Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General No Gen, Pre Gen, Origen

Yeah, yeah.
Negativity, toxicity, yadda yadda.

Let’s not pretend that the type of user that keeps going into flippant “Fuck the haters!” rants while shedding bitter, salty tears, showing the middle fingers all around and biting the lower lip while muttering “I’ll take the ball and go home, where everyone is friendlier” is someone particularly more pleasant to interact with on a regular basis.

Or subjectivity of what’s pleasant aside, someone who leads to more productive discussions anyway.

Neat, thanks for reading ^.^ I'd be interested to hear your (or anyone's really) thoughts on it, and ways to refine it or issues it might face that I've not thought about in the rough draft, if you can spare the time and energy of course.

My cardinal rule when interacting with people on the internet is have a short memory and be willing to reset the conversation every new beat. My cardinal rule when posting things is always try and add something to the discussion, instead of just indulging in self-satisfying gainsaying.

No one is above reproach here, but when the conversation is about the posters and not the posts, what am I to do.

I'll try to be productive instead of just bringing drama to the thread. I'll give some thoughts on a game that essentially had origin characters that I really did enjoy. Final Fantasy VI. No, you didn't get to choose dialogue options, everything was decided for you ahead of time, but you were stuck with the characters and had to choose which ones to bring along. What I liked about the characters was that although they had separate motivations, they came together and even though the interactions between most of them was very minimal, you still felt like they were a team. if BG3 could emulate that feeling somehow, I would be okay with origin characters. As it is, I don't feel like anyone is a team in my party. Everyone just hates each other, and they never feel like they grow together as a team really at all for the entire first act, which is a substantial amount of time.

If Larian could make the characters feel more like a team, they'd be going a long ways towards making me enjoy the origin system.

I'm glad someone brought up FF, I've been wondering how to work in FF IV somehow but I know a lot of people can get snobbish about JRPGs.

I had added another year because I meant full release, and I don't really see these arguments going away anytime soon between now and then.

You are absolutely right about everything you say here, and I too am now doing exactly what you're doing.

For those who were paying attentiont there were rumors about Larian doing a BG game since 2018.

Nice try, but double umm-actually back at you for missing the context of debunking the idea that people have discussed why customs and origins work/don't work in regards to BG3 for 2+ years before launch. Can't discuss something that isn't known yet. There was no discussions with merit about actualy gameplay design of BG3, until gameplay design of BG3 was revealed.

Context is king. Don't play the 'gotcha game'.

Might get banned for this but just can't resist. Are you saying that Larian staff ain't people, or that they had no discussions with merit about actual gameplay design until the design was revealed? Because in case of the latter, it would explain quite a lot of the game's shortcomings...

And yes, I know that's not what you meant :p Context etc

Sure, had no actual point to make, beside "being cute"

While I prefer to play a custom character, I actually worry more about developer efforts to make my character "special" conflicting with my concept of the character than I do about them not feeling special enough. More hairstyles and clothing would be welcome, but I prefer to define my character via their choices in-game. Of course, tied to those preferences is my expectation that I'll only play the game solo. If my character didn't get to make all the choices, I might well welcome the option to play a more pre-defined origen character--and might find it more fun if the other players played origen characters rather than blank-slate Tavs.

Perhaps a thread title change? Something more to do with forums etiquette and decorum, or like "a friendly reminder to please play nice" or something along those lines? I find the conversation here somewhat interesting and worthwhile, but the thread title isn't very topical anymore. Also last warning notes about creating a negative or antagonistic environment are less likely to be seen when buried in the middle of a thread. Regarding the ignore option, I think the ignore function on these boards (the actual button I mean) has downsides. The ignore button is a bit like putting on a blindfold and earplugs, which may seem expedient, but has other consequences. Ignoring someone means removing all their past as well as future content from view, so a later apology or attempt at explanation or redress would go unnoticed and it also creates non-sequiturs within the public conversation from the ignoring person's POV. I think flagging a post or poster for moderation is a better solution than the ignore button, unless one is being harassed in PMs or something. Regarding the generally negative atmosphere or infectiously low morale, this is harder to combat. There's only so much one can do, short of producing positive content or curating such content. As a moderator the task tends to be putting out fires after they've already started, but more fire and flame prevention might be achieved via a forums restructure and especially with the addition of more stickies. Stickies not just as guidelines with rules or reminders to be on best behavior, but to curate the threads that actually model that and which are also still current and topical and interesting to read. Many of the threads in the mega-thread section are rather amplified and dated. The stickies in the other sections are a bit dated too, just kind of hanging around like glass cabinet curiosities from 6 months ago. "A list of ongoing discussions and other miscellany" locked and stickied in both sections seems less relevant now for example. It's cool to sticky and unsticky material or archive it periodically. I have been hoping for a year that a major forums migration or restructuring might be imminent, but it seems less likely as time goes on, so that has me thinking that a general house cleaning might be in order to try and get the best we can out of what we have to work with. In addition to suggestions about general etiquette and how to play in a particular section, some other stuff might be useful as well. Like a note for how to attach images using outside hosting and a BB code, link to direct feedback portal, or stuff of that sort. But have it very clearly titled like "READ BEFORE POSTING!" or something with blinking lights like that, if it's going to be stickied and locked. Not sure if this is on topic or off topic now, or if I should have posted it here or in the other thread hehe. General section can be kinda confusing, I think I'll dip and come back after Thanksgiving. Best!

I have a ignore function totally separate from the forum...I've only really considered 'ignoring' ALexs who only seems to like seeding datamined spoilers in every thread.

As for making this thread about forum etiquette, that's fine, but I'm afraid it might mean creating a third thread to deal with talking about origin - custom characters...and by third I mean thirtieth...

One of the things I like so much about Origin characters is that they come prebuilt with flaws. I don't mean flaws in their stats, but rather in their personalities. They're more like real people in that sense. Whereas I find custom characters tend to be more stoic and empty, almost too cool for school, if you know what I mean.

Or they're overly crowd pleasing in nature. By that, I mean they tend to say whatever the NPC wants to hear, whatever needs to be said to get the best result, the +1 like or the conversation path that leads to pick pocketing the hot magic item or whatever.

But I think that's less likely to happen (at least in my case) if I'm playing Astarion. I can respect his character because it's fleshed out, and I'm not morphing it all about in my head as I go. And I know that if I'm missing anything by sticking to a firm personality, then I can later pick it up by playing Gale or Lae'zel or Wyll or Shadowheart.

This approach intrigues me, and I have to admit, I also like the idea of playing a character that the game knows how to talk to. A game where the other characters can say my name out loud, for instance. That seems like a small thing, but it means so much.

Consider how it feels when you're walking around and the companions start talking to each other. Playing a companion lets you be a part of that instead of being above it all.

That's a very good point, games don't often give you a way of building in flaws to your own character, and even as a player, choosing a flaw for yourself is not the same as finding you (or your character rather) has one. I wish there was a good way of incorporating fatal flaws into your own narrative that wouldn't just be gamed in a meta way or didn't feel like it was something that happened without regard to your intent.

Of course for a lot of people, they probably don't want something like that hung on them with or without their say.

Just to the 'say my name' point, I wish a game would come along and really lean into that idea instead of working around it, or just giving it up as impossible. In many ways BG1 was ahead of the curve there, where at least one could record their own custom audio for barks and import a portrait. Sure it was limited by the tech then available, but it definitely felt like forward progress and at the time it was way cutting edge. BG1 was the first CRPG game I ever played where it felt like the custom PC truly could be customized. I think it's a big part of why the game was so compelling, completely independent of the actual story and such. Like it was just so much more ambitious in that regard than any CRPG had really dared to be before it.

Rounding out 2021, where we all have microphones and cameras in our pockets, and voice modulation tech exists at a pretty high level now... I can easily imagine a D&D game where our Companions actually could say our names out loud, and that would feel like a real watershed moment in a modern CRPG. Like I can imagine "Who are you?" as a custom character suite, where the player feeds in all these inputs with prompts for recording and a series of selections, and the game then amazes us by actually having our companions take that ball and run with it. But I just know that we'll never get anything approaching that when the custom PC is all backburnered in favor of Pre-Gens.

I'm not sure that everyone has the same ideas about made BG1 so fucking cool in 1998, but that was a big part of it for me. That unlike every other D&D crpg that preceded it, Baldur's Gate went out of it's way to promo that idea. The idea that actually Customizing a PC might be a real possibility on the horizon, rather than a complete pipe dream. I'm sure it would be quite a bit of work to find what the next iteration of that looks like, whether in a 3d portrait suite that includes stuff like Voice or tragic flaws as part of the character 'portrait' but I think that's the sort of excitement I want to discover again. Not a pick from 5 or pick from 8 type scenerario. I don't disagree with any of the points being made about how a custom falls short compared to a fully designed and professionally acted performance, but I wish that they'd try for it anyway, like really take a couple moonshots on that score, because I think it brings us closer to my ultimate goal of seeing D&DVR in my lifetime.

I'm for the custom PC all day, all the way! Hehe

It's a nice dream, truly, but even today we don't have the appropriate tech to blend a recorded external sample into an existing pre-recorded voice line. It's another element that is just made 'easier' by having an element that binds the pc to the story, since it gives writers and out for referencing our character indirectly "Seems our shard-bearer has to go to neverwinter, like it or not... well, I want to see this through now, so I'm going with her." No, it's not entirely smooth or perfect, but it's another tool in the toolkit to handle a difficulty.

That aside, some of us use our hands to talk, so, recording our own barks and names isn't really an option anyway...

What's likely to come first, before that, would be the ability to give the game a phonetic translation of the name we want to use, within the context of a game that is already using functionally synthesised voice sets - these days, voice modulators can take a mic input, cancel it and convert it into something that sounds very much like a real voice, and yet entirely different - the good ones are getting harder and harder to tell apart from real humans. I could see, in the future, a game where this is done large scale, and so the game is actually equipped to read a phonetic description and place it into its existing dialogues for all characters smoothly... but I think it's still a little ways off.

And yes... fully immersive, fully tactile world experience D&D and video games of any sort is the thing I think many of us are looking towards as our generation's 'flying car' dream.

Fallout 4 has a robot who will say your character’s name if you pick one he knows (and he knows quite a few!). I was very excited when he said my character’s name! 😊

Hmmm it would definitely be nice if voice acting could pronounce our names somewhat as long as the ai reading can figure it out without sounding like a automaton.. so I think that will be future music. As for the origen characters, just make them more like a team as the story grows. I really wish D&D had kept it negative traits for races somewhat, while limiting in some regard, it did mean each race had a bit more personality I guess. In general, characters in rpgs need to have something they are bad at, no-one is a savant at everything. Question is, how to do it in a believable non gamey manner.