I wouldn't complain if we got the option, but if I have to be perfectly honest I'm not really sure why people care so much about starting equipment.
It's not like we are sticking with it for very long, anyway.
And with the possible sole exception of the longbow I can't really think of many basic items we don't cross already in the tutorial or shortly after.
The reason to care is because it makes character creation more engaging. Since this is the very first aspect of the game we interact with, it'd be nice if the player had some input to help shape the look and feel of their character in terms of the gear-out. If we aren't sticking with it for very long in EA, that's more a failure of the game's equipment progression in my view. We really shouldn't need a bunch of enchanted equipment with the level cap this low. If they had elected to make the aesthetic appeal more central to the equipment progression (e.g. choosing one suit of regular chainmail over another suit of regular chainmail, more because we like the way it looks, as opposed to stat bonuses) that'd be another thing, but they really haven't done that here.
I like the idea that background or race might provide some additional options, but then I worry we end up in a similar situation where the game's designer tells us how our character is going to look, rather than allowing the player to take the lead on that. I guess I just don't like the notion that game is totally dictating to us what our visual vibe is going to be, based on our choice of Class or some other element of characterization that should be independent of our visual aesthetic. None of the choices they've given us really look like how I picture any of my D&D characters. They all have some gaudy-ass color combination in the starting gear, or weapons I wouldn't choose. The Bard is a good example - I take one look at that starting outfit and find it hard pretty hard to select the class. Maybe I could get into a Bard who wasn't wearing teal carnival duds with a bunch of gold crosses everywhere, but since that is the only option, it just results in me not wanting to play a Bard. I don't think there is sufficient variety in the prologue or first act, even after wasting a bunch of druids and gobbos for a couple hours, my character still doesn't look like MY character at all.
Choosing colors would certainly help, since a lot of these outfits would probably be decent if I could just tweak the colors or patterns, but I can't, so they aren't. It's just a shame, because they spend so much energy trying to make everything else look cool, and then the PC is all weaksauce?
Wizard's robes are the worst offenders for me currently, since they just look horrid. At least the Sorcerer and Warlock have something going on, but the Wizard's robes all look ridiculous. Something tells me they are being total EA holdouts here, and just sitting on stuff for the full release, but I think it's a terrible strategy. They should have focused on front loading the aesthetic variety in Char Creation, so that people would have a reason to keep playing the never ending EA, which has otherwise been pretty light on delivering new early content. A change or new option in Char Creation options is immediately apparent like 30 seconds after loading and makes me want to explore the game further.
