I can see myself giving Shadowheart a try, because:
- based on what we see in EA I think she has the most interesting connection to the main story
- I like playing sneaky witch thief characters (the first BG3 character I rolled without any foreknowledge was a half-elven trickery domain cleric, only to abandon that playthrough when the first companion I found on the ground was the same!)
- her memory wipe seems to license the most freedom in playing the character how you want
That said, like many posters on this thread, I do hope that Larian somehow manage to make custom characters as real and compelling as the origins, and would much prefer to play my own character(s). I personally feel that having the controlled character voiced in dialogues would make a huge difference to how present they feel in the game world compared to the companions, but I know that’s a separate and controversial topic in its own right. And there are of course other ways of bringing custom player characters to life, as has already been well-articulated in this thread.
(Regarding “wasted†effort on origin chars, I’m genuinely curious to see how much totally new content there will be to make these main player characters rather than controllable party members. I wonder if there’s a way of doing it that doesn’t need massively more than would be in the game anyway. Possibly not!)
