Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Are custom characters flat and pointless compared to Origin ones? [Spoilers]

Or is that just mine?

Please just let me say that despite everything I will say here I love the game and I am utterly impressed with the number of options that seem to be present in it. I think Larian did do a fantastic job. However, exactly because I am so impressed by it I feel occasionally so let down when the quality seems to be inconsistent at places. So I came here to rant. Forgive me for that.

So far I am just in Act 2, and this might change later in game - if so, please do let me know.

I am currently doing my first play through and I am playing a custom githyanki character. I picked this race because I really loved it during EA, I loved the weird outsider/fish out of water feel of the character where, you can wonder about local customs, accuse people of having strange attractions towards cats, and generally freak everyone out with how odd you look and act while being one of the sceariest thing walking around. However, I didn’t want to play as Lae’zel for 2 reasons, one is that in the EA she had a few really funny lines that I didn’t want to loose out on and two, her overzealous love for Vlaakith made her personality too rigid and different from how I wanted to role play my character of this race. I couldn’t have role played Lae’zel without making her completely OOC.

So Act 1 was mostly ok, until when I got to the Githyanki Patrol where everything started to fall apart. As soon as you get into ANY situation that matters, the custom githyanki character is immediatelly treated as if was one of the vanilla races (human/elf/etc) enslaved to/under the guidance of Lae’zel.



Later on, when I got in the Gith Creche, I, as a gith constantly was reminded by the game how I can’t read tir’su and therefore can only read any text that is in common or ask Lae’zel for help. Why? Seriously?

As a custom gith you are basically playing a fool and called out for it constantly as well, by literally almost every single githyanki you meet with, not just by Lae’zel. This actually even makes sense as most of the gith specific lines are about asking how gith customs work (something the PC should know) and the non gith specific lines are often actively out of character for a gith. We are apparantly the egg that was dropped in the creche.

Then things get somehow worse, when we meet . Whose reaction in general is like :

“ Ah, Lae’zel, you fantastic child! And… uh… you, other one over there… “

and from there onward our custom PC is treated as if we were Lae’zels slaves/servants again, to the point that if you actually kneel infront of her when told (again a gith only selection), she does commend Lae’zel for training us well. Like… really? Basically as far as the game is concerned at this point we are a non-gith sidekick of Lae'zel.

I kind of got completely fed up when Laezel’s quest progressed after the creche and
He will at this point tell us about

Funnily enough this turn is so sudden that even Shadowheart comments on it in a rare meta moment.


At this point I started to get seriously sick and tired of Laezel’s attitude and also started to wonder what does happen if you play a gith and don’t have Lae’zel in the team? Are you even allowed in the creche and offered purification? (You should be, as you ARE a gith!) I didn’t want to reload from before the Gith Patrol, but I did a reload from before meeting
Right? Nope. He never turned up again.

Obviously Lae’zel is special and this is her character’s quest, but surely some racial reactions were very much warranted for in those situations for the custom PC? All of her backstory is essentially that she is a gith, which means if you also play a gith you have the same backstory, except nobody cares about yours. Because you are a custom pc.

Why is this an issue? Well, not allowing the custom githyanki to be recognized as a githyanki in any situation where their race actually should matter, makes it pointless to play as a gith. As a custom gith in environmental and story reactions the game either treats you as if you chose Lae’zel as the Origin character or as a non-gith PC. It would have been better simply not making the giths a playable race at all and just leaving Lae’zel as the origin character.

I would actually restart this game now as a different race if I didn’t have some 45h game play in it already, but the gith playthrough is really ruined for me at this point.

My custom character is MY character, so I love her. The origin companions are super overrated, and I can't imagine ever playing as them, they won't be who they are if I play them, they'll simply be a shallow version of their original personality. All imo at least.

Yikes. I was expecting gith characters to get more special treatment than that. Maybe Larian did just assume that you'd pick Lae'zel if you wanted githy goodness.

For someone who likes - or at least doesn't mind - playing premade characters, I imagine the Origins are going to feel much more interesting and well-integrated into the world. But I hate it, I only really like custom characters, and their integration is... mostly good enough, IMHO.

I agree. That is an important part of any rpg imo, the ability to role play and develope a characters personality freely. As opposed to playing through a fixed story with a fixed character.

The player character should me a main character of the game. They don’t necessarily have to be “the choosen one” but they really shouldn’t be just the side kick hanging out with the big kids either. Really, would the story change if the custom pc wasn’t part of it? No. And that is not right. This is why this game feels like Divinity instead of BG.

Being a Shar Cleric also doesn't work too well or being DU as L didn't rewrite any of the dialog to account for his memory loss, so you get to claim your from baldur's gate and other things you don't know due to the memory loss.

The Custom Character is a sidekick character, the real characters in the game is the origin characters. This was a problem in EA too, when we couldn't play anything but custom, I thought DU with a custom class/race was the solution, but no they just did the work to add the story of the DU on top of a standard custom character dialogs. I'm still mad that I can confess my dark urges and admit to murder, but my next dialog with the companions is to say I didn't do it, that is so messed up.

And I'm mentally stuck in game due to Gale being made to be main character in Chapter II, to the point I kill Gale after the dialog. He is not even part of my adventuring team, I just tolerate him in camp due to him being to dangerous to not be under my control. Killed the messenger too.

So let's just play origin character, EXCEPT when you do you lose most of the dialog the character says when you lead with origin avatars.. You are ACTIVELY losing out on story by playing an origin character or using a origin character as party face.

I'm waiting for people to analyze character backgrounds an make a guide on them, so I can make a character with a history that don't involve being from BG and I can just play as party face and sidekick to everyone's important story.

This was what I was afraid of, unfortunately. That Tav would not get reactivity in important relevant areas because origins were prioritized.

I agree.

Personally, I wish the Origins were not part of the game. Those extra resources could have easily gone into making Our custom characters (whom Larian admits by their own statistics are the lion's share of players) Have much greater reactivity from their character creation options. All that stuff with Lae'zel? That could have been *should* have been written for a Gith character.

The Origins system as Larian uses it really is the worst of all worlds. Play an Origin and you lose out on your ability to define your own character, *and* lose a party member you'd otherwise be able to interact with. Play a non-origin (custom) character and find immersion breaking lack-of-reactivity to your character creation choices because guess what? The 'elf' storyline writing was reserved for the elf Origin (you get the picture), and to boot, you'll always feel a little like a side-character to the main characters who are the Origins, because they all have intricate plots woven into the main story, while you get 'default scenes'.

At the very least on their next game they should move to an Origin system more akin to Dragon Age (Or the Dark Urge). A 'Gith Origin' in such a hypothetical would give you the ability to determine your character's gender, appearance, name, class etc while retaining a 'Gith' storyline and reactivity.

It sounds like the origins had more differences, such as unique Daisies, but got scrapped as part of the rewrite which might've made them more interesting to play.

For original characters there shouldn't be an Elf storyline, that's the point of the origins. My character was Drow, there is no way for Larian to know if I was RP'ing a surface exile or devout Lothist, they gave dialogue options for both. The same with Gith, I am a playing a loyal soldier or an orphan raised in Neverwinter? My choice not theirs. Lae'zel is not just Gith, she is a unique character and forcing all Gith PC's to be Laz would make less sense than allowing Gith characters to be whoever you want them to be!
Saying you want an Elf storyline for nonorigin elfs, isn't saying no origin system, t's saying more origin characters to pick from. AN elf storyline if you play an elf would make the elf not a non-origin PC but an origin.

I don’t mind having Origin characters as long as their Origin story is unique to them and there is enough material for the Custom PC to feel involed in the big story. The origin characters basically should be your usual companion characters with their own story, but playable. They could put things in a different perspective or show you a different angle on the story. What they shouldn’t be is the focus of the main story. The player should have the option to have a full game experience with their choosen race/gender/class regardless of having a companion in the party or not. The companion shouldn’t hijack the optional race/class part of the game and negating it for the Pc just because that is their background. That is simply bad writing.



I think there are ways to help the player to form their character. As a drow, if you have the option to answer both as a Lolth loyalist or a renegade then you as the player can pick the right option and roleplay. But you still are a drow, so if you get in a situation where it is logical for the world to recognize this, the world should. Larian claimed in their last Panel from Hell that they were focusing on this aspect a lot, and sure, some lines you get during your playthrough will be specific to your race. The issue starts when things happen around you that should be affected by you being that race. That is hard to handle, so most games just stay away feom it. But if you make a game focusing on a plotline connected to a race, e.g. The githyanki here, then you cannot just brush off the PC with a few complimentary, “oh, what chew you up and spat you out again” line in the face of a whole gith specific plotline happening right next to them. Either don’t put that plotline in it or involve the PC character to the level they realistically should be.

The game is full of situations where the game recognises I am drow, this game has done that better than any previous RPG I've played. It comes up in NPC dialogue and was considered basically every time it's relevant.

I haven't played a gith character but from your description it seems to be giving exposition your character would already know?, I assume it is the same even playing origin La'zael as there has to be some way tog et the player that information. RPG's always have the problem of exposition your character wouldn't need but the player desperately does. Should the game just leave players who choose Gith learning nothing about Gith culture and practices if they can't ask Laz or be informed about it?

Drow dialogue does it quite well, you ask Minthara what life in the underdark is like, she makes a joke about how surely you know already being a drow, you can reply 'yes but I want your perspective' or 'no i've never been' etc, the game provides the exposition without compromising your choice of background.
Gith would be alot harder as so much of the game deals with gith culture and stuff the player NEEDS to know and you can't rely on every player making a gith character to have read up on them

Ditto.

But I'm going to hold off on commenting further until more people here have had the chance to finish the game and when we can have a really honest and in-depth discussion of all these weaknesses of the game.

Good news is amnesiac Durge is allegedly Tav+ (according to some subreddit posters) with an intimate connection to BG1+2 as its story.

93% of players aren't on the forum soaking in the culture of negativity and extremes too, in other corners of the internet, the game, PC character choices and story are being received far better than here. I'm in six gaming forums and a couple general geekiness online communities, this forum is the only one where people aren't excited and gushing about the game.
The % is total players with analytics on, not forum users, different demo different standards

Not quite done yet, getting very close, the 3 'main' villains are taken down and I'm just cleaning up the last few quests before the final main quests, but I can say that my character mostly felt like the main character of the story. When I walk up to people that I've saved (as long as Tav is initiating the conversations obviously), they talk to ME, they mention what I did, etc. The companion questlines are obviously different, you can pipe up if you want, and characters will talk to you and your relationship with the companion will have a strong effect on the outcomes of their story as well. There are also moments when companions will get recognized by npcs obviously, but that is to be expected.


I disagree, I think this forum is probably the most balanced place for discussions. "culture of negativity" is such a reductive way to phrase a group of people with different expectations and desires. Seeing a number of people voice their concerns isn't automatically toxic, or just debbie downers.

I don't really find this forum very negative. Most people here say, that they like the game, but would like to see some changes.

Dude, if you think people are negative about bg3 here... lol, there is a certain forum you should check out.

I see your point but I would like to politely disagree. Pointing out that the game is not perfect and has issues is not the same as a “culture of negativity”. People on this forum all say they love the game, but loving it doesn’t mean that we have to be blind to it’s faults or we shouldn’t talk about it. I am talking about my negative feelings here because I hope that if there is any place Larian may pick up feedbacks from (very unlikely) it will be this place and might consider improving on this approach in their future games.



This is an absolutely valid point and I am certain this is exactly what the writers were thinking when they put these conversation choices in the game. However, I think it is a bit overdone while there isn’t enogh focus on plot related reactions. This plot is very much connected to the githyanki, shouldn’t that make the PC more involved?

Regarding the type of exposition you can have, for example, you can ask Lae’zel about how come that the githyanki breed having eggs. Now that is a little bit similar to be an adult human coming from a highly sexually openminded society and being in their adventurer age (20s maybe?) asking another adult human about where do babies come from. While not impossible, not exactly logical, don’t you agree? I also doubt that Lae’zel can ask this question. Surely there could have been better ways to handle this exposition. Like, put it in a book, or a letter, a note on the wall addressed to all the staff in the creche, etc.

Or just have an in game encyclopedia that explains certain things like in Pathfinder games.

Surely this is a case how many lines of dialogue could they reasonably be expected to write and record? There’s already an absurd amount, most of which is very well done IMO (a few quirks here and there). There’s always going to be cases where you might think it would better if you could say something different than the options given or if characters responded differently to whatever.

Personally I find it a little grating that your companions say the exact same thing on joining and being dismissed from the core team. Especially when you realise that you just asked someone to stay behind while they still an item you want to take off them. Argh!

But that’s a minor gripe in the scheme of things. Game dialogue is always going to be a compromise that way. I think Larien have done good job of it in general. The game does recognize your race (sometimes), it does give you options depending of class (sometimes). As well as responding to the choices you make. It’s not perfect, but it couldn’t possibly be.

Well...not if you are the Dark Urge they are not. And I'm just going to say this right now: playing as the Dark Urge as evil is by far *the* best way to play the game.

There are two important bits you should know, I'll put them in spoiler warnings but they will be very generic descriptions without specifics like which characters are involved, when, etc. They are just generic descriptions of things to look out for because one could leave you in a very dire situation in terms of your ability to continue playing the game while the other, it's just epic stuff that everyone should see before they stop playing this game.

Something to be careful of:

Something epic you might see:

Hopefully those descriptions are generic enough and sufficiently devoid of detail so as not to spoil things but also provide just enough pointers to help you recognize and avoid disaster and help you not miss one of the most epic scenes ever. And hopefully those descriptions also provide some reassurance that custom characters in the Dark Urge origin are very worthwhile.