The game still needs to show characterisation and development, of course, but these need to be extremely flexible and driven by the player to an extent that I don’t think I’ve seen done better in any other game (recommendations gratefully received on that front!).
May I guess that what you want is... the lack of writing about your character ? More branching (quests/dialogs lines) but 0 background and character development ?
I’m not sure whether what I want is even possible. Though I don’t think it’s lack of background or development, but rather lack of imposed story about my custom character’s family and history. So I want there to be writing about my character but I want options from which I can pick, and the ability to select “none of the above” where they don’t apply. And because I recognise that there are limits to the number of options that can be offered and how rich they can be, yes I think you’re right I’d want more branching and responsiveness to who my character shows themselves to be within the game, given it couldn’t rely on some specific pre-assumed relationship of my custom character to the plot to drive their motivation and role in it.
The trick, I guess, would be to give enough in-game content to hang my head canon on to feel satisfying without adding unreasonable development overheads. But it feels as though the game at least could do far more in this direction than we’ve seen in Early Access. One of my bugbears, for example, is how little curiosity companions and NPCs often show about RPG protagonists, who are always asking questions but not being asked them in return. In BG3, it feels like having our character being quizzed by people they meet over the course of the game and giving us options to reply would be one way to start building up a picture of who our character was before they were kidnapped, and then be able to provide at least some basic reactivity to that. At the moment, it does feel too much as though our character has sprung fully formed from an illithid pod, and we don’t even get much opportunity to talk about where they’re from, why they were wherever they were when they were kidnapped, who they were with and whether they’re worried about them, and whether they have family and where.
