Back to the OP's point:
DA had some interesting companions that managed to be 'normal', and the D:OS games likewise had companions that managed to be interesting and have their own motivations without being weird caricatures.
Given that Larian wrote the D:OS companions, I'm disappointed that the BG3 ones are so grotesquely odd. Aside from anything lese, it is usually the case that twe empathise more with those we can relate to. Having <wow> <zap> magical alien character backstories is less interesting for me in the long run than a slow and measured character development for someone I can genuinely relate to somehow. The fighter who wants to return ito his homeland because his wife is pregnant and is constantly fighting between the desire to chop things up and the desire to preserve his life for the sake of his unborn child; the rogue who is wanted for a crime and seeks to clear his name and become an honest citizen, but can't help pickpocketing or filching things. Or how about the young wizard who is wanting to make a name for herself in the world but has no self-confidence or belief?
Many of us are RPG players, some of us are GMs, and some have even built their own game-worlds. A few have decades of experience. I'm sure that Larian could have gathered thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of interesting companion ideas if they had asked for contributions from the fan-base. Some of them might even have been suitable to include in a game.
+1
And to be fair, I don’t know that it’s the backgrounds themselves that make them unrelatable as much as how they’re just not believable as people at all. Their uniqueness is just ham fisted as all hell. Everything they wear, everything they say, their whole aesthetic is screaming their backstory. Seeing a kid at the mall wearing all black baggy clothes, chains and eye liner, you don’t think to yourself ‘this is someone who’s clearly depressed’ Instead you think ‘this is someone trying to look depressed, and who’s naive’. You see it when you bring up the wrong subject with a housewife who’s trying to be cheery and she starts to tear up then pretends nothing is wrong.
Queue a bunch of people jumping in to say ‘hum well *actually*... in Baldurian culture people often use color to...”
