I don’t know that they needed to go down the route of making everyone the star of the show in order to to make co-op work. If you took the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars then conceivably you could say that Frodo and Luke Skywalker were the stars of the show…but they couldn’t have done what they did without the aid of other ‘stars’.
Some of Larian’s decision making seems to have been driven by accommodating co-op a certain way and the result is that game has suffered for it. What percentage are playing co-op anyway…surely a minority?
I’m not sure that Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are really comparable, unless you are talking about specific co-op games based on the stories?
My point is that there’s a reason that the origin characters are just as “special” as your main, and that reason is multiplayer. I find it weird that many people don’t address this when talking about it. I don’t know how many people will play multiplayer, but it’s a pretty core feature of the game and therefore entirely reasonable for the game to designed so that all players would have equal agency instead of some being relegated to side characters in someone else’s story.
I don’t think the game suffers for that decision in single player either. My main character is still the one who calls the shots, they just aren’t the unique special one, but one of several. However, I also have the option of making other characters take the lead on occasion, so for example, I can do something much more dickish with Laz'el or Astarion than I would with my main character.
