Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Origin Character Feedback

Hey folks,

Been looking for a place to give some directed feedback comments, and short of anything direct, this seems like the most official place to do it. Also curious to see if anyone else shares the concerns I've been having, as well, and other people's thoughts on it.

So, one of my partners and I have been following the the news about BG3 for a little while now, and we're quite excited. We've been playing DOS2 as the first larian game that we've played since Divine Divinity way back when, and we've been having a lot of fun with it... but as we look forward to BG3 and look at the news that's available, a few concerns have popped up.

So... Origin characters. Great in concept, and fun to play with, but it's been hard to escape the feeling that *not* playing with them guts the game to a certain extent - like you're being punished for not playing with these characters instead of your friends, precisely because their stories are so earth-shakingly involved with the core plot... they're not *essential*, sure, but if you don't invest in them, it's hard to escape the feeling like you're missing out on large swathes of lore and story as a result.

That's all livable - and the hope is that effect will be smoothed in various ways for this new game, but it brings me up to the issue that makes that first one more glaring.

In Dungeons and dragons, just sticking to the basics and not going to wild or different, and sticking just to the forgotten realms, and not looking at other realm spaces... we have:

Dwarves,
Elves,
Humans,
Half-elves,
Halflings,
Gnomes,
Dragonborn,
Half-orcs,
Tiefling,
Aasimar,
Tabaxi,
Genasi,
Aarakocra,
Tortle if you're feeling cheeky.

That's the basics - there are many others that push into the bounds of more unusual and uncommon to encounter, or more generally monstrous.

And for our origin characters - character that many players are going to wind up feeling *Obliged* to play with for fear of missing out on huge chunks of story and effectively being punished for not investing in - we're looking to get:

A human,
A human,
A half-elf,
An elf (undead)
A Gith.

They have a huge plethora of peoples to choose from, and instead of giving us a broad selection they've decided to give us two and a half humans and one and a half elves, and one exotic, obviously-heavily-tied-to-the-core extra.

If we had only five of these origin characters, and a whole spectrum of different peoples to represent and involve, why in the world would you decide that two-and-a-half humans and one-and-a-half elves, and a token odd-one, was the way to go?

my partner and I are finding ourselves really disappointed by what looks like a criminal lack of diversity in our 'origins' cast... surely we're not the only ones put off by this?

It might be too early to judge, they might add more companions somewhere along the line, though I am inclined to agree with you, even the elves look very bland and human-like which makes it worse. Lae'zel is featured in the intro cinematic to the point it almost feels weird not to have her in the party, which gives me flashbacks to DOS2 where not all companions were equally fleshed out. (Beast and Lohse were hands down the worst, as much as it pains me because I really wanted to love them.)

At least I sure do hope that they add more companions, if not during launch, maybe as DLCs at a later date.

I lowkey hope that we'll also get future chapters with unrelated stories that go well beyond Baldur's gate, but that might be too much dreaming!

I'm hoping they'll add more as well... and I'm really hoping we don't end up in a situation where the integral-to-plot importance of these origin characters leaves us feeling like our own custom characters an infinitely less relevant or important by comparison - a big issue with the origin system in DOS2.

I'd really like to see some halfling and gnome representation, personally - and that they actually be properly differentiated and not lumped into the 'mostly identical small person' category, but in general, we'd just really hope that if we do have the origin system looming over the story, then the spread of characters represented by it will actually be a diverse spread.

I'm mildly concerned about the Larian need to shoehorn an undead character into the mix... so far vamp-boy feels incredibly out of place for the setting and universe, and really just stands out like a sore thumb; I don't want to judge in advance, because they could, potentially, spin a story that works for it there and makes it fit in a way that feels okay... but to do that they'd need to fall headlong into the 'this character's thread overshadowing the others' trap... so I'm dubious.

You're not wrong. In the age of voiced characters, they may have to go for the most bang for their buck. That means skipping characters they don't think will be picked as much for PCs. It's expensive to produce these characters.

I wouldn't say the last 4 on your list are common or usual. And as this is set in and around Baldur's Gate, there are some races that are going to be more prominently featured than others. Also, some of the more unusual races aren't even completed yet and are not part of EA so we could still get them as origin characters with official release.

They're pretty common for player characters - and certainly more so than Gith ^.^ In the D&D circles I've roved in, video game and tabletop alike, 'normal' humans are really one of the least played races. That's just personal experience, mind, but it's definitely been my majority experience.

Baldur's gate itself might be comprised, in the vast majority, of humans - as are most hubs of civilisation on the sword coast - that doesn't mean that humans should be the majority of what we can play, or see represented a playables and companions. Quite the inverse, really, given that Baldur's Gate itself has historically prided itself on its inclusivity of races and cultures, and also the fact that, as far as I can see, there's no reason to suppose that any of us are actually baldurians to begin with - Lizzy our gith friend certainly isn't ^.^

I think only the custom character hails from Baldur's Gate. If it makes sense. Humans, Tieflings, Halflings, Half-Elves, Elves, and Dwarves, would make sense being from the city, it is fairly tolerant of race and culture. A drow or half-drow is probably from the Underdark (why they are on the surface is up for the player to decide) and the Githyanki is probably from a creche/hunting party who got captured by mind flayers while trying to become an adult. In Githyanki culture the only way to become fully accepted into main Githyanki culture is to kill a Mindflayer and bring its head to the throne of Vlaakith the Lich Queen.

what bothers me more is that right now theres no Dwarf as a companion, no halforc obviously.
Its not DnD if you dont have a Dwarf who is exactly the same as any other dwarf

Agree on most of your concerns, much prefer a more organic way of meeting party members instead of just having all of them playable and “forced” on us in the beginning of the game!
However regarding the number of races and companions, there will be a lot more at launch, this is just the ones that will be available for ea. Keep in mind that launch of the game is probably 1-2 years away still:)

Maybe they do not even made those races and are working on them. We watched several humans, elves, half-elves, githyanki, drow, gnomes,... in the gameplay but there´s still some races like half-orcs, dragonborn, etc that we did not see.