I also think Larian need to move away from this idea that ALL the companions have to be origin characters.
Agreed. It is not smart, in my view.
To me, that's overspending resources on one idea : giving players some amount of freedom at character creation if they choose an OC as PC.
My personal guess is that overall few players will play through the game more than 2-3 times. Since Larian seems to design the combat gameplay to be very fun at first (in
some sense) but not necessarily very deep (in
my view), I think that the story, not combat, is where the replay value will be. That story is overall fixed, though there will be several paths through it. It's certainly too early to be precise on this, but I feel that the extra content gained from playing a given OC as a PC instead of a Companion will not be that major a replay factor. So, having 8 Origins Characters instead of 4 doesn't add so much replay value, and mostly just add choice.
Each of these additional options is probably bringing less and less value (decreasing marginal utility for those who like economics), yet it has the same cost. People were fine playing Lara Croft, Solid Snake, Geralt or Link in games where you couldn't choose your character. I think giving 3 or 4 options (say, a Fighter, a Rogue, a Cleric and a Mage) would have been nearly as valuable as giving 8, but for half the cost.
