Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General who do you think the new origin character will be?

If I remember correctly, Barcus did no artificier stuff. All he did was being an absolute disaster...

I would love to have Barcus as a companion.

It's been done before in the Dragon Age games.

You know who would have been a great companion? Origin or otherwise? Some hypothetical protégé of Jaheira's. An easy good companion and a connection to Jaheira that would explain her presence effortlessly.

Damn it is sad but I'll be busy while the PFH and won't know right away who the new origin is. I guess watching a recorded event is alright still, with a beer or two..

This discussion has had me thinking about Eder and Beast from DOS2. I enjoyed both, but they polled at opposite ends of the popularity spectrum, with Eder being a fan favorite and Beast widely dismissed as "boring." Beast, a dwarf and former leader of an unsuccessful rebellion now being called back into the fray, struck me as probably chaotic good. Anyway, I've been pondering both why the two more "normal" characters were received so differently and what "lessons" Larian may have drawn from their experience with Beast about what fans want. When the lowest rated character from your last game was an amiable, relatively non-edgy shorty is would be easy to assume that fans want taller, more personally difficult companions with off-the-wall issues.

The BG3 fan base undoubtedly differs a bit from the DOS fan base, although with a lot of overlap. The number of origin characters/other followers is also significantly larger with BG3 which would to me seem to open the door to creating slightly more niche companions, perhaps even risking a shorty without mental health issues (other than those related to our shared crisis).

Yeah me too im at work for the next 4hours so im gonna have a drink n watch a recording

At least with a recording you can skip through the boring bits and skip back to check on things. The thought of having to sit through Swen and co. in their naff D&D outfits in real-time fills me with dread.

The thing is, if you play a character that's not straight forwardly good then immediately you're on the same page with everyone. Be out for yourself, be violent as you need to be, don't give a damn about anyone else. Gale approves of us being good but he doesn't really push us to be. Wyll, for all his talk of being a hero falls back to violence and cruelty whenever it comes to finding Mizora or dealing with the goblins. Shadowheart only cares about being cured. So we only have Karlach as potentially advocating for the party's better angels on a consistent basis. Does that not seem imbalances and a problem? They only clash with a character that tries to be stalwartly good.

I'm also very annoyed at the concept of good characters being written off as simple or incapable of being morally complex. The fact that we lack that sort of firm good character just tells me Larian lacks the interest or ability to unsersrsnd what makes one interesting, which to me is a mark against them. I think most of the nuance these characters have shows up accidentally underneath the frustrating need to make everything "edgy" and "cool" and "morally gray" and that for example, Larian has considered the moral questions of Astarion's character far less than you and I have. They just wrote "tortured vampire" and accidentally walked over depth.

That much seems proven to me by the fact that they don't even take advantage of the clashing personalities and ideas in the party. Everyone seems to get along with everyone else just fine, it's only us they clash with. If Lae'zel weren't a githyanki and she was the same in all other ways I don't even think Shadowheart would have a problem with her.

Well, unfortunately for us, it is very much Larian's view that honestly good characters are boring characters that their writers have no interest in creating. Larian's message to us here is simply: We like to write ONLY edgy, hipster, angst-ridden characters who are morally questionable to outright evil. We don't care to create classically good characters because that's boring and a waste of our resources. But if you players keep insisting on having good companions to play with, then fine, we will give you a couple of resurrected companions from the old BG games. But we will not have created those two companions ourselves, which is the whole point. And, we get to kill two birds with one stone by being able to claim that having Minsc and Jaheira in the game now "connects" BG3 to the previous BG games. Perfect!

Damn it is sad but I'll be busy while the PFH and won't know right away who the new origin is. I guess watching a recorded event is alright still, with a beer or two..

OK, goblin is my least favorite race, but at least a small one. Still sad about Helia. Maybe she will still make an appearance as camp follower.

Well, it's not clear that it's actually a goblin (you create the current host, who can be any race or class), and it's not available as a companion. PC only. Although I guess it will turn up as an adversary in any case.