Thank you very much for your text, OP! I also value story, immersion and character design more than the combat system itself. As long as the combat is playable, and the class fantasy feels "real" - then I'll be able to deal with most sorts of combat.
And my third issue, please correct me here if I am wrong, I very much wish to be wrong.
I hate the origin characters. I love them as companions, but the idea of origin characters is terrible and I am stunned its being continued with, especially in BG.
I disliked them in D:OS and in my four playthroughs I never played as one, I started a fifth playthrough recently but cant get into it very much, that is simply because I do not enjoy playing as someone else in these types of games. You even say that this game is about us as players, yet almost without a doubt the optimal way to play it, the best way to experience the most of the story and get the most out of the plot and lore, is to play as someone else, the origin characters.
You used the tag system in D:OS and that meant that no matter what you did, you could only ever as yourself with the few "ordinary" tags the game gave us, while the origin characters had access to the same "ordinary" tags + their own. Meaning unless you played as one of them, you were missing out on new events, conversations reactions, possibly even more lore or backround and different approach to quests and such.
This is so in your face oppossite of what these games are about, and I understand, you do not have to play as an origin character the enjoy the game, but as a person who wants to see and do all there is to do, it FEELS SUBOPTIMAL, or like a wrong choice, to play as your own created character. That is simply unforgivable.
And given the amount of questions about this I am not alone in this feeling. To this day nobody can really answer the question of what you are missing out if you do not play as Origin character, but most people agree that it is better to play as one to get more story.
Unless this gets properly explained or changed, many players, including me will feel like we made the wrong choices when playing as "us" and that is a horrible feeling to have. Yes, you can enjoy their stories as companions and get full understanding off it, but you will always know that there is more to it, as it is you simply heard it, but if you play as Origin character you can experience it, as well as everything else that the player character can and experiecing the story is exactly what we, or at least I want.
Id say scrap Origin characters as playable, but obviously that wouldnt happen, especially not on a word of a random fan, its too far into development and its clearly and idea you as developers want to have in your games, given that you brough it over despite the questions asked about it in D:OS 2. But I beg you, give us a proper explanation of what you will get and what you will miss out in relation to their stories when playing as OC instead of Origin character and make the gap of missable content as minimal as possible.
Another option for this would be giving us an option to experience crucial moments in their companion quests as them, letting us essentially switch with them and play as them for a while during the duration of the quest, which would make it far easier to experience the content locked behind playing as them and still play as us, also it would reduce the amount of unneccessary replays to see all the points of view of all the companions. Or let us hear their thoughts through the tadpole and answer as them, something like that, just dont make us play as them.
I am torn about this as well. And just like many said before me, I also felt slightly... Inferior to the origin characters in DOS2. I am very intrigued by the suggestion made above to allow us to choose a background instead of forcing the entire character upon us - but if they were to do it as detailed as the origin characters are, then chances are that it will possibly conflict with the details that the played has imagined for their character.
I'll make up an example to emphasize my point (this are absolutely not in any way 100% consistent with the facts we know about Astarion, but as I want to avoid spoilers, I literally just made up a random scenario):
Imagine that you're taking the Vampire Spawn-background (Astarion) and you meet this one NPC that Origin Astarion would know as... Uhhh, let's say he was feeding on that person, but was caught in the act. All fine and well for character Astarion... But when it comes to YOUR character with the Vampire Spawn background, in your head your character had a distinctive preference regarding whom you feed on - and this individual does not match the criteria at all. That would cause an awkward conflict for the player. Sure, it could be solved by something like:
"[Lie] You're mistaken. We never met."
Or
"You're mistaken. We never met." (truthful, turning the plot into a mistake from the NPC's side)
However, these kinds of solution would require a rather complicated tag-system and a huuuuuge chunk of content for the different possible scenarios.
Short version: it would require a damn lot of work.
The way I see it - most developers have to make a choice: either your background matters a lot, but it the choices and details are much more narrow. Or, you let the players be whoever they want to be and avoid involving their background too much in the present. (or you do it like Cyberpunk and just give the impression of going with option 1, but in reality you're going for option 2... No, I am not salty - why do you ask?)
Personally, while I certainly am interest of the Origins being available as backgrounds as a concept rather than pre-made characters - I think BG3 is too far gone to implement it now. And there would also be complications regarding classes since these stories are *mooostly* tied to specific classes - like Wyll's story being a warlock story, Shadowheart's story being a cleric story and Gale's story being a wizard story etc... And a part of that we have the obvious issue of Lae's story being even more narrow as it is a githyanki story perspective...
Basically, Larian would have to introduce a *whole ton* of proper origins backgrounds if it were to make a fair amount of options for everyone, if we use the current Origins as standards...
Honestly, in the end I would be happy if they just made our backgrounds matter more than just being a stat stick. :[
