Well, speaking as someone whose enjoyment of a Role Playing game is 99% characterization and story based and 1% battle based, this new style of companion dialogue just doesn't cut it for me.
It's simply not "natural" enough.
What dialogue there is, and given my inclinations I found there to be little enough of it, isn't nearly engaging enough. The companion characters, just based on their brief dialogue scenes, are sadly two dimensional and almost completely forgettable. I found more of interest in Vigil Keep's seneshal that I did in any of the "companion" characters and I believe that the quality and accessability of dialogue interactions with the Keep's seneshal is entirely the reason. There are more meaningful dialogue interactions with the Keep's seneshal than there are with any single other NPC or companion, and you can always walk up to him and ask him what's up, even if he doesn't have anything new to say to you.
For me, it all comes down to suspension of disbelief. I think of it this way: In the real world (bad four letter word, I know, and I apologize for it), I go into work in the morning, I walk up to my co-workers, say hello and ask how their evening was. Sometimes they have a story to tell, sometimes they don't. Either way they will respond to my greeting even if the response is very brief and completely personally unenlightening.
What doesn't happen, is that I go up to a co-worker and say hello and they completely ignore me while staring at their computer monitor (try directly initiating a conversation with one of your companions in the Keep and see how they respond). Likewise, I don't walk up to the coffee machine and stare at it to start a dialogue with my co-workers, if I want to chat with them, I will go to them directly (but for some reason I am expected to believe that staring at, or rather clicking on, a tree in Amaranthine works as a conversation starter... really?). I don't lead various colleagues up and down the same hallways to see if one of them happens to find something interesting in one of them (though for some reason I am expected to repeatedly visit the same areas with different companions each time just in case they might deign to talk to me if I look at the right thing). I also don't open the doors to my co-workers' offices and walk in repeatedly to get them to initiate conversations (however, this is apparently an acceptable method of communicating with my companions while housed at the Keep).
These are not "natural" ways for me to communicate, and because they are not, they interrupt the flow of the game for me and therefore disrupt my ability to suspend disbelief and immerse myself in the Awakenings world. This lack of immersion, for me, leads directly to an inability to relate to the companion characters and severs any budding emotional bond that may have begun to present itself during their introduction. What this also means for me, given that I am such a character and story driven role player, is that the game is basically ruined. The various fight and battle scenes are nothing more than gratuitous violence to me unless they are extremely plot advancing, which sadly isn't the case for about 70% of the fights in the Awakenings expansion and as such these don't make up any ground that was lost by the poor communication between myself and the companion characters. Since I have no vested emotional interest in the game expansion, via the companion characters and the lack of depth of the plot, I also have no interest in re-playing the expansion. Because I have no interest in re-playing the expansion, I have recommended to several friends that they not bother to spend their money on it; they are very like me in regards to what makes a RPG entertaining and even fictionally believable to them. Though now that I think about it further it might be nice to have a couple of friends to complain about it with. It could be a somewhat engaging way to pass an evening at least. Ok maybe only part of an evening... a small part.
Wow, I'm long winded....
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