We’re approachingBaldur’s Gate 3’srelease date, but I’d forgive you if you were a little confused by exactly when that is.The game has pulled off the trick of moving both forwards and backwards, launching August 3 on PC (up from August 31), September 6 on PlayStation (down from August 31), and the 21st of Never on Xbox (same date as ever). It could come out on Xbox in the future, with a technological hitch with theXbox Series Sresponsible for its absence, but for now it’s PC and PS players who can begin to look forward to the game.Many of them are looking forward to Karlach, an Origin character who has gotten the fanbase all hot under the collar- fitting for a Tiefling. But Karlach aside, Origin characters are a great idea, and more games should embrace them.
Origin characters are a simple idea - in any given character creator, you’ll have preset characters to choose from. In games likeMass Effect, there is a canon version of both BroShep and FemShep, as well as various creations within the face builder itself. Origin characters take this a step further. They aren’t just pre-built aesthetically, they have all of their classes, subclasses, spells, backstory, alignment, and pretty much anything else you can think of already chosen. Don’t want to spend hours constructing your perfect face, then longer pathing out all of the choices you might make before you’ve even played the game? Just wanna dive in? Choose an origin character.
Related:Baldur’s Gate 3 Is A Game I’m Never Going To Have Time To Play
This feature is not unique to Baldur’s Gate, also featuring in Divinity: Original Sin 2, and hails from a great tradition in tabletop play. I’ve written about my affection for Dungeons & Dragons' character creator, allowing you to set up storytelling arcs you had no idea were even coming by making smart choices early. However, what a lot of tables do is choose from premade characters - the DM will either design a few or find stock builds online, and these will be handed out to players as their starting point. These can either be curated, to best suit each player, or randomised, to offer the most variety (especially if characters switch around for anthology one shots).
However, Origin characters don’t stop there. A premade character is great and all, but Origins take them to the next level. If you don’t choose an Origin character, you’ll meet them later in the game, with some even sticking around as companions. So if you look at Karlach and feel torn between giving her up or sacrificing the chance to make your own character, you won’t need to. Karlach will be in your game either way. It’s not just a benefit for players spoiled for choice either - the fact these characters have an important part to play in the story means devs know their efforts will have an impact even if a player opts to build their own hero.
As someone who plans on making their own character over the course of an hour or two, I’m grateful that Karlach will still be a major player in the story. And as someone who may, in years to come,replay Baldur’s Gate 3 to see different versionsof thesefabled 174 hours of cutscenes, I like the option to dive right back in with Karlach, or indeed whichever Origin character turns out to be my favourite. Which will be Karlach.
I mentioned Mass Effect before deliberately, because it’s my most replayed game ever. I know my playthroughs by my romance options - even if I make wildly different choices, that is how they will be defined. I know what choices I make in my Liara playthrough, my Jack playthrough, my Trainor playthrough, my Thane playthrough, my Miranda playthrough, even my Samara playthrough - a hard wait for a powerful payoff. But how much would these stories have differed if, instead of just aligning myself with Liara or Jack or Thane, I was playing as them? These characters all have drastically different starting points but I still believe it is possible.
Dragon Age: Originsallowed for multiple starting points, and while subsequent games saw this feature shorn off, I still think there is potential. Yes, it would be a huge undertaking, but video games are huge undertakings these days. The creativity, replayability, and inventiveness offered by Origin characters is worth the trade-off of making an open world map a little smaller, cutting the runtime a little shorter. Origin characters are unique to tabletop-adjacent games, but they don’t need to be. If Baldur’s Gate 3 drags them into the mainstream, I hope more typical RPGs borrow them in the future.
