Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Please Rethink PC Origin Characters

And even if you control 2 Bhaalspawn in your party their story is not the same... And you even don't know it until half of the second game because it's a part of the companion and main plots.

You may not like BG1/2's story and of course, 20 years after some things are way better in BG3 to play a role (tags, reactions to our race choice, to our answers,...).

But it's not relevant at all to the custom VS origin characters discussion anymore and no one ask this to change.

If companions didn't need to be developed to the point where they are fully fledged protagonists then it probably would be a lot more economical to make more than the absolute barest minimum.

I dare anyone to argue that companions in the old games didn't have personality. They did, even if it wasn't hammered home with endless dialogue and looooooong quest lines and cinematics. Mazzy with her family problem and that Slums encounter, Minsc having to save his witch in BG1 and really just being Minsc in game 2, Keldorn with his family issues, Cernd with the baby trouble, Jan with his family problem, Nalia with her marriage issue... Not exactly long quests, but enough to give the character a bit of stage time. And that really is enough.

The problem isn't simply that Larian's origin characters are badly written and their dialogues are triggering inconsistently and out of order, it's that Larian is making all companions be playable protagonists with all the bells and whistles, instead of just making companions fot the player-made protagonist. This scales up the cost of each companion and if DOS2 is a template, which it appears to be, then there will literally be less content in the game if you make your own character.

We will not be able to rotate party members beyond Act1, presumably, and we cannot complete quest lines in Act 1, so with a self-made character the player has access to three companion quest lines, and if playing an Origin pregen there will be four. Add to this all the interludes and personal thoughts and presumably chat options for being a special Larian-designed pregen that probably won't be available for anything the player makes.

The backgrounds idea wouldn't be terrible, but the problem is that Larian would naturally just add those dialogue options to their Origin characters too. Why wouldn't they? It does not appear that Larian grasps the not exactly suttle difference between "playing your own character" the way you would in a table setting versus "here's our bullshit pregen, complete with background, goals, dreams, aspirations, emotional baggage, and questionable life choices, this is now your character", which just alienates any pretense of actually role-playing.

The only time this whole "this is your character" approach actually works, IMO, is when the preset character is ambiguous enough that you still get to define that character. The Witcher series works because Geralt is a very grey character and all the options he can choose are all fairly plausible for him, but they will all have consequences, leading to more plausible choices and more consequences. PST works because TNO's current incarnation is a fresh one that the player defines while learning about fixed incarnations that came before. But doing something like that with these excessively rigid Origin characters is quite impractical, because either one acts completely at odds with the character as it was defined or else one just does an adventure game with Larian's protagonist party. And that feels wrong on multiple levels.

One, D&D is about rolling your own character. There's nothing "mine" about Larian's posse and the only way for me to make "my" character is to be more or less in the background of the Larianites.

And wrongness number two, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 were always about one character and that character's journey and eventual fate. Then comes Baldur's Gate 3 with what feels like an MMO plot, everybody has a special tadpole and let's all have team-up at Baldur's Gate and head out for a raid boss. No protagonist at all. Or everybody is the protagonist. It's a completely unfocused plot that isn't about a single character's development and impact on the world and which isn't meant to be "play YOUR adventure" in style at all. It's more of a "play Swen's adventure with Swen's characters".

At the risk of sounding a bit whiny, I find it quite aggravating that Larian wants to make a game about a mixed bunch of Larianite misfits rather than tell Tav's story about the journey that Tav had to go on and the people Tav met. Should Tav be at the center of Tav's story? Yeah, that would have seemed like a sensible choice. But not for Larian, apparently.

This. This. This.

+1 billion

I am not personally a fan of "origin" characters myself, as I play these sorts of games to create my own persona. I am also not a fan of these origin characters being shoved in my face as party members either. I get it in the beginning that we have to deal with these unpleasant individuals because of circumstances, but I really wish we could gather companions later on in the game NOT from the origin list, that might have personality's I could mesh with the persona I am working with. Something like 10 good non-origin party member options would be nice optimally. Covering at least the mage/fighter/healer/rogue ranges. Though my personal perfect group makeup would be 4 Rogues spec'd with different sub-classes to round things out. And give some story options that my character can participate in without needing the negative origin baggage along with it. Everyone one of these current origin characters feels like EMO Masochist tripe.

I really don't like the Pregen protagonist concept at all in a BG game, for most of the reasons listed above. It really feels like an attempt to skip over the most core part of D&D, which is character creation, just to appeal to a casual action game audience who can't be bothered to put in the time on the front end. As if it's there just for pick up play. I mean I can understand why that might bring more people on board, cause it's more cut and dry, but I think it just gives the wrong impression of what Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to be about. It reminds me of those unsatisfying "D&D" games for the playstation 2 that did away with character creation and character building altogether, in favor of just 3 or 4 pregen characters with a set class/race and all the rest. It does seem somehow effrontery that they are basically sneaking the pregen idea into this thing through the front door on us lol. I keep hoping that banner at the top of this webpage will come down, and be replaced by a dozen new companions who aren't Origins, but our actual intended companions for this game. Though I don't know if that will ever actually happen. Alas

I sometimes wonder if they are testing this as a single player game in-house at all? or if they are just putting their people in groups of 2 or 3 or 4? Everything about the game, including the Origins, seems like its there to make the game more Co-Op friendly to the determent of the SP experience. It's just kind of weird, as I don't think of Baldur's Gate as a particularly MP oriented game at all, even if it did have the MP option. It was great and enduring cause it was a great single player game.

It wasn't only 20 years later, other cRPGs that came out back then (Fallout, Arcanum, Planescape Torment) had character reactivity towards choices made at character creation. This isn't some modern invention in gaming.

And this characer reactivity is how you make a character feel unique, in my opinion. A story telling me "oh wow, your character is so special" while it's pretty obvious this story also doesn't care for the most part about the character I've created? Doesn't make me feel like that character is unique, quite the opposite. It becomes clear that it's a story shaped without the protagonist, where you just tag along for the ride. That is why I disgaree that removing origin characters is somehow going to make Tav more interesting. It doesn't add or replace character reactivity. I like for example the custom backgrounds idea, because it would allow me to further differentiate between the Tavs that I create.

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.

You keep comparing your created character who makes a particular set of choices through the game to another created character that makes those exact same choices. Yes, those characters will have largely similar stories, but complaining about that when you intentionally pick all the same options feels a bit too meta for my liking. If you wanted them to be different, you could have your different characters make different choices. While the overall plot points would be the same, the specifics of how they came to be would change.

Further, what you seem to be missing is that the entirety of the first two games plus expansions is actually a story dedicated around Charname, so obviously Charname isn't simply "along for the ride". Arguing that the story doesn't react enough to Charname's attributes and class choices isn't a totally unfair complaint but that is by design and also a meta-gaming complaint. The story is specifically written to be an adventure about Charname that lets Charname be whatever the player has decided. One can hardly make a reasonable complaint that Charname isn't in the foreground enough when the entire plot of two games is literally revolving around Charname.

BG1&2 lets you create any character you want, because charname doesn't matter. That is the point. I can create a neutral character who then proceeds to cut a bloody path through the Sword Coast, then ends up a hero (because that is the default ending). Upon import to BG2 my character gets treated as neutral (at this point the game enforces a canon party as a backstory, ignoring your previous choices), proceed on the same bloody warpath (you can be a hunted criminal that is celebrated a hero in Suldanesslar, because there is only this one ending), and only at the point of hell trials I finally get the game to pay attention to my character. Then in ToB again it doesn't matter, my charname can have godly wisdom by that point and still they are expected to act dumb enough to fall for Mel's plot. It is that linear until you finally arrive at the yes/no ending, at which point my only other option of changing the ending was going through with Anomen's romance.

To me this is not a story dedicated to protagonist, because most of it is already prewritten and whether the character I have created actually fits this story doesn't matter. Hence if you step out of the line, it leads to the absurd situations as above. And that is the best case scenario, worst case is when I have tried to be "too creative" in roleplaing my good cleric in BG2 and she was instakilled by a special "cheated npc" for it.

In Bg3 it's worse. What's your point?

worse how? do you know already the ending and later acts story to be certain of this?

Fair. Act 1 is worse*

*Unless they'll make some drastic changes down the line

Please expand on how it is worse. What is the BG3 equivalent of Arkanis Gath for example? Why didn't the tieflings in BG3 throw my evil character a party after she murdered them, the way the elves in BG2 do after you kill them in Suldanesslar?

They could easily create interesting unique pre-gen characters for that crowd even without going all in on Origin characters. That could be a nice way to ease new players into D&D and into making their own characters.

I'm not sure I want to get into this game since we're digressing, but if you are talking about reactivity, I think even though it's 20 years old, bg2 is still better. It is more limited, but the story is more cohesive for it.

Well, the examples I have provided are from my playthroughs. In both BG1 and 2 one of my characters was tempted by their divine blood in the dreams. Yet because the developers decided to not implement mechanic where your deeds impact alignment, giving into those dreams meant nothing because only rangers and paladins can fall. And I wasn't playing either. Instead the devs chose to implement a "reputation" system, which could be gamed worse than BG3 barrels (and I suspect this was the purpose of it). I didn't do that and so my murderous character was hunted for being a criminal, yet this also had no impact on the main story. (What is ironic is that my good character in BG2 was killed for playing good, simply because in that particular quest the writers decided thid is not allowed since it would limit the thieves vs. vamps choice to only vamps.)

In BG1 and 2 either your character fits into how the writers decided charname would act, or they don't. In which case the story feels too disconnected from the main character to call it cohesive.

And I disagree this is worse in BG3; I think it is too early to tell, because for now we don't know if giving into the tadpole or abstaining will shape the main plot.

Let's say Larian fails to implement any consequences to the tadpole usage except for what is already there: the dreams. Larian could remove the origin characters being origins. This would still not make the story focus on the protagonist more, in the absence of reactivity towards that protagonist. Because whether you used the tadpole or not would ultimately not matter for the story. Just like it didn't matter with the Bhaalspawn powers, including the slayer. Whereas for example custom backgrounds or other tags, which would be inaccessible to origin characters, could make the story more character-driven.

Ash, your BG1 and 2 experience is not a story that isn't about Charname but simply one that cannot reflect properly on all the things that Charname could end up doing on their path towards their destiny. Even so, it is still a story about Charname and it will always be a story about Charname, even if it can be rendered a bit oncoherent by extreme behavior, and even if the crossover from BG1 to BG2 is a bit bumpy.

Yes, BG2 ends badly if you aggro your only path towards Spellhold. That's a bit hamfisted but then aggroing in that situation is a fairly silly move, so why not? What else can they really do to ensure that players understand that they have borked their game and must reload in order to actually continue the adventure?

I agree with quite a few of your criticisms regarding the story depth of BG1 and 2, but while the story was imperfect, at least it was my adventure about my character and their companions. And it could go a whole bunch of ways. Was I betrayed by the vampires or did I bargain with the thieves? Did I repay the thieves' trust in me by putting them to the sword the moment they were of no use to me (meaning when I was back from the Underdark), in the name of justice? Or was there perhaps some ulterior motive of finding good loot? Was I honest with merchants or did those potions of master thievery tempt me into being a city-wide crime wave? Did I save Aerie or did I murder that filthy ogre with the siren voice trick? Would I save Viconia or let her burn? Would I save Nalia's keep and then dump her or would I help her? Would Valygar unlock the sphere alive or dead?

Those were Charname's decisions about Charname's adventure. Most of it didn't matter in the end, granted, but how is Charname to know?

In BG3, the story is simply not about the player character. It does not tell a story about the grand adventure of Tav, it tells a story about some Larianites and maybe some casual nobody named Tav who plodded along with them. We are not playing our own adventure, we are playing Swen's adventure of the Larianites with the Weird Tadpoles using Swen's characters with Swen's backgrounds and Swen's pick of personalities and Swen's pick of goals. The Swenish Larianites are all protagonists and we can maybe add a support character to the story, if we really insist.

I'm not sure I want to get into this game since we're digressing, but if you are talking about reactivity, I think even though it's 20 years old, bg2 is still better. It is more limited, but the story is more cohesive for it.[/quote]
That's would be a big debate whenver more is objectively better. Arguably the best RPG even made would be Witcher2 as it has two seperate chapters, with unique NPCs and questlines, and yet I would argue this was the biggest mistep the series has taken, and the weakest entry because of it's ambitious reactivity.

To me personally, amount of reactivity is irrelevant if I am not engaged in the moment of making the decision or don't care about outcomes. That is something I will not be ever able to argue for objectively.

The companions are not the problem. Even if I prefer to have non-controllable companions, the more they and their backstories are fleshed out the better.

The problem is that the MC is way too bland and replaceable.

It's an artistic choice, not a good one in my opinion but an artistic choice nonetheless. They want to put the focus on the party, not on a single character, because this is really a game thought to be cooperative, with single-player mode as a bonus.


For now it doesn't bother me much, I really immerse myself in the character so usually I perceive it the way I want no matter the boundary conditions, but I can still see the problem at the foundation.