which characters I would like to take on the ride.

TBH, the only 2 RPGs I actually switched around between companions are ME2 (different companions work well vs different types of enemies) and ME3 (Everyone is pretty balanced but unique without XP penalty or heavy dependency on equipment). In BG games I mostly stick around with the same party, especially when newly recruited companions only scale to the PC up to a certain point. That's why I didn't have the chance to play much with the likes of Skie, Alora, or Yeslick in BG1, and why actually planning on recruiting Imoen in BG2 is such a pain for me. If they locked after a certain point like in DOS2 I'm fine with that actually.

But the AD&D XP tables are awfully forgiving; after a couple of levels a low-level character can almost catch up to the rest of the party. That's why dual-classing can work. Although there might not be much XP left by the time Alora and Skie show up, depending.

Thanks seven for sharing me this!

Disk requirements were updated on Steam: from 70 gigs to 150 gigs.

Quite a bit of space but I read that there's 100 hours of content in the game. It ties with RDR 2 for the largest disk space req,

Community Update #8 - Character Creation
store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/1086940/view/2868188053546850136

This is looking to be one of the nicest CCs I've seen in a while with all that pretty detail and that hair is stunning! I hope Bioware pays attention to this.