Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Will there be a Prologue, before your capture?

Because of a discussion on Dragon Age Origins that lead into another discussion about how your custom character is shown to have something of their own personality, I've been wondering if there will be a prologue that establishes your character based on the origin/traits you've chosen leading up to your capture. à la DA:O though much more abbreviated, I'd even be fine with something text only.
The history of the origin characters seems like it's already a large part of their stories, has Larian mentioned definitively if they'll deal at all with your custom character's history?

That would be nice but I don't think there are any plans like that. I do really like the idea of starting out as a nobody and being able to play my nobody life for a bit before being thrust into an adventure. It's easy enough to make up whatever background you want but not as fun as to actually get to play in the background.

Doubtful. It just seems impossible to do for this game. Dao had only 3 races and 3 classes, two of those with no significance for the story. Bg3 has many races, at least two of them require specific origin (gith and drow) and then you have many many classes, some of which (warlock for example) also require a special origin. And then you also have the companions/origin characters... As I said, quite impossible, unless they find a good story way to limit the number of possible origins

Larian hasn't said anything about it. In fact, I believe they said they'd once planned on adding dialogue tags tied to your character creation selection - anchorite, hermit, urchin, etc. - but it wound up being too much work.

Still, I'd really, really like to be able to further flesh out Tav McBlanderson's background. Tav McSlightlyLessBlanderson? Please?

I doubt it. The game follows the same narrative template as DOS2, so Larian is likely heavily invested in the "waking up on a beach" theme.

Yeah, sadly being a nobody is antithetical to D&D's mission statement it seems. I realize you also choose your character's background, I can't remember if it's ever come up in dialogue but I suppose it's as good as we'll get in this regard.

There are some dialogue options built specifically for being from Baldur's Gate. Hopefully though they do add more background locations that you can choose from. The problem as I see it in making your character from Baldur's Gate is there will definitely be some disconnect when your character actually gets to the city they are supposedly from and doesn't know their way around because the player hasn't actually been there before. 'Hey Bert... Glad to see you made it back home. Why don't we meet up at your old neighborhood... maybe at the tavern across from where you used to work?" "Ummmm.. Who are you, where's my old neighborhood and where did I used to work?"

This has been brought up before and, sadly, did not get a whole hell of a lot of support.

I hope so

I think it should be the tutorial mode of the game.

Nautiloid in hell should be chapter 1, when the story actually begins.

They don't need to fully spec it out so that a Tutorial prologue is specific to every character class/background etc, it could be more generic. Like here you are at an Inn in Baldur's Gate, where you can kit out and buy a drink, learn the UI by engaging in some focused tutorial stuff. When you leave the Inn is when the mind flayers grab you up off the streets ala opening cutscene. You don't need a whole separate prologue for a warlock or a drow or whatever. All you need is for the character to have some reason to be in Baldur's Gate when the attack happened.

I think making a simple Tutorial Prologue that starts out with the normal "roll up a character and buy their starting gear" pre-game type scenario. Basically a BG1 style start for character creation and tutorial, that cuts to a BG2 style start for the first chapter of the actual adventure (which would be the current Prologue in EA).

Eh, I like determining who I am and what my motivations are and keeping things open-ended.
The idea of wandering around in my normal life for a while before I got scooped up doesn't appeal to me at all.
Escaping from the nautiloid is prologue enough for me.

I understand that but this was spurred by another discussion about how the presentation your custom character wasn't a total blank slate, meaning that your character isn't totally determined by your actions from the start.

It's kind of a part of DND in that you create your own background for your character in Dungeons and Dragons, as well as in many sandbox RPG's in general. For example, the Elder Scrolls series always starts you out as a prisoner, and how Fallout . When you create a character in a D&D campaign, you don't play through your backstory before going into the actual campaign, that stuff is determined by you before you begin playing. You create your character, and give them as much or as little of a history as you want, and then you take over while they're imprisoned on the nautiloid. That's as open-ended as you can get, and anything presented before that only narrows the character's backstory and takes away that choice, or at least complicates justifying how your character got where they are.

Starting off as a prisoner making your escape is the best way to accomplish that, because it's up to you how you got there, and you can shape your character how you like, and make choices based on what your character would do. If they presented more information about your character before that, it would make it much more difficult to justify your decisions throughout the game, or even worse, make you feel like you have to follow a certain path because the game made you believe your character as someone who would prefer one choice over another.

Or it could just be set in Baldur's Gate at a generic inn, as a separate tutorial.

For those players who don't need a tutorial they could just skip it.

For those who do need a tutorial, say those who don't know anything about D&D character creation or systems, this would be a better environment to learn core mechanics and the UI, since you could introduce each aspect in stages.

A Tutorial needn't award xp, but would be a cool way to kit out your characters starting gear. Could also have a combat or sneak/steal aspect, or basic spellcasting and convo or merchant UI tutors.

But also with nods to class/background/race choices in text convos maybe with the innkeep or bartender or npcs sitting around, that could serve as a background reinforcer in that way. Like maybe if you're Githyanki or Tiefling or Drow someone might pick a fight with you in conversation for a combat tutorial "let's take this outside!" Simple stuff.

Not so much a story arch in itself, but just a point of departure that leads into the actual story. I don't think it would be all that crazy difficult to set up. Its a natural fit with the opening cutscene to do something set in Baldur's Gate just before the attack.

Considering the amount of permutations this would need to satisfy fantasies about "origin stories" of any sort, my personal take on the suggestion is the following:
if we are actually that desperate to blow more money in some way, can we please push some more to use them on implementing a day/night cycle instead of fifteen flavors of tedious tutorial?

Also, "budget concerns" aside, I'm absolutely not a fan of dragged tutorials that get more and more tedious to indulge on at every subsequent playthrough.
DA:O was brought up as an example, and it reminds me precisely the two/three times in the past where I said "I'll try to play it again" and I was discouraged precisely by having to go through those origin stories.

But this is the problem isn't it? Different players have different priorities when it comes to what they want to see more.

Sure, and I will always advocate for MY priorities, because I genuinely think they are the ones that will make the game better.

The origin stories in DA:O are awesome. Especially the dwarf ones.

I don't thing it is impossible. I'll expand. For what I've seen in DOS and BG3, the characters created by Larian like Astarion have labels to identify them. Those labels are linked to their quest, stories and some dialogs.

So you can basically write some stories asocated to quest and a few dialogs and give them labels. Then you let the player creating a custom character choose one of those stories+quest. If you want that the stories make a little more sense with the custom character and felt a little more coherent, you can restrict the selection to choose from depending on race, class and background.

For example: you might want that the story "dwarf heir" only show to the people choosing a dwarf.

So there is a potential technical solution and I would like to see something like that. If that doesn't happen well, it won't be the end of the world. But I would really like to see that custom characters are as rounded as the ones they created. Just as they promised. Hell, they might be already discusing better solutions than the one I said. After all, they are professionals.

People generally hate tutorials, though. One of the first mods will probbably be "skip the tutorial"mod. I don't see them putting a lot of work into a bunch of different tutorial sections that people are just gonna want to skip anyway. Dragon Age: Origins could do it because they had a small number of possible origins, and they put a lot of effort into them. It was part of the shtick and the selling point of the game. The amount of work it would take Larian to implement a bunch of customized tutorials that would satisfy people probably wouldn't feel worth it to them.

I hope there will be a Prologue telling us what we were doing before being taken by the mindflayers, rather than where we came from etc.
To tell a custom made character's story seems like a lot of work but explaining that a character found themselves in Baldur's Gate or in front of the gates before it happened. Anywhere really, anywhere but a spelljammer right away.

Let people arrive in the world first before everything explodes around you. I can see that my character is surviving incredible odds but I can't take it seriously.
Anything but showing higher level content that apparently only serves as a set-piece and not interesting gameplay.

And really work the tadpole angle, dont throw it away by having everyone know about it and not having any escalating symptoms. Mindflayers are great at anything mind related but they can't make the insertion moment of the tadpole a bit more fuzzy to remember, so we can puzzle it back together?

Having people start in Baldur's Gate, teasing players with the city, have them go window shopping and then take it away again. During these first few minutes you can teach the player about the controls and maybe give a few pointers to where one lives.

Or have the player fight something realistic first, a bunch of goblins that don't have more hp and explosives, barely escaping before then being abducted.
Those goblins with explosives are great though.

The start weak right now and for me it's mostly due to not being able to arrive in the world and look around first a little. And surviving the dragon breath at level 1.