Unfortunately, we have to remember that the very concept that players might want to create their own personal characters is actually a fundamentally alien concept to the people at Larian; they've had to learn that that's a thing, and it's not an idea that came to them naturally in design. D:OS2 added support for a custom player character LATER; it was not an original part of their game, and it wasn't really very well supported then - you just got the basic skeleton game with none of the variable content, and you ended up by the end with a lot of things that didn't make sense or didn't tie up, because you just hadn't been presented with the content that would help it fit together.
As a more tactile example: you have a cake to make and eat, but at the start of the bake, you are asked to chose a type of cake to make, out of five different flavours, which will substantially alter and affect the cake that you experience. Then, later on, they shrug and say "Yes, well, I guess you could choose no flavour, if you really want... Okay", and then you can choose that, and be delivered a bland, flat cake with no flavour at all because it is literally just the bare bones of what is needed to make something that can be called cake, but that leaves the strong feeling that something important is missing... and the defenders response is to say "yes, well, you did choose to have that, so you can't complain at us!"
That is what D:OS2 ended up being like... and this game design is going exactly the same way, despite promises from Larian to the contrary.
This is one of the major red flags of concern for this studio taking on a D&D game, where a monumental part of the type of game is precisely predicated on your freedom to create your own character, and chart your own, meaningful, journey... so if they do the same thing here, then as a D&D game, which it's being advertised as, it will almost certainly fail.
I am not in agreement and I feel this kind of feedback is overly hyperbolic. None of the Origin characters matter...at all. You are welcome to slaughter the lot of them and just play with 4 friends, and I expect you will eventually be able to just create 4 characters yourself and use them instead. Will there still be traces of the Origin characters and their story? Sure, but they don't matter unless you choose to explore that.
To compare running the game without the Origin character info pre-setup as "bland, and flat" is to willfully ignore how much depth is built into this cake. I am at 700 hours and still have not seen everything. My most fun and memorable experiences have been with 4 other knuckheads just kind of creating our own story and making a mess of things.
As for running into things that "don't tie up" - I mean have you played this game fully? This is a world that has tons of stuff that you only see a fragment of the story. Example: The Harpy nest, there is a note that references someone running off to join a mercenary company to pay off debts. There are tons of things that reference other people's stories that you only get a little part of the whole. There is Numenera everywhere. Example: There is an entire tower in the Underdark with an absent landlord that you only see the pieces of what they were doing there and his dangerous infernal machines left running an empty tower. I thought I had discovered everything in that tower but apparently I missed like 5 things!
