Uh, no. If an NPC dies, I choose to reload or not for whatever reason. I don't see how having immortal allies is superior to choosing what to do myself.
Come now, hand on your heart: how many times have you continued playing after a party member died and you were not able to resurrect him?
I agree, though, that the mechanic could be improved. PS:T had a nice in-game rationale for immortal allies, for example. You could also add a "death's door" mechanic -- say, when a party member goes down, you have some finite amount of time to administer first aid to keep them from going over the edge.
But making death permanent and keeping everything else the same would just lead to every battle being a dance on eggshells. That is, you'd have to save before every encounter, and expect multiple reloads; surviving an encounter with everyone alive would be due to luck as much as strategy or skill.
Try Dwarf Fortress, by the way, if you want an example of a game with realistically lethal combat -- you'll even occasionally have people suffer permanent brain damage in sparring accidents. It works, it's a lot of fun, but it only works because your characters are expendable -- as much as you might've grown fond of little Såkzul, there's always another dwarf out there to pick up his masterwork steel battle axe.
So the two viable models are NWN2 and The Witcher? That shows a lot of imagination.
They were examples, not models. But they do represent two ends of a continuum -- one, a story where you know almost nothing about the protagonist, and consequently the story is about the sidekicks; another, where you know a great deal about the protagonist, and can consequently make the story about him.
I repeat: you
cannot write a deep, compelling, personal story if you don't know anything about the person the story is about. This imposes an impossible constraint on the writer.
What I'd prefer is a game where no NPC is essential. No one was essential in BG or any of the sequels or spin-offs that I'm aware of, or Fallout or a lot of other games with great stories. Obviously you couldn't solo it in BG, but if somebody died the game didn't compel you to reload, did it?
Once more: how many times did you continue playing without reloading if your party member died? I don't know about you, but when I played Fallout, I did my damnedest to keep my sidekicks alive; and because of the nature of things, that did mean saving before every encounter. I eventually lost Dogmeat anyway.
And... that part of Fallout was *not* fun. Every time the game kicks you out of immersion and forces a metagame action -- "oops, must remember to save!"... "dang, gotta load!" represents a design failure. Usually a little one, often so little we don't even notice, but if it's the dancing-on-eggshells variety, it's a big one.
But to get even pickier about what *I* would like: permanent death without resurrection, just because resurrection doesn't make sense. How come your enemies don't resurrect their bosses? How would a king (or anyone wealthy) ever get assassinated when resurrection is available for 1000 gold? If it were "realistic", it would skew every aspect of society.
That's why I run my PnP campaigns without resurrection... or, rather, where resurrection involves truly epic adventuring, à la Orpheus going after Eurydice in Hades.
I too would like to play a game like that. However, in order to maintain immersion and not get into the save-and-reload mechanic, it would have to be pretty different from games as we know them. Combat would have to be rarer, and enemies less epic. In a real swordfight, even a skilled swordsman runs the risk of death or permanent injury, which is why real-life swordsmen spend a lot more time training and sparring than fighting. But yeah, I'd like that -- for one thing, it'd force the devs to think more about the story aspects.
The only reason I gripe so much about DA is that in the very early stages their whole "low magic" shtick sounded very appealing, gritty and fun. The more I hear now, the less I like it.
Well, a little counter-hype never hurts, that's for sure.
Besides immortal party easily leads to silly situations and tactics like using Carth as a bulletmagnet 
