Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Which Origin Character are you looking forward to playing?

So I'm trying to picture now what playing Lae'zel as the Main Character Protagonist is going to look like.

Presumably the choice to select "Origin: Lae'zel" comes during the 'Who Are You' screen, immediately following the tadpole opener. We've just watched a mind flayer float over and put a worm in Lae'zel's eye from a 3rd person perspective in that one which is kinda odd if we're meant to be her, but whatever. The opening cinematic itself I suppose works reasonably well for Lae'zel as MC. She's the only character we see there, so I guess as the player we just put ourselves in her shoes and ignore the perspective that the scene is being shot through.

Then do we wake up on the Nautiloid? Somewhere else?

If waking up on the Nautiloid how does it proceed from there? Does somebody else jump down, call us "Abomination" and then instruct us about Mind Flayers and how we need to fight the Imps to reach the helm?

Is that now Shadowheart's job instead? Is someone else is in the pod banging to be released? Or is it Astarion making the jump down, and now it's up to him to sell us on the urgency of the whole Nautiloid escape? Do we skip the Nautiloid altogether as Lae'zel and just begin in the cage being mocked by Teiflings? Is it an entirely different introduction to the game? Like how's that all going to look? Because right now Lae'zel does pretty much the entire hook for the game in it's first level.

It's not going to have anywhere near the same impact, if Lae'zel is not the one delivering those opening lines. Just watching the slightly updated animations for her expressions during that scene in Patch 6 is a little taxing. Trying to imagine Wyll or Gale or whoever doing that first bit instead, it just seems like it would fall pretty flat by comparison.

This then has me think that the whole introduction on the Nautiloid must really just be a placeholder for that to work, and that none of this opening set up could be final and still fly. I mean if it has to change that much just to accommodate Lae'zel being the MC, how much else goes out the window? I think of it like the start to the Story and many people treat it like it's set in that way, but as soon as I'm playing as Lae'zel instead of a custom character, it all starts falling apart at the seams right at the outset.

Does everyone get this same Nautiloid intro except for Lae'zel? Is it musical chairs with substitutions? Or is it a completely different intro on the beach or somewhere else for each Origin character?

What if I choose Wyll instead of Lae'zel? Does another character then get slotted to blow the horn during the Gate fight, and in all those intro Tiefling training sequences? Does that stuff just disappear? ​

It doesn't seem like it's going to work without scrapping the whole sweep of the intro. I have a hard time picturing it and so fear the worst. I think they should put it out there, with an example in EA to show us how it's going to look, and demonstrate how it's not going to just tank everything about how we enter the story. If the way we enter the story isn't important, cause it's EA and this isn't it anyway, then shouldn't they be changing stuff around more regularly to really get us used to that idea? Each patch so far has just refined the introduction and built on it, it hasn't totally changed the intro. But if that's what's going to happen with the Origins, I think they should be priming us for that.

Also, an off topic Lae'zel curiosity, but when we meet up with her again and she's in that tielfling cage, one of our dialog options says something like "You abandoned me, why should I help you" but for all we know she was thrown off the ship and landed straight in the tiefling trap. I mean a couple seconds delay in getting thrown from the ship and she could easily have landed more than a couple hundred yards away from us right? To me that's the only sensible explanation for Lae'zel getting caught in the trap to begin with. Just like really bad luck, coming off a free fall after getting brainwormed and fighting her way to the helm, just got dumped in the wrong place at the wrong time and sprung the trap in one extended series of calamities hehe.

If I was playing as Lae'zel, I would prefer not to have to group up with Shadowheart as my first NPC companion. Astarion can come along as our rogue I guess, but I'd like to ditch him too. Give me the Novices or someone else to command as Lae'zel. Let me side against the Tiefs from the outset. Playing as an Origin character but doing that with these same Origin parties all over again would feel pretty boring to me. It would be much more fun if Lae'zel could recruit different NPCs, where being Lae'zel means access to those companion NPCs specifically. That might be an interesting approach. As a Custom PC, we should have access to a larger pool of possible companions, and as an Origin PC it would also be more interesting to have more recruitable NPCs available as companions. Just let me roll as Lae'zel with Scratch. They'd make a good team, she probably respects Scratch more than Gale or Shadowheart anyway. Then maybe let her bring Sazza into the fold, someone she can bark at but also who also talks back. That'd be way more entertaining to me, and maybe then I could see some purpose to playing the game out as Lae'zel like a pre-gen. I prefer the origins as companions, but I think they are insufficient there, we should have many more possible companions and varied combinations of those for potential parties.