On a side note, its nice to see a good back and forth debate going on about this.
So for me personally, it really boils down to that, as of EA the custom characters just feel like they have 0 visible impact on the story/game outside of "I'm gonna fix the tadpole problem". Personally, when I play an rpg, I love to see my background and choices have some form of visible impact in the game. Most often, this comes down to branches in story dialogue, and if one is lucky, a good variety of prologue quests or callouts to your type of character throughout the game.
At the moment, background doesn't come up at all, and race and class really just boil down to either a proficiency skill check that has no story impact, or a single line of dialogue that boils down to "Yeah I've done that thing before". I can understand trying to keep the custom character blank enough to allow people to apply their own vision, but that really should only go so far. Im hoping maybe this will be better in the later acts, but right now Im not so sure. Im playing this game primarily for the story, so I could give them so lea-way on personal story quests that might steer your character in certain specific directions. I've never had an issue with other RPGs that do that. Otherwise, I at least hope they can drastically expand how much of an impact your race, class, and background have in dialogue.
Except that the custom characters have all the impact on the game? Siding with this faction, or that faction is decided by the player character. We can put them on a back burner, and play as one of the Origin characters, but even then, it's a player choice to do that. None of the comps usurp your agency in those decisions, they only take what you, the player, give them.
That's the keyword in this debate too, agency. The only games I've played where this doesn't come up much is The Witcher, where you have lots of agency about what and who you do, but next to nothing with who Geralt was before the first game, and games like Tomb Raider, where it's pretty much a given. In RPGs like this one, including MMOs, players want all the agency they can get over their main character(s). They don't want to play the developer's vision of that character, but would rather have as many blanks as possible to fill on their own. You can see some of that in this thread too. There's an implied tradeoff here, you can have a predefined character, after the Origin characters become playable, or you can create your own to handle things as you see fit, including any relevant backstory. To me, that's the best way to handle it.
