Originally Posted by Sozz
You've got to see the difference between a game like Arcanum or Dragon Age, and Icewind Dale or Solasta; one has a story about your character, and thematically linked to your companions, and the other just occurs to a party of characters who contribute nothing to the story apart from determining if it happens or not. The story of BG3 looks like its going to be about the origin characters, but it only 'happens' to Tav.

I think that’s well put. The question is what we want to do about it. Games that make the story more about our custom character tend to do that at the expense of our freedom to make that character whoever we want. That’s true of the original BG games, where we had a pretty fixed origin story and were limited in the sort of age our characters could sensibly be considered to be, even if we had flexibility about race or class. Even something like DA:O, much as I loved it, gave us a reasonably limited set of origin options to pick from. I like that BG3 gives us far more flexibility and wouldn’t want that reduced.

On the other hand, I don’t want our companions to be more boring or less connected to the story, as their backstories are potentially a great source of interest and engagement. The ability to actually then play the story as one of those companions is not a must-have for me, but I do think it’s a nice idea and wouldn’t want this to be ruled out not because it would be a bad experience in itself but because it could make another experience seem worse in comparison.

So, for me, given that I don’t want to compromise either my freedom to play whatever Tav I want, or the connection of my companions to the plot, and kind of like the idea of being able to step into those companions’ shoes if I want to in later playthroughs, what is left?

Perhaps I just have to accept the existing trade off between flexibility versus plot connection, but I hope not. There seems to be plenty of opportunity to make what “happens to Tav”, or rather what Tav does, in the story satisfying enough to even the scales, particularly if Larian continue to refine the opportunities to roleplay our classes, races and backgrounds. As I’ve already said in this thread, I don’t think Larian have quite hit the mark with EA but it feels like there are some improvements they could make that would get them there without totally overhauling their approach.

"You may call it 'nonsense' if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"