ED-E no longer following me (possible mini-spoiler)

What if you fire him, jump to some far away place, wait 24 hours and go back to him?

 

Yeah, disappearing companions is really a pain in the arse. The game should spawn followers always right near you, if you reloaded a savegame + didn't told them to wait. This way this problem could be pretty simple workarounded..

 

Blah, got a similar problem now. I needed to send Arcade home for a while, so I can do Cass' quests. Now I am done with Cass' quest and wanted to pick up Arcade again, but... there is no dialogue option for that. I can ask him what he thinks about the current situation and say bye, but nothing more.

Someone knows if that is possible to fix? I don't want anyone else than Arcade.

/Edit: Bleh, solved it. Looks like Arcade doesn't like mechanical companions. I had to kick out Rex in order to get the dialog option for Arcade again. After I picked him up, I took Rex again.

Feels like a bug in the way it is done...

 

I think when you tell a follower to wait, the game takes the command too seriously... they'll wait at a location forever, and if you forget about them, too bad. Followers should be smart enough to bring them back in follow mode once you've, say, fast traveled away, or a certain amount of time passes. I'm not 100% sure, but it also seems like they can be left behind somewhere if you get too far ahead of them, and it'll take days before they get back to you. ED-E in particular seems guilty of disappearing at random.

Just to confirm, is your follow distance set to close or far? If it's set to far, sometimes you have to actually walk a good 20ish metres before your companion starts to follow.

 

He seems to be heavily bugged.

I've finished his quest long before I visited remnants bunker and there he's got broken. I've tried not taking him there, just sent him to Lucky 38, but he eventually died near the entrance to the Strip.
Tried other things, but in my walkthrough he seems to become broken by the endgame

 

Hmm, he joined me when I had Rex. I heard he hates ED-E though...

But yeah, I constantly had disappearing companion problems on my first playthrough, so I suggest everyone to write down companions' <prid> as soon as you hire them, just in case. Second playthrough, though, so far so good, nobody disappearing.

 

I've had no problem with ED-E, just didn't upgrade. Only thing he's useful for anyway is being a pack brahmin, high perception and fun battle music. Only time any companion ever stopped following for me was when I entered Lucky 38.