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No!

They are great, i love exploring unique characters with in depth stories rather than just a blank slate.

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Like the OP, I don't like origins and I would like more options for custom characters, like better dialoge options, more chances to take the initiative and to have the last word. Also, it would be nice to have a quest that is only for custom character and doesn't depend on using the tadpole. Right now, it looks as ifcthey are putting lots of effort in the origins while forgeting the custom characters.

If they didn't promised that custom characters wouldn't feel lacking, then people like me simply wouldn't buy the game and the people who enjoy origins would just play the origins. But they wanted that people who didn't liked DoS2 system to but their game. Now they have two choices, deliver what they promised or try to lie their way out of this.

But right now, the custom character looks way less developed and disappointing.

What I won't do is play as an origin character. I tried that in Dos2 and I hated it. Half the time it was as some other person playing for me instead of me. For me origins would be just companions, nothing else.

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i like them and i will play them. the world is full of crpgs which do not do origin stories, larian is one of the only developers which do this, so i think it is quite self-centered to want to remove them from one of the few crpgs that actually does them for the sake of idk what? fortunatly i think there is very little chance they will be removed: if the VA has already been contracted or already recorded and since things like storyline, character design etc will already have been worked on considerably the argument seems to hinge on wanting larian to pour a lot of money down the toilet to remove one of the games unique features.

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I won't remove them at this point. But I expectcthe same level of work and options for custom characters. Otherwise, Larian would have deceived people like me, who don't like origins and could have perfectly skip the game and leave it to the people who love origins.

As you said, the world is full of rpg and I could have bought another. I think it is deceitful yo promise something, not even try to deliver and then say "but if you play the game the way I want to, you would change your mind and if you still didn't like it, you are wrong". No, if they wanted to do DoS3, they should have been upfront about it. The problem is not that they put lots of effort in the origins, the problem is that they haven't developed custom to be played as a main character. Maybe because they don't like their characters to be secondary. But if the player choose custom, then custom is main character and origins should be secondary. That is the point.

And it is selfish to expect people who don't like origins to just put up with a subpar plot and less options.

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Originally Posted by alice_ashpool
i like them and i will play them. the world is full of crpgs which do not do origin stories, larian is one of the only developers which do this, so i think it is quite self-centered to want to remove them from one of the few crpgs that actually does them for the sake of idk what? fortunatly i think there is very little chance they will be removed: if the VA has already been contracted or already recorded and since things like storyline, character design etc will already have been worked on considerably the argument seems to hinge on wanting larian to pour a lot of money down the toilet to remove one of the games unique features.


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Origins are fine, its the custom that needs more work.

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I'm one of those who don't give a damn about Origins Character. I hope to be able to have a satisfying experience playing only custom characters.

Larian advertised well-enough that they wanted to make their game feel like the DnD tabletop experience. So I hope custom characters won't be an after-thought.

That being said, any request that involves "please throw all that time and money away" are unlikely to be met. It's not a reason for people to censor themselves, but really, that's unlikely to happen.

Originally Posted by dotmats
As far as I can tell, Larian's origin system is a bit like their surface system: no one cares about it anywhere near as much as they do. Origins in particular just seem like wasted resources that should have been spent on a greater diversity of options for customising the player character - sub-classes with their own dialogue choices/ quests/ NPC reactions, perhaps a DA:O origin system that works to anchor your character to the world, a much more expansive "background" feature, that kind of thing.

I think we'd need to have hard data polled from players (including the future audience who doesn't hang on the Larian forums) to truly know about the first statement. But I agree with all the rest.

What I don't understand is why they decided to make 5 (or 8 ?) Origins Characters. Half of that would have been enough.

As much as I can praise Larian's bold decision to create content that will not be experienced by everyone, with multiple ways to solve inter-dependent quests and the resulting permutations (non-universally-experienced content being the main reason why "choices matter" is so hard to do for video game developers), I think that creating that many different Origins Character was pouring a lot of resources into the same idea, and I hope there'll be resources left for non-Origins character.


Originally Posted by Niara
I don't mind having companions with interesting and personal stories - but they need to be strongly secondary to the core story of the game, and the core story of the game needs to focus on, and make the player character feel like the actual protagonist.

I fully agree with the fact that personal quests of companions should be secondary to the core story of the game. But I think the core story of the game should just be the tadpoles, the Absolute and whoever is behind.

We have these Special One stories all the time. But "a band of adventurers foils the grand-scale plans of some evil deity (or deities)" is a self-sufficient story. As far as I know, most DnD campaigns don't make one player at the table be the lead character and the other players play second roles. It's a party of equals, who band together and cooperate. I know, this is a (mostly-solo) video game. But Larian claimed they want this to feel like the tabletop DnD experience.

I don't need to be THE hero. This doesn't have to be MY story. I'd like it to be the epic adventure of four failed True Souls puppets who made some pantheon-changing plans go wrong.

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Originally Posted by EMC_V

And it is selfish to expect people who don't like origins to just put up with a subpar plot and less options.

The op is advocating for removing already existing content in one area because they feel that content in another related area is sub-par in comparison. it feels petty and punitive. I am saying keep that content, do not remove it. I find it hard to see what is selfish about not wanting roleplaying things removed from the game that already exist and money has already been spent on. This is not a zero sum thing: removing origins will not magically make custom "better", though for some reason people seem to think that is how it would work. As verte says, don't remove the origins, bring the custom up to standard and use the level of detail put into the origins as a benchmark which you can then point to and say: we want this level of effort for custom pcs too.

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Originally Posted by alice_ashpool
As verte says, don't remove the origins, bring the custom up to standard and use the level of detail put into the origins as a benchmark which you can then point to and say: we want this level of effort for custom pcs too.

I'm fully behind this.

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I'm voting for making the custom character more interesting for sure. I wrote some time ago here my suggestions about how exactly:
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1. The custom character (CC) importance.
After quite a lot of thinking I realized that it doesn't matter how much you untie the origins from the main plot, it doesn't matter how much you tone down their stories, the problem just is not really in them. We had quite a lot of oh-so-special companions in other RPGs. The only difference is that we couldn't take them as our own character that doesn't really matter in comparing their importance with our main character's importance there. So it's the CC himself lacking his own upsides added in the plot. And here my thoughts on how it can be changed without taking away the freedom to have whatever backstory for our CCs in our heads:
1.1. Add the very special connection to the main plot only for the custom character.
It should be something the character himself couldn’t know before the main plot came into motion. Maybe he was observed by The Absolute before, got favored and now he has a different kind of tadpole that gives him special powers over the rest of tadpole users. Maybe he has some relation with whoever The Absolute is (yes, that’s somewhat BG1 all over again, but still better than being Tav-named nobody).
1.2. Make the custom character the only one type of glue to paste them all together for companions as continuation of those special tadpole powers.
You have Lae’zel and Shadowheart hating each other, Astarion being so paranoid that aggressive at the first meeting, Gale jumping on our character from the teleport, Wyll fighting goblins before becoming the part of our party. At the moment it all may become fatal for them, but we pass our checks and everything is fine. So let’s imagine that no one but the very special person with the very special tadpole and maybe Wyll can persuade Lae’zel and Shadowheart to put their differences aside, no one but that person and maybe Gale can deal with Astarion in a non-lethal way, and so on. As an option to make it not so harsh on players it may be just different DC for the checks. Also it may be partially based on companions classes, in such a way that we would always get a viable party.
1.3. Additionally maybe… I know it’s tons of work… but add a small level for the custom character before Avernus as a flashback of his normal day. And then a personal quest that involves someone he knew before.
The flashback level should be based on our choice of race and background. It will exist only to establish a connection between our character and a few NPC. The character has his normal no-adventures day and meets some friends/rivals/mentors. It should be short dialogs starting with the narrator characterising the NPC for us and us choosing the relationships. Like this:
N: Here comes Charles as pompous as always. Just a local thug, he never knew when to stop adoring himself. But some people think it’s just a part of his specific sense of humor, which many find amusing. You…
P: 1. …never liked this jerk. 2. … always were good friends with him, knowing that’s the humor for sure. 3. …never really paid too much attention to him. 4. …learned a lot from him.
After that the story should proceed mostly as normal. But at some point we should meet the same characters being somehow involved in the whole situation with The Absolute or any other suitable disaster.
1.4. One more big “maybe”… put some restrictions based on their temper for Origins as the player characters in single-player.
That’s the last resort and maybe probably will be hated by many players, but at the same time it’s logical. If we are taking the role of Shadowheart on ourselves, we should role-play Shadowheart with all her specifics (like hating Lae’zel and not willing to take her in the group for example). Same with each one of them.

Funny enough, I got only one type of answers, like "we don't want to be special".

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I'd be more interested in Origins if they played like, in some way, the Witcher plays, just less. Yeah, have the player decide some major things, but otherwise let the characters act as they would and watch their stories unfold.

I guess the system lends itself to people who are for the one and done approach, i myself don't remotely see the appeal in picking, say, Lae'zel and being a paragon of good.

Last edited by Innateagle; 05/12/20 08:03 PM.
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Originally Posted by Innateagle
I'd be more interested in Origins if they played like, in some way, the Witcher plays, just less. Yeah, have the player decide some major things, but otherwise let the characters act as they would and watch their stories unfold.

I guess the system lends itself to people who are for the one and done approach, i myself don't remotely see the appeal in picking, say, Lae'zel and being a paragon of good.


Agreed. If you go for fixed characters, go all the way and have them have a distinct personality even as playable origins. So it makes full use of the "specific character" type of PC.

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Seriously. Scrap gnomes, does anyone actually play them? Instead of gnomes concentrate on something players ACTUALLY like: elf subraces.

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Originally Posted by Innateagle
I'd be more interested in Origins if they played like, in some way, the Witcher plays, just less. Yeah, have the player decide some major things, but otherwise let the characters act as they would and watch their stories unfold.

Ok, that would be super cool for me. Right now my only problem with playing origins is the fact I won't be able to enjoy their dialogues, expressions and stuff as much as I do when they are my companions.

I hope the issue you're talking about will be at least partially solved thanks to origins' special lines we could see in Swen's gameplay presentation.

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Originally Posted by Drath Malorn
I

Originally Posted by dotmats
As far as I can tell, Larian's origin system is a bit like their surface system: no one cares about it anywhere near as much as they do. Origins in particular just seem like wasted resources that should have been spent on a greater diversity of options for customising the player character - sub-classes with their own dialogue choices/ quests/ NPC reactions, perhaps a DA:O origin system that works to anchor your character to the world, a much more expansive "background" feature, that kind of thing.

I think we'd need to have hard data polled from players (including the future audience who doesn't hang on the Larian forums) to truly know about the first statement. But I agree with all the rest.


Sure, some like origins, but do they like them as much Larian? Is it possible to like them that much? We should task our best forum scientists to find out.

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DOS2 allowed you to customize the appearance of your origin story characters within the boundaries of the race. And later you found a mirror that allowed you to customize the appearance, feats and stats of your companions as well. But you couldn't change their race or class. I assume BG3 will eventually allow the same.

Origin stories are a good compromise between different story experiences and budget. For example, take the origin characters name. If you want anyone in the game to be able to say that characters name, it has to be known upfront. So Name and Gender are generally locked down so they don't have to record 4 or 6 people saying all of that characters lines. So I don't have a problem with a button that says "Astarion". It is a male character named Astarion with some traits and a backstory that you will read about above the persons head.

It would be nice if BG3 let us do more than DOS2 did. For example, Wyll needs to be a Warlock, but could he also chose some of the other races? Laz'el must be a Gith, but does she have to be a fighter? Gale needs to be a mage, but does he have to be human? And does Astarion have to be a rogue or an elf? Of the available options, shadowheart seems to be the most constrained.

So I am in favor of expanding our ability to customize the Origins as much as possible, but I am NOT in favor of scrapping them for generic templates. The Template play through is what we are play testing right now.

There are some other great comments in here in regards to companion treatment of the player. I will note that in real life, most relationships are in fact self-serving. So I find the current reactions and commentary pretty realistic and in line with the NPCs personalities. The only unrealistic thing is that Laz sticks around as long as she does if you don't maintain progress on her quest (new stage every day) until a certain milestone is reached. I think Larian should focus on adding more good natured companion options and less on fixing the current companion options.

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Originally Posted by Phea
Originally Posted by Innateagle
I'd be more interested in Origins if they played like, in some way, the Witcher plays, just less. Yeah, have the player decide some major things, but otherwise let the characters act as they would and watch their stories unfold.

Ok, that would be super cool for me. Right now my only problem with playing origins is the fact I won't be able to enjoy their dialogues, expressions and stuff as much as I do when they are my companions.

I hope the issue you're talking about will be at least partially solved thanks to origins' special lines we could see in Swen's gameplay presentation.


Yeah, that's what i meant. My favorite companion right now is SH, knowing that why would i ever want to pick her as my Origin, and in so doing overreding her personality with whatever i want her to be? Similarly, if one goes into with the one and done mentality, maybe their favorite character could be Astarion, but since they picked him because he looks cool all they're gonna get is a watered down version of him.

It's a very weird and confusing system, and one of the reasons i got DoS2 a couple of years ago but still didn't get out of the ship.

Last edited by Innateagle; 05/12/20 10:51 PM.
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Origin characters are interesting, generally better written, and fun to play. Therefore, I suggest we just scrap OP's opinion instead.

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Personally I'll, probably, never play as any of them, I've always been more interested in custom characters. Having your own story rather than follow someone else's. I don't mind playing games following a character and their story, ST Fallen Order or Deus Ex for example, but for rpgs I prefer my own character. That said this is one of those requests that will never happen.

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Originally Posted by alice_ashpool
Seriously. Scrap gnomes, does anyone actually play them? Instead of gnomes concentrate on something players ACTUALLY like: elf subraces.


Finally, we get an unequivocally RIGHT suggestion. This deserves a consulting fee paid by Larian, that's how fundamentally correct it is. Some unfortunate people will say, "but I like playing gnomes", but this is, sadly, just Stockholm Syndrome brought about by those irresponsible creators who have been violently foisting gnome-related content upon us all for so long. Rise up! Cast off the chains of the gnomocracy! We shall be free!


As to the topic, I think the origins are a good thing. I may or may not play one, but I know that lots of other people WILL play one. Maybe not many of the Very Small Group of players that post on forums, that specific niche group of hardcore RPGers who care more than is healthy about the minutiae of RPG design, will use this feature. But definitely plenty of the Very Large Group of general/casual gamers who make up the bulk of the customer base (and never read or post on forums or subreddits for the game) will.

But I've noticed that most people around here tend to forget that the Very Large Group exists, or perhaps they just don't matter? Despite the fact that it's their money which mostly funds the existence of these games. Even if 9 out of 10 people here agree on something, that's still peanuts compared to the whole audience of the game. And what WE want, we weirdos, we D&D nerds, we crazy obsessives, we highly opinionated niche fans, is not necessarily (and is often the opposite of) what the Very Large Group enjoys. For every one person here who hates barrelmancy, there are 100+ people who think that shit is hilarious, fun, and/or awesome.

Even when making their own character, a large percentage of general/casual gamers out there don't even customize things like skills, stats, or spell selections. They just take the defaults. They just pick a race and class, set up their appearance, and call it a day. They don't know what that other stuff means, or does, and they don't really care. They just want to get in and play. The preponderance of Tavs show that a lot of people don't even care to NAME their character.

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Im a big fan of origin characters abd i love to have the option to experience a kind of new adventure when playing as one.
If i remember right, Larian is going to add a Mercenaries system like in DOS2 anyway for those who dont?

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