Initially I thought that's what Origin meant, like a backgrounds thing for Race or Class, I guess because that's what it meant in Dragon Age: Origins. I don't understand why these characters are even called Origins? I guess because we are meant to learn where they came from by playing them directly?

I think they are trying to pull a Black Summer on us. Where we get to begin at the end and brain our way backwards to get at the origin. In film editing presenting a story backwards or out of sequence felt novel in the 90s with Momento or Pulp Fiction, but it's kind of lazy story telling today. Not that it can't still be done well, but it's such a quick gimmicky gimmick to engage the audience that it feels particularly shallow in 2021. Once you start playing scenes backwards in a movie, of course people want to see the explanation and the justification for what they've just been shown. We have like an innate need to know the why in that case. So we will stick around purely because we feel owed an explanation, even if the story otherwise isn't particularly interesting. If the film then doesn't deliver at the end, when the sequence chronology settles all it's reveals, and we finally understand what's actually going on, it can be really infuriating if the payoff doesn't land. Showing things to the audience out of order is maybe structurally engaging at first, but in the end the story has to actually deliver, or all that effort feels wasted. That is what having the Origin characters reveal who they are, via dialog or flashbacks over the course of the entire game, is probably going to feel like.

Usually there is only room for one amnesiac in such a story, and that's the protagonist. But doing it for 5 separate characters just seems like concept overload. Who were they and why are they here? Is that the question we're supposed to ask for each of these origin characters? I just don't care enough about them I guess for that to hold my interest. Maybe I'd try it once for Minsc, just to see where Boo came from or whatever, but I'd rather the story be about Charname and so just don't really see the value. The game needs more companions, not more protagonists. We need a supporting cast, not 5 leads.

Last edited by Black_Elk; 24/08/21 07:46 AM.