I'm gonna guess that "begins our journey" part will have to do with activating the epilogue content that is already in the game files, which we know of thanks to datamining. The content that was pretty much always intended to be there, but was cut because of the month-early release.
And honestly, I can't even hate on that decision. People who don't have hours of free time every day to play this game weren't going to get to the endings (or maybe even to Act 3) by this time. And Larian's move to release a month earlier than Starfield was smart from a business standpoint. Regardless of how much better BG3 might end up being than Starfield, releasing in direct competition against Starfield would NOT have gone well.
I agree, and clearly reviewers and most players do as well.
Larian has some space and faith because the game is basically so good, and also Deus Ex, Mass Effect 3 and Fallout 3 ate the "HOLY HELL THIS ENDING SUXS" bullets for them, so RPG gamers are kind of used to terrible endings, and thanks to ME3 and FO3, already have the idea that endings can be fixed/improved (albeit the FO3 change was ultra passive-aggressive and pathetic on the part of the devs, showing a really profound egotism). So just hearing that BG3 is going to improve the endings will calm people down a ton (otherwise we might have seen quite a lot of annoyance in the next month or so as more and more people completed it and went "That's it?!").
And yeah, going up against Starfield, absolute best case would be if Starfield kind of sucks, and they we just have endure a terrible idiotic console-war-adjacent back and forth for the next couple of years over whether Starfield or BG3 is better and BG3's sales would have been much, much lower because a lot more people have played a Skyrim or FO4 than DOS2.
This way, even if the initial product wasn't as good as it could have been, it's still good, and Starfield and BG3 both get to be judged largely on their own merits.
I think some people are going to be pretty judgemental (and perhaps rightly so) towards Starfield's story, characters and choices, because of BG3, but I don't think it'll make a big difference to anything but "gamer discourse" because most people buying Starfield are just going to wander around aimlessly shooting people and exploring procedurally generated bandit bases, rather than engaging with the story particularly.
Which dovetails nicely with the Starfield release date -- since Bethesda will need a couple months to patch that to playability!
Bethesda have been claiming Starfield will be their least buggy release ever (it seems MS has had huge QA teams on instead of just whatever three people and a cat Bethesda usually uses), but yeah, we're really grading on a curve here, and "least buggy Bethesda game" is kind of like "least slimy slug" or something. It's still probably going to be pretty slimy.
