I still don't quite understand what the issue is, here. And before anyone throws smelly boots and rotten eggs at me and calls me a "Larian fangirl", I'm not - this is the first of their games I've ever played... I just happen to love this particular game the way it is shaping up, is all. I've never played the original BG games (well, BG1 a little, and this year not 20 years ago) and I've never played the Divinity series.
Originally Posted by Niara
That is what D:OS2 ended up being like... and this game design is going exactly the same way, despite promises from Larian to the contrary.
I didn't know that. But in THIS game, it's reversed, and we are starting off being encouraged to play our own player-created character. The other Origin characters aren't playable yet. Where is the issue?
You CAN play your own custom character with or without the NPC companions. You CAN choose to play as one of the origin characters. Probably more characters will be coming. You CAN choose to play either custom characters or Origin pre-made characters with friends, or for example 2 custom characters and 2 pre-made characters, etc. You can do literally whatever you want. I don't understand how having all these options is a problem?
I'd try to explain it again but I don't see the point when you are purposefully ignoring any post that explains the issue (in fact, it's so blatant I'm suspecting I may LITERALLY be in your ignore list and you won't address this reply either) and then following with another "I don't see the problem".
You seem to think that "more options are always great" as if for some form of magic they came as a net bonus, with no compromises, when reality is very different. I don't care if I can just "ignore Origins and play a custom character", because that doesn't address the issue. I care for everything the game had to give up to even allow these Origin characters to exist.
Let's take DOS 2 as an example: I would have gladly welcomed a game where companions interacted WAY more with each other (rather than ignoring their mutual existence and talking just to the Main Character) over one that blew most of its extra budget and manpower into writing/voicing these same few companions from multiple perspectives (read: playable or not).
...and yet, the companions do interact with each other, here for sure. It's been a while since I played DOS2, so I don't recall, one way or the other. If it's "but they're limited", are you looking to get their whole story laid out in the first act? That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. I have already talked on the "what they gave up to make the Origin characters voiced" point. They didn't give up anything that isn't "given up" in any other game with voiced companions. If it's giving up on the PC being voiced, I doubt that it's got a lot to do with voiced NPCs. After all, the PC in BG 1 and 2 was a silent protagonist, barring some selection blurbs. Ironically, Hawke being voiced in DA 2 was one of the things that lit the old BSN forums on fire, because "their tone doesn't fit what I wanted it to be". So that's a lose/lose proposition.
If they spend too much time defining Tav, then we run into the issue of all the possible variations, even just in EA, let alone what may be possible on release. Parallel to that issue will be those that expect to be able to define that particular themselves, instead of "playing Larian's Character". I've watched this debate for decades. I've seen every iteration of the argument, and while I was initially all about silent protagonists, I've come to the realization that both have their merits, and neither is going to be perfect. Even with a silent protagonist, I've found that dialog options that I may have wanted to take weren't available. For a voiced protagonist, where was the choice to tell TIM to take a long walk off a short pier after the first mission in ME 2? Where was the option to not work for Cerebus at all? Pitfalls abound, because no matter how well a game is received, and we'd be hard pressed to claim that ME 2 wasn't a good game, and that it wasn't well received, since most people seem to believe it was the best game in the series, it's going to have things missing that players wanted, and things included that they didn't.
But I digress. The budget to make the comps voiced doesn't necessarily affect whether or not the main/custom character gets voice lines, or a lot of exposition about who they are/were before the story events. In the vast majority of these games, where the character isn't totally defined, such as the Witcher series, the character is shaped by the player's choices, from what's available, voiced or otherwise. Some of a PC's backstory doesn't even become apparent until later in the game, from the player's perspective, such as being a Bhaalspawn. Other characters involved may have known, but we didn't know until later in the game. So I don't know what's in store for Tav, or which ever of the Origin characters someone may choose to play as. I don't have access to story boards, or scripts, or even a vague outline of Act II or Act III.
The only real issue I've had so far is not being a fan of the "only some of the NPCs will carry on after Act I" thing. I'd much rather they continue on in the story, even if it's a "split the party, and send some this way, and some that way" thing, or an "All hands on deck" situation to get to where ever it is we're going from where we are now.
