Emerwyn

Challenging, right? It makes it the more interesting!

Thanks everyone for chiming in with some advice. Hopefully I can just recruit the companions and leaving them at the stronghold to progress and develop their personal stories while actually adventuring with my own party, like for example in Mass Effect, where you don't have to take a character at all to exhaust all their conversation, romance them, and finish their quest-line (besides their one personal mission, where it does make sense that you are forced to bring them along). If bringing the characters along for more than their own personal side-missions is required, I'll go with a first playthrough with the pre-scripted companions and then a second playthrough with a custom party. If the game is as good as I think it will be, I'll probably even try a third "Ironman" run with just the main character, considering by then I'll probably have a very good idea of the game systems and encounters.

I am guessing OP wants to know how much of that kind of content is in the game. I don't think anyone from the beta will be able to answer that one for you though, only the devs will have an idea of that. Yeah that's pretty much it. My doubt is if I'll miss really good bits of storytelling/narrative or the chance to explore certain areas or attain certain powerful items just because I chose to not bring any pre-scripted companions as regular party members. If recruiting them and leaving them at the stronghold while chatting with them now and then is good enough to unlock all of the content, I'm fine with that. My main doubt is if I'm good to bring my own party of custom-made adventurers and miss relatively little or none of the game's content. I imagine no player can answer that yet, but any guesstimation is welcome.

I haven't tried PoE yet just to not spoil myself, that means I'm patiently waiting for the final released version of the game to play it from beginning to end. However, now we're getting close to release, and there is something I'd like to know from anyone who has actually played the early access/beta to any significant degree and has valuable first-hand experience. Are companions really relevant/important to the the campaign? The reason I ask is because lately in this kind of multi-character RPG, I enjoy creating my own party with very diverse characters I've been developing through the years while playing both in tabletop and on-line RP communities, but I always hate the idea that because I made my whole custom party I'll be missing out on a cool of quests, narrative or game content that is locked behind specific pre-scripted companions. So that's really what I'd like to know. Am I good to make my own full party, or do I miss out on much by doing so?