Speaking as a DM myself, I personally steer clear of those kinds of starts and try to give my players some sort of primary thread to follow until they go their own way. Everyone meeting in a bar is kind of cliche frankly, and there are better ways to hook players. Then there's the fact that this is a video game, not a tabletop game. Starting in a bar wrks better around a table because you're with your friends, with new characters and you've all set aside a few hours to play around and have fun together. A video game has to hook you earlier on so that they make sure they've convinced you to continue devoting time to that particular game and not any of the others you could pick from. I convinced a friend of mine who is familiar with cRPGs and TTRPGS to play the first Pillars of Eternity, a game I absolutely adore, and they told me that the beginning was too aimless and didn't give them a clear, coherent goal to be going towards and that killed his sense of investment. And having gone back and played the game again, I can agree that vague beginning was definitely the weakest part of the game.
Also maybe I missed something, but BG3 doesn't seem to be a save the world story, just a save yourself story. You're not chosen ones, you've just been caught up in a bad situation that you need to get yourself out of.
Thats an interesting critique of Pillars and is probably one reason why I like it alot more than Pillars 2. You are just a normie travelling down the road and you piece by piece discover more things about yourself. The fact that there is no clear goal is to the strenght of the game, not detriment. There is a mystery and you are aware there is a bigger picture but you dont care because you're having so much fun exploring the world. Its probably why BG1 resonates so well with me too. The prologue is basically: "myserious bad guy wants to get you" and what do you do with this information? Fuck man, just go east and talk some friends of your father, perhaps go into the woods to the south? Dunno, there is some troubles with kobolds in the mine to the south maybe you want to check that out.
The story reveals the importance of the main character piece by piece. You can probably ignore 95% of the content in BG1 and still complete the game. Perfect storytelling for computer games in my opinion.
I agree 100% about what you say here about Pillars 1, and this is one of the main reasons I love that game myself.
