Im getting the game this friday in europe, wondering if anyone found out of many companions one can have?

One non humanoid and one humanoid companion.

Hmm... Well that makes Charisma less useful. I made a low Charisma character to spend points elsewhere and thought only having ED-E and another companion was because of my Charisma of 2. I so hoping for multiple party members similar to that of Fallout 1 + 2. That was one of the great trade-offs; I may not be very smart, fast, tough, strong, but I'm a helluva charmer... speaking of which... Personal army! ATTACK! And it was always fun to watch the interaction between characters, "Boss, Sulik is looking at me weird."

Then again, with the obvious defects in the AI that makes me think the AI programmers put their pants on head first (got me a M.S. in C.S. and can smell bad logic design a mile away...), I'm a bit glad I won't have the headache of dealing with more than two companions in real-time.

Don't underestimate the power of the charisma-tied skills like Speech and Barter. I've had plenty of checks against these...

EDIT: It's an entirely artificial limitation. This was modded all to hell in FO3.

Things just tend to get crowded when you have more than that around you.

Which happened in Fallout/Fallout 2 as well.

See: Marcus.

Gotta love taking on an Enclave Patrol when Marcus decides to turn Vic, Sulik, and Dogmeat into ground hamburger.

lol!

I gave Ian an SMG -once-

I never made that mistake again...

Barter isn't that much of an issue, there plenty of fodder to pawn off. Speech, I just tag and dump the first few levels of skill points into with a high Intelligence score and compensate thoroughly. And since the FPS aspect of the game cripples the reason for high weaponry scores, you aren't shorted much from redirecting skill points into non-combat skills. And things wouldn't get too hectic if it wasn't for the AI's default move to charge into combat after an enemy and then move onto the next one... despite being told to stay close and passive. (I don't think those options actually work.) Rule set, context sensitive, and multi-state AI design must be a foreign thing to the developers. Then again, the game engine might simply be too worthless in this aspect to offer much to developers and modders alike.

Oh well, hopefully modders will take care of it. It seriously feels like Bethesda and Obsidian are taking a few pages from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. playbook: Release awkwardly constructed game, let fans straighten it out.

Barter is not only used for item prices it also provides dialogue options