Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Suggestion: PC Personal Quest

I've seen a lot of people pointing out that the custom Player Character feels a bit stale compared to the origins characters (and I do agree for the most part). Giving the PC voiced dialogue would certainly help that along, but it occurred to me: what if custom Player characters had a personal quest of their own to deal with beyond the main quest, same as the origins characters?

It could be tied to player background choice, and pop up at random while adventuring. It would give more thought to what you pick as a background beyond what 2 skills it gives you.

Downside is it would likely mean quite a bit of work to tailor, create, and voice a questline for each individual background.

However I do think this would help add a bit of much needed dimension to the custom character.

I would so very much love to have this.

We're already given two choices for the player: either a heavily scripted Origin character or a blank slate for roleplaying.

A middle option with some kind of "light" personal quest would be hard to pull off without steering too far in one of those two directions. Too much scripting and it would feel like your story is on rails, not much different from choosing an Origin character. Too little would just be a "meh" side quest with no real impact. That's without even getting into how it would have to fit each race and class.

It's an interesting idea, I just don't think it's practical, considering the opportunity cost in developer time that could go somewhere else.

I don't disagree with you. It would certainly pose a lot of work for the developers, and it would be difficult to have quests that strike the right balance between fun and fulfilling, but not too much on rails. It's part of why I thought tying it to background choice might at least help with that, in allowing people to still select what most closely matches how they envision their character.

In a related note, I do wonder if the origin characters will be treated the same as those in DOS2 where you could tailor their class how you liked when you selected them as your main. I get the feeling you won't be able to do that in BG3. I'm not saying that's bad, but for those who want to pick their own class AND a background that comes up in the game, I have the suggestion above.

But, as said before, I'm well aware it would be quite difficult and a lot of effort and other things take priority right now.

Wow this is a pretty cool idea but I wonder kind of quest it could be to compare to origin characters

It could be one of your choosing! Tyranny, an RPG made a while back, had a bunch of novelties going for it, amongst it, they let you create the backstory of your character. And the way they did it was really cool too, the setting of the game is a brutal war against the last remaining nation to resist, and in that creation of your story, you as a sort of general, choose where to attack, who to send, get a choice between negotiation or slaughter, and all these choices would not only affect the people and how they view you, it would also completely change some of the lands that you will visit during your travels.
We could surely do something similar in Baldurs gate, have our character walk through his stages of life with it's various conflicts, and that'll shape the nature and direction of the personal backstory.

The only issue I see here is, that we're starting at level 1, and you can't really take it seriously if your level 1 fighter fought terrible demons and discovered a mysterious artefact of great power that they must unlock and understand. But tbh, that seems to be a general problem with all of our origin characters, so we wouldn't really be all that out of place.

Something like that would be pretty cool, but it doesn't necessarily have to be something so grandiose. Id be satisfied with a nice little arc that impacts maybe even just a few people.

Well surely my Drow won't have the same quest that my dwarf would.
And they can't create something for every playable race without it impacting quality... there are just too many.

So its really difficult to design something with all these variables.
Maybe the background could be orchestrated your kidnapping originally and based on your race and background the enemy would change but the overall story is the same.

Something that works for all custom races and their background with its open-ended circumstances.

That's what Origin characters are for, and they will be pickable as a PC.

If I'm not mistaken, the "dream waifu" visions are the custom character quest. Though I can't say I like it, if anything it makes me less interested in customs.

That and I think there should be a "half-origin" system, somewhat akin to DA:O (without the prologues).

This is a great idea <3! It would be really nice to have a story behind the character type we choose .

This is a super cool idea! Dragon Age: Origins nailed it perfectly.
It gave us a "chapter 0" revolving around the chosen origin of our character (for the human they were, noble or mage, for the dwarf, noble or karta, for the elves dalish or city elf) and then we will find hint to our background all over the game.

I think something like that would be amazing for the game. A chapter 0 introducing us to the game, its mechanics and a quest revolving around our race/class/chosen background, ending with the abduction aboard the nautiloid.

I think a chapter 0 might be a bit much, we need to have our own characters. Not another premade character.

I would love for character creation to be used fully. Hell lets start with allowing backgrounds to affect our character.

I think with so many options for this it would be too difficult to pull off without taking away from a player's idea of their background. Especially if they don't add in the variant options. I suppose they may be able to do it if they also add in a custom background option that then doesn't come with this extra idea.


I hope this isn't the case considering I think this character is supposed to be who you want to sleep with. I made a lot of mine who do you want to kill.

Could just pick a background.

Like from Baldur's Gate, that one Elven Nation, Waterdeep, etc.

The Neverwinter MMO let's you do little things like that, just take the background at character creation from that, and add some conversation options based on them.
Can also be thrown into the tags.

I'd already be happy if not every custom character had the "baldurian" tag. It makes absolutely no sense to have that tag if you chose, for example, "outsider" or"hermit" as your background.

+1 tbh, i was surprised that such a mechanic wasnt already in game. granted it is early access and larian seems to still be working on implementing the tag system which likely would be the method for incorporating such a plot device/story element, and i can understand everyone saying the tadpole plot (which imo seems more contrived on each playthrough) serves as the pc's personal quest, but it just feels underwhelming when all the other origin companions (and apparently several npcs) also have the same parasite problem in addition to their own origin storylines whereas there is nothing that the player can use to tie their pc to the world of bg3. like, what was our pc doing before we got scooped by mindflayers? where did we get picked up - yartar or somewhere else? ive posted this sentiment before, but it just feels like if our pc never survived the ship crash the story of bg3 could continue as if the pc never existed in the first place, which just doesnt feel like a baldurs gate game

I'll quote a reply from another thread where something similar has been discussed:



So it seems there's little hope to it. I'm personally completely not interested in romance in games and I'm not happy about the whole deal. One person said it's not necessarily romantic in nature, but the way it's presented in character creation makes it seem pretty straightforward.

Btw, I'm not sure I quite got what you mean with making "who do you want to kill", care to elaborate?

I have a hard time coming up with any type of romantic background for any characters for games I play. My backgrounds usually have a lot of betrayal and revenge so anyone my character dreams of is going to be a part of that. Going to be a really cringy thing if I find out I was supposed to love these people.