Only moderately; he's limited to a small sea for his starting chapter and the events that knock you out of there take your ship, so he's on roughly equal ground with everyone else, the biggest difference being the island he starts on lets you pick which side of the main continent you land on, so while most characters start on the western side and two start in the east, he can go either way.

Also, yeeeeah, not a fan of the redesigns at all, and I can't pretend to particularly like the graphical direction they went with the game as a whole. Some people, like Jamil and Hawke, are roughly on par with their original designs, and I do give credit to Hawke for looking his role a hell of a lot more than he did in the original, but most, Sif and Aisha being the two in particular that bother me, aren't . . . uh, good.