Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Why is Tav the least interesting character?

I can't get interested in Tav. She is as generic as you can make someone. I won't play Dark Urge because that is way too dark. I am not interested in playing an "Origin" character. I wanted my own character, my own story. But there is literally no backstory to her. No one in Baldur's Gate knows her. She doesn't run into anyone from her past. She doesn't have voiced lines. We didn't even get to choose our starting city. She literally has no life or backstory before the abduction.

She has no personal connection to anyone or anything. Tav has no personal questline at all to look forward to. Yet, all of the other characters do.

Why wasn't more effort put into making the one character that could be considered "ours"? If there is another patch, I really would appreciate fleshing out more depth for Tav. Our own characters deserve more than just "theater of the mind".

Thank you!

Well because of the very large number of things our own characters could be it would be very hard and time consuming to implement. You could maybe add a questionaire at the start asking things like your parents alive? Happy? In the jungle researching spiders? But you just couldn't cover it all.

To be honest I think it's by design. They give you options to play as characters involved in the story and they give you the option to play a blank slate with some dialogue options based on their class/race. I think that's more than fine. If you want your own story, it sounds fair that for it to be your own you have to imagine it.

There is a spectrum of freedom they can give the player character in RPGs, sometimes it's a bit more "railroaded" (the Dragon Age games come to mind) and I also like that, but I think for this game this approach works, especially since they give you plenty of options to have a detailed backstory with the origins.

If they wrote backstory for Tav then Tav would be an origin and not yours.

Tav is a character that has to accommodate millions of people.

Mass Effect, Dragon Age Origins, for a couple of examples, gave us options that really helped shape the character. We had connections to characters right from the start (Captain Anderson or the Noble family Cousland, for example). So we had some emotional attachment. They don't need to create a huge story change, but some depth and emotional connections would make a huge difference.

The thing is... the game does give you options to help shape a character. If you don't want to pick them, that's your choice, but them offering several options but also a blank slate option is like the best compromise I can think of. Otherwise there'd be threads asking for Tav to not have an established backstory, or asking them not to be voiced, etc. There is no winning in the whole "player agency vs established backstory" debacle and this was a good middle ground.

Tav is your character, you must come up with your own story for him and play with it. Absolute freedom. Tav can be anyone, you just need your imagination.

I'm very glad they made "Tav" an unknown person who's personality you can define. I don't like predefined characters, the main reason I'm not a fan of the Witcher games for example. I'm currently playing the Dark Urge, and I'm already quite annoyed by it. As said in some posts before, if they made predefined stuff for "Tav", it would just be another Origin char.

The issue with putting in established lore is that you have to actually show that lore.

In a game like Mass Effect, this is done by having cutscenes where other people are talking about your character at the start of the game. In Dragon Age: Origins, you have the prologue where you're doing your origin story.

Neither course would work with the way BG3 is set up where the very start of the game is you being tadpoled (Which is suggested to impact character's abilities - Hence people like Karlach, Gale, Lae'zel and Wyll starting as level 1 and barely able to 1v1 a Bugbear despite being highly adept warriors/wizards - Thus it would be super awkward to have a prologue where you're "Full power" before being abducted and tadpoled)

There's also the secondary effect of things like having choices a la ME's backstory options, as you'd have to create different dialogues based on what was picked, which is additional work (ME gets away with it due to how little it's actually brought up, just a handful of references across the entire trilogy and 1 unique mission in the first game).

Meanwhile, blank slate PC can work as people can create their own headcanon for their character and try and pick from generic responses to try and push that headcanon.

It could be nice to have options for backgrounds, maybe nothing as concrete as an Origin character, but things like what city you're from, your profession (Aka the "Background" option being somewhat relevant other than the skill proficencies) and a Solasta style demeanour choice to influence your speech... But such things would be a lot of work and you'd still end up upsetting people.

It's a shame you don't want to play as Durge, because it fixes the problem you're having with Tav not having a background. I liked my durge run a lot more. I feel like it is better at tying the story to the main character.

So I think the reason that Tav is the least interesting character is because Larian never really thought of Tav as a "character." I think Larian views Tav and to a lesser extent even Durge not as a character who we are meant to emotionally connect with, but as an avatar through which we make things happen, interact with the game world and experience the stories and actual characters within the game. I say this because I have never played a crpg where I felt less satisfied and more disappointed roleplaying. I felt as though for all the different things that can happen, my character always felt pretty much like the same person across my three or four unfinished runs, with maybe some moderate variations. It's not just a matter of Tav being a blank slate. To give examples, The Pathfinder games and Pillars of Eternity both have blank slate player characters. But the game provides a large breadth of dialogue options that allow the player characters to feel unique and to potentially be interesting. The stories are also clearly ABOUT the main characters in those games. BG3 isn't really about Tav. It's a game that's concerned with presenting the player-as in the person behind the screen- with as many options and things to do as possible. It's not the blank slate factor.

You are absolutely correct, OP. And in my view, Larian deliberately left Tav underdeveloped as a way to pressure players to use one of their pre-gen origins, which is what they want us to play as. It is a cunning way to force us to play as one of their origins, and that is complete b.s. Like you, I also will never ever play one of their ridiculous origin characters but still fully expect that I should be provided with a player character that I create that is fully tapped into the game. This is not something too much to ask for. Games like DA, PoE, even the Pathfinder games, and most notably BG2, all do this far, far, far better than Tav in BG3. So, it can be done. It has been done by others for years. But Larian deliberately chose not to do it in BG3.

As a side note, I hate the concept of their origin characters so much that I would want to just slaughter each and every one of them because I see them as the characters that don't belong in my game. But Larian has made sure we can't do that either, by tying huge chunks of the game's story to those origin characters such that removing them from the game would effectively remove huge parts of the game's story, quests, and content.

Tav is a nobody, that's my problem with this "MC" he/she doesn't matter, no matter what happens to this character, it's irrelevant, even the MC from DAI had more character...

Tav is what you make him/her.

Dark Urge has a backstory and it worked out beautifully. I much, much prefer playing Dark Urge to Tav now. I played Tav once, tried Durge, and never looked back. There are people who like blank slates, and they get Tav.

Dark Urge isn't that dark. You can be a good Dark Urge. You will have "urges" and make mistakes sometimes, but it'll be revealed in due time why it is. And the ending for a good Dark Urge is very rewarding and wholesome. I really recommend trying Dark Urge. You can change their class and race, so you're not stuck playing Dragonborn.

As others have pointed out, several other games in the genre have done this better than how Larian handled Tav. It would be nice to have a simple prologue or cutscenes providing some information on what Tav was doing before being abducted, based on their race. They could also have added elements to make Tav feel more integrated with the game world based on race. For instance, if Tav is human, the game defines them as a Baldurian. It would then be safe to assume that Tav has contacts in the city and possesses at least a surface level knowledge of the current state of affairs in the Sword Coast. However, none of this information is provided. In my opinion, a "blank slate" character should still have some backstory that's interwoven with the game plot, and preferably some prior relationship with existing characters (Dark Urge has those). Tav is more like an "empty husk" than a "blank slate".

lol pardon?

@GrayGhost: Your theory also makes sense in the light of their recommendation being that you use a Tav for your first play-through. Tav is basically the avatar to figure out and "learn" the plot with it's different options, so you can later on tell a story that makes sense with one of the Origin characters - Durge included.

I second this. Especially if you played through the previous Baldur's Gate games.

In Early access, many people asked for more content for Tav. They gave us Dark Urge and I'm happy with that. The way conversation and tags work, part of the problem to add content to Tav is that many of the tags that you can use as Tav, are shared with the origins. From classes to backgrounds. Dark Urge has an exclusive background. The bad side of this is that you can't have a noble Dark Urge (well, you can add skills and all that, but the game won't react).

They could have added a "Tav" tag, but the problem is that a drow Tav shouldn't be treated the same as a githyanki Tav or a human Tav. As it is, there are few race dialogs or triggers that should appear for them but won't.

I would probably have fixed that by allowing Tav to choose from a few preselected stories similar to the origins that added a new tag. Or by allowing specific backgrounds not available to the origins. But that is me and they probably wanted to encourage you to play the Origins even if most people said that they preferred their own character. Anyway, I have faith in the mods and expansions.