Interesting that you prefer Dragon Age, because that game had its own relationships problems. In Origins, your companions got stat bonuses (+2 magic for Morrigan, let's say) based on how high their approval rating was. So basically, the most efficient way to play the game is to be the yes-man to whomever you decided was on your party for that playthrough. To do anything less is to introduce real, measurable handicaps to your team's combat ability. And if you're not a neurotic min-maxer, low approval also locked you out of further conversation trees, likely the reason you're playing a Bioware game in the first place. So, if you're tired of Morrigan's nihilistic powermonger schtick, just shut up and nod your head - good things will come your way.
The introduced a slightly improved system for DAII - your companions got bonuses for consistently adversarial responses as well as consistently friendly ones, but the game still only rewarded consistency. If, say, you enjoyed Merrill as a person but abhorred her blood magic hijinks, you ended up breaking even on the friend-rival scale, and you got no bonuses at all. She might even try to murder you if you make a certain choice at the end, even though she theoretically is fonder of you than if you two were full "rivals"!
So I guess I'm saying Bioware's got relationship problems in general, especially where relationships interact with the systemic parts of their games. Ideally, I'd prefer the conversation system to be completely siloed off from the more gamey stuff, but that's probably asking for too much. A neat alternative is something like Alpha Protocol's approach - you get a sweet perk for nearly every choice you make in the game, whatever that choice happens to be, so you get to feel like you're personalizing a character without feeling screwed for your choices. Another preferable alternative is Telltale's The Walking Dead, which probably had some math running under the hood to determine who left, who stayed, etc., but never made it explicit by telling you to fill up a bar, and if you wanted, you could go into the options and keep yourself completely ignorant of which choices were "important".
When I heard via developer Q&A that Inquisition ditched the approval system, I became hopeful that they were aware of these issues and were trying new things, but I guess we'll see come November. As for Mass Effect, I'd like them to ditch the Paragon/Renegade system entirely - it's beginning to feel old-fashioned - but I recognize that that's unlikely to happen.
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