Origin characters is a concept that will never work. It was fine in DoS because it was the first time but the point of playing such role playing game is to create your own characters.
- Origin would be fine (choose an origin for your custom character) - "Origin" companions could be fine (deep companions that have their own story)
But Origin characters takes a lot of ressources (money, writting constraints,...) for a very debatable interrest.
You don't need origin characters to have preset characters and I'm not sure Larian's game need even more replayability through origin characters. There are so much classes and builds, and skills and story pathes and so on that the replayability is probably already enough for everyone.
It's also bizarre that so many people (and journalists) claim that they LOVED the feature when speaking in abstract, but then if you are having a frank conversation one-on-one with them and you try to pressure them into giving more details on how this affected their behavior they start to rethink about it.
I used to like the idea of origins in BG3, but my mind has been changed. It boils down to two main problems: - opportunity cost (afaik, origins are A LOT of work, and if that work could be directed to having 3 times the amount of (fleshed out) companions... yeah, not a good exchange) - story structure (BG1&2 were about a single character with the story revolving around it; with origins you need to account for each of them being the main character - or none of them - and the writing is likely to suffer)
Still, I don't hate the idea; I'd like to see the approach of "fixed-custom protagonist spectrum" used in some future cRPG series, just not in BG. Of course, only if it would be very well executed and wouldn't be a detriment to other aspects of the game, so it's... idealistic, to say the least. I don't expect any studio to pull it off anytime soon.
Regarding the co-op reason for origins: I really, really don't like it when multiplayer tacked on to a game hurts the single-player experience. Larian wants to make both work and subsequently hurts both. Solasta would be a better fit for MP, having neither developed companions nor major story focus.
And really, I think the solution to the multiplayer problem would just be to not arbitrarily limit companions (as in kill off all not in the active party at some point). So you could still have companion quests with 4 custom characters in a party.
