ZombiePopper said that (at least I thought) but clarified their position.
So people was person, and not even that. Got it.
Yet Piper dislikes it when you commit an illegal act. As someone who is an investigative journalist in a city where the mayor wants nothing more than shut her paper down, that seems a bit silly to me.
Whether it seems silly to you is irrelevant to whether it's a part of her character. Anti-authoritarians, by their nature, tend to flout or defy conventional authorities and rules- even, especially, when the authorities dislike them and would tolerate adherance.
This seems just a tad like people who deem a character a hypocrite for not adhering to the player's straw-manned insistence of what their beliefs are.
That companions approve of player actions is fine. Dragon Age does that too, when you find Vivienne's books or Blackwall's Warden relics. The difference is, those are things they asked you to do. Finding these items is important for them, so it stands to reason that they would like the player more because of it. I'm even down for Strong liking you more and more as you kill things with him in tow, since as a Super Mutant he enjoys little else.
What's also different is that these are about the only points where world actions actually affect approval. Dragon Age is a series in which approval is overwhelmingly tied into the roleplaying of the dialogue system rather that character actions: companion's characters are overwhelmingly controlled by what you say, not what you do between conversations.
Fallout is a fundamentally different sort of RPG, where most of the role-playing is intended to be in the non-conversation sphere.
But I find it really silly that Cait starts talking about all the good I did for her when I haven't even spoken to her since leaving the Combat Zone with her in tow. Piper speaks of me helping people and how she likes that in my character, but I barely did that at all and simply picked locks in her presence until her approval hit the desired spot. I don't think that is an exploit, it's how the system is designed to work and happens naturally as the game flows unless you intentionally refuse to pick locks so as not to gain approval.
Picking locks isn't the exploit we were referring to- torturing Dogmeat was the one you were hyping. Cait approving of lock picking is tied to her character.
We can certainly agree that it was a bit silly if lockpicking was all you did... but then, I suspect we'd also agree that the Mass Effect romance system was pretty silly as well since it was tied to the typical 'three conversations and a flag' system regardless of what else you did. One is the flaw of an approval-gate system if you exploit any single approval-garnering action- the other is a flaw of a system devoid of approval.
Dragon Age had something similar with gifts in Origins, and the devs rightfully decided this system had to go and toned it down. I think companions liking the player for mundane actions is not good both story and gameplay wise, unless that action is explicitely important for them. ''I like picking locks and you pick locks'' isn't really a great reason to have the approval bar soar if you ask me.
Did I?
(Alright, that was a bit mean.)
But- going back- Dragon Age is able to go away from gifts because it's extremely dialogue heavy and that's where the companion approval was in the first place- even as a limitation has always been how easy it was to lose approval opportunities for the gameplay benchmarks if you didn't take everyone everywhere. DAO relied on gifts to supplement because approval was only a good thing and the only way to get the friendship bonuses. DA2 tried to compensate by allowing Rivalry so that having a negative relationship wasn't 'bad' but suffered the unsatisfying middle. DAI changed it's approach by letting Big Decisions and Judgements affect non-party members.
Thing is- this is still all about party witnessing dialogue, in games built around dialogue roleplaying, in games where a expected party of three companions brings multiple witnesses to every conversation of note.
Fallout isn't that style of roleplaying game. It never has been. This isn't a matter of 'Fallout 4 took away my dialogues'- this is a matter that you can complete a good deal of the settlement content of any modern fallout game without even meeting, let alone recruiting, all the companions. Whether because they're tied into core story quest in a series infamous for letting the player ignore it (Fawkes, Nick), their recruitment is tied to a high-level area (the ghoul companion of FNV), or there's a recruitment quest and extensive investments required to recruit them (Cassidy for anyone not putting points into barter), it's very easy to recruit companions late in the game, after the low-hanging dialogue fruits have been passed. And even then, you're only bringing one of them with you at a time.
If Fallout- any Fallout- tried to tie Bioware-style dialogue approval, it'd be pretty poor. Bioware establishes an early recruitment of pretty much all companions relatively early in the games, and paces the dialogue content throughout. Open world games like Fallout, do not.
Which means, if dialogue alone isn't going to be enough, you either supplement dialogue approval with non-dialogue actions you can reliably access throuought the game- which, in turn, means you can simply grind those non-dialogue actions as necessary- or you simply abandon approval at all, and go for a flag system (in which case characters are notoriously unresponsible to the sort of actions you do do if it's not in a specific set of negative flags).
The Mythal thing was probably Sera's last straw, the first straw was the IQ being Dalish. I don't know much about Sera's romance but it seems the only one who gets dumped is the Elf IQ.
Since you clearly don't know much about Sera's romance, might I suggest you study it a bit? All Inquisitiors are culturally different from Sera. Being different is not the issue, since all Inquisitor-Sera romances deal with that.
There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made of Sera, but demanding homogeny and the same opinion on everything isn't one of them.
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