Part of what made the older D&D crpgs cool was that they gave an impression that character creation wasn't necessarily attached to any particular module or campaign, but that you could come up with a character idea and then bring that character into any adventure. The whole import/export character idea from BG and Icewind Dale and the Gold Box games. Granted the promise of that idea wasn't fully executed, but they paid lip service to it in the way that character creation process was framed at least.
I enjoy the idea of selecting our starting equipment with a variety of standard equipment types available from the outset. Ideally based on some cost in starting gold so that there can be trade offs and maybe some interesting decisions as to how exactly one kits out. Maybe it's better to spring for a better sword, or sink that coin into armor, or maybe buy some arrows, or something more utilitarian like a rope or a torch. Perhaps all the same stuff gets thrown at us in the tutorial if we explore, but I'd still rather have that be something that's part of character creation, cause it's an element of characterization. It irks me that every character just gets the same set of class themed armor and the same standard melee or range weapon, without any real input from the player. It makes every character of the same class look and feel too similar.
Importantly we should be able to choose our colors and select some elements of individual fashion to make each of our character feel unique. Even if the dude dressed in red, looks identical in every other respect to the dude dressed in blue or black, they'll still at least have something in the feel to set them apart. I'm surprised it's been two years and yet the character creation process feels largely the same as it did in 2020. Sure there are more classes now, and more hairstyle or whatever, but they're not giving me a reason to come back and try it again on the aesthetics front. I wish they'd have stuck with regular equipment for the entirety of the EA, esp with the level cap this low, so that then our choices about equipment at char creation wouldn't be immediately superseded by finding something that's +1 that then defines our whole look from the rest of the act. I don't know, I just thought we'd get more on the front end to keep it engaging, there's only so much you can do with a haircut.
