The interface with the two sidebars for your companions shows up while paused. So it's super-easy to pause the game, issue some commands, and then unpause as needed, while using hotkeys for the more mundane of tasks (take cover, go forward, etc.). They've actually removed the usual "click to focus on a character, click again to use ability" of that character for unified design which allows you to see all party actions that will fire on unpause quickly.
Looks good to me and is very much in keeping with the way past Bioware games have allowed you to manage party members.
