Strawmen aren't very good opponents in discussion, and it makes you look silly to fight them.
It's not a strawman. I am taking the suggestion he made and showing an instant problem with it, using the VERY SAFE ASSUMPTION that Larian will not delete the origins.
The point is: Red Prince's story wouldn't be all that different if instead of a unique red lizard, he was a lizard with tags Prince, Asshole, Exotic Appearance.
All we have seen of the Red Prince origin is him on Concentration Camp Hellhole Island. It is very wrong to assume that the only effects of his origin can be covered in those generic tags.
You replace the references of his specific skin color with vague mentions of an unusual scar/birthmark/mole/etc., and his story can be easily adjusted to contextually fit any race.
I highly doubt that.
That was totally uncalled for.
My point was valid, and there was no need to write three pages about it just for the hell of it.
Instead of having origin stories tied to a specific character you could have only tags.
You are of course free to make that suggestion to Larian to delete all the origin stories and instead replace them with a bunch of small scenes tied to very specific tags to produce a mix-and-match.
However, I don't believe that "delete the origin stories" will get a warm reception at Larian.
And about the comment of Stabbey, it's simple to give a trolling counter example.
"Red Prince" is not a tag, it's an origin story.
A tag would be "prince" for example, or "heir of the royal family", hence if you'd pick a "female dwarf", she could be the heiress of the dwarf empire, and you could imagine several scenarios, like some races/sex not being able to have certain tags, certain tags being mutually exclusive, etc...
You could think of an intelligent system just like you have in paper RPG, you wouldn't need origin stories for that.
And that's pretty much what you got from my post so... Point was made.
I'll repeat myself:
All we have seen of the Red Prince origin is him on Concentration Camp Hellhole Island. It is
very wrong to assume that the only effects of his origin can be covered in those tags.
If there are scenes later on with someone who personally knows the Red Prince, such as a scheming nest-sister, those will not work with any combination of generic tags. Each origin story has a late-game origin quest tied specifically to the origin. That won't work with a mix-and-match pick-your-tags origin.
Your suggestion is basically to substitute in a bunch of tiny minor generic pieces in place of specific details. Trying to weave in 2-3 random setpiece generators (like you can find wandering the wastes in Fallout) might be possible, but the limitations of fitting in all race and gender combinations would make them seem bland and impersonal, like a novel in which the protagonist only describes his relations like "Parent One poured a bowl of cereal for Younger Sibling."
Also, it probably wouldn't be all that coherent. What if I pick the Merchant,and Bandit tags and encounter the "[Bandit's] Old Gang robbing [Merchant's] Old Partner" setpiece? If you break each origin into several different tags, that allows for those tags to be mixed and matched with potentially opposed tags from other origins. Untangling all the complications would be a massive headache for the writers, coders, quest designers
If these setpiece generators become tags, then they would have to be limited in multiplayer. A tag could only be picked by one player. You couldn't have two Merchant players reach the same trigger for a setpiece.
Anyway, I hope I made my point, and I've pretty much nothing else to add, I hope the system will see some changes, but I'm pretty sure this is a moo point since the origin stories are there, and I don't see why they'd remove them, plus, it's clear it's the path they chose, so it's pretty much a lost battle.
I can't imagine Larian removing the origins either, especially not based on suggestions from people who haven't seen how they work off of Concentration Camp Island.
Back in the Kickstarter days they showed the Island Heiress origin, which was off the island and had specific interactions between the heiress and existing NPC's. That was just an example, but it should be paid attention to when thinking about how the origins are likely to work once off of the prison island.
