Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Opinions on amount of companions

To answer Plisko's question, at least in their previous game - Originally, Origin characters were all you could play, at all; extreme player-base demand led them to inserting a custom character, but it was done in a very half-arsed way; the character had no quest lines, no interactions with anything in the game, nothing unique to them, and was entirely a dead mop. The result was that playing with a non-origin character was just an objectively lesser, blander and more empty experience, and made the game itself feel lesser, blander and more empty, compared to the characters they had originally designed who all had a lot of advanced character-specific interaction with things.

The result was that the community advice to new players swiftly became: "Don't play a custom character - there's no point, and you get nothing out of it. There isn't a single thing that playing a custom character lets you experience, over playing an origin, and you just miss out on huge chunks of game an interaction... so don't bother". Despite this, a large proportion of players still did choose a custom character for their first play through, came away deeply dissatisfied with what felt like a half-finished, incomplete game with a half-told, incomplete story, but enjoyed the game enough on its other elements to try again with an origin character, after the community told them it was basically necessary.

The metric that Larian seemed to take away from this was "People love our origin system - even the ones who wanted a custom character came back and played origin characters, so clearly it's a beloved system."

Edit:

To Crimson - having a smaller party to create a more intimate and personal experience is a false equivocation when you hold it alongside other games. Games with large party counts still manage, in most cases to adequately build, story and engage those characters to make them feel close and personal; when you pitch a character into a story, you plan for doing all of that, and you do it for as many characters as you reasonably can, while still maintaining that. Larian doing fewer does not equivocate to them having better, closer or more intimate characters - it's just a sign that they are less capable in this department, or don't care about it as much, and cannot do this as well or with as many characters as other contemporary titles.

I enjoyed Fane's story, sure, and Ifan's... Sebille and Red Prince just absolutely did not land for me at all, Beast was fine, and Loshe was kinda off in her own unrelated world, which was... fine, but eh.

If I were to compare companions in Act 1 of BG3 with companions in Act one of other games with larger character rosters... I felt and immediately stronger senses of interest, attachment and desire to enjoy my experience alongside: Linzi, Jubilost, Neeshka, Sand, Linu, Tommy, Deekin, and others, by the end of the first act of their introduction... than I do for anyone in BG3. Fewer does not equal better quality - it's a false equivocation.

It's fine to enjoy exploring the story of a character that has been pre-written and is predefined to fit into their world.... but that is not what the vast majority of people come to D&D for. They come to play their own characters, to define them, and to make their own decisions as suites those characters that they create. Other games that based around specific, pre-designed characters are certainly very successful and popular... but they aren't D&D games, because that's not what D&D games are about. So... when you make a game and advertise it as a D&D game, and as the definitive example of D&d in a video game, and the successor to an existing D&D franchise... Don't ram your personal characters down my throat; don't focus on your personal predefined characters to the detriment of the character I create for myself.