Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General I wonder what will happen to character backgrounds

I wonder what will happen to character backgrounds when you create a custom character if we all speak common?

I understand reason why they removed languages from the game for now but doing so leaves character backgrounds unbalanced. Does anyone know how character backgrounds work with the removal languages? Did they convert 2x languages to one skill? Or have they given everyone two skills and made character backgrounds just a back story? If character backgrounds now only refers to a back story you know 75% of the players will all end up using the same 2 or 3 character backgrounds, what ever gives players the biggest advantages . . . . . . .

A few possibilities come to mind. First and foremost, extra dialog options, both with NPCs and with interactable objects. You see a messy desk covered in books and scrolls. "sage" lets make sense of them (or makes the arcana roll easier). You're about to enter town and the guards seem to want to shake you down. "Noble" allows you to bull your way through, "soldier" allows you to appeal to your shared occupation and get through, "criminal" lets you bargain the bribe down -and- gives you a contact to talk to at the inn about smuggled goods. When Swen showed the scene with the intellect devourer coming out of someone's head, one of the dialog options was tagged "githyanki", so this is not at all difficult to imagine. Option 2: situation specific bonuses to rolls (persuade checks against people of similar background, tasks related to the background). Option 3: they've said insight dice are in the game (and we've seen the option come up as a pop up when Swen failed a roll) - possibly acting in accord with your background is related to how you get them.

There won’t be any background dialogue choices. As there are already race and class dialogue options, Swen stated that they decided adding backgrounds too was just too much.

I am not going to lie, it is very disappointing to hear that there will be no background dialogue options. Personally, I think that if given the choice between class and background dialogue options, I would've preferred background dialogue options.

Which makes me wonder how they're going to handle a custom main character.

So far this "no backgrounds" thing was only mentioned on Panel from Hell when they were talking about how the world reacts to your character. And back then Swen said that at first they were going to use backgrounds more widely, but then they understood that some backgrounds tend to rise questions like "how exactly you became a folk hero?". So there is still hope that backgrounds will give you some opportunities, but they surely won't give you full conversations based on those backgrounds.
PS: "Freedom of choice vs Immersion" situation.

From looking around it looks like they are going to have 10 back grounds for us to pick from when creating a custom character. In D&D 5e when creating a custom character the backgrounds affects the number of languages you know, skills, background feature, and starting equipment.

If everyone speaks Common and there are not going to be any background features then where does that leave custom character backgrounds?

Watching the videos of the live events where they gave viewers the options to choose the outcome of an encounter its seems in almost every case viewers didn’t pick/do what was wanted or expected. Once they starting getting the data from EA and seeing what people want and where people are spending their time I have a feeling we are going to see a lot changes.

A way of picking skills and maybe starting equipment?