Companions or Adventurers

Question

In Pillars or Eternity, you can find companions to join you during your quest. You can also "recruit" adventurers in some places (inn, etc.), which basically allows you to create completely a new character to join your party.

As I see it, they both have pros and cons:

• Adventurers are completely customizable and allows you to create an "ideal" party, with complementary stats and skills. You can't decide the initial stats of companions.
• Companions have a story, dialog options, associated side quests, and might give additional choices in some other quests. Adventurers are dull and not involved in the storyline.

I know this is a very subjective question and opinions might differ, but I would like to know (no spoiler please) if going on the journey with custom adventurers will make me miss a significant part of the experience of PoE, or just a few trivial quests/dialog options.

Answer 1

In my limited experience so far of playing (11h) with a mixed party of both, I've found that the companion side quests are the only thing you'd really miss.

However there are some companions you'll meet along the way who do add to the storyline by allowing you to interact with them to talk about the primary story points, what or who they are, background information and how they affect both you and the world around you.

I've found this added a good deal of context to the story and helped to flesh out the lore of the world, giving my actions in the game more meaning.

So overall, I don't think that you'd miss to much, but it's my feeling that the game is designed to be played with companions mostly, in order to provide a more complete experience.

It's also worth noting that you can swap out your players at an Inn, so you could play a difficult dungeon with your best party, then head back to the Inn and swap in a companion to the team to get their side quest, although I've not tried this yet as I don't have any 'spare' team members.