I think Larian has enough on their plate coding Clerics as worshiping specific deities without adding everyone else to the mix. Sure, you get a little thing that says you worship Ghaunadaur - God of slime and Ooze - but honestly do we need them to create custom dialogue to support all that?
Yes, I agree it’s a nice to have rather than essential to be able to specify a deity for every character (which is why I said what I said, rather than what Ragnarok “fixed” my post to
).
That said, while deities are essential to clerics, they can also be fundamental to (some) paladins and monks and not having the character creation option and dialogue to reflect this would, I think, lead to a much poorer roleplaying experience for these classes. And the incremental work shouldn’t be huge as likely they could share much of the deity-specific dialogue of clerics of the same god.
Deities can also be important to druids and rangers, though with those it’s easier to get away with generic nature-loving stuff, so while I’d still like to see optional deities with a scattering of suitable dialogue for them, it’s lower priority for me.
For everyone else, I guess it wouldn’t be too tricky to just let us pick a deity in character creation for flavour, but that then might lead to disappointment if it’s not reflected in the game, and I agree reflecting it in the game without undermining the specific divine connections of some classes could fairly quickly become onerous. Personally, I’m okay with picking (at least one level of) one of the classes that has such a divine connection if I particularly want to roleplay a character to whom devotion to a deity is important.
EDIT: Also, with respect to the full list of deities offered, I’m torn. I can see an argument for keeping it to a shorter list that have some specific content/dialogue options in the context of the plot. But I still feel that I’d prefer the list to be more comprehensive, to give us the flexibility to play whatever character we like, even if that means there are many gods who give little or nothing in the way of additional cleric/paladin/whatever deity-specific options and we just get generic class stuff. Personally, though, I’d probably choose to roleplay divine casters with connections to deities who play a significant role in the story, but without some indication of which they might be as part of character creation admittedly that would involve some meta gaming.
