From a studio that prides itself on narrative design and the intricacy of characters, their backstories, and resolutions, it's sort of comical that they would upend any character consistency and narrative design by essentially allowing complete respec of characters whose stories were literally designed around their class (with a couple exceptions). Making more Origin stories is a likely non-starter here since they are all fully voiced by VAs, and were probably incredibly expensive to produce.
What they should have done was design a few characters whose stories were classless, so that excludes Wyll, Shadowheart, Gale, Jaheira from the onset here, but all of the characters to a degree are defined by their class choices. Astarion would prowl the night in the city capturing victims for his master, this is a Rogue. Karlach was a frontline soldier in the Blood War, I don't see a non-martial class doing this, Wyll made a pact with a fiend, Shadowheart directly states she worships Shar and not just as someplace she goes on Sunday but actively runs missions on her behalf, Gale literally says he wants to be the greatest WIZARD in Faerun. Sure, there are some, SOME, gray areas on a couple of the characters, Astarion perhaps and Lae'zel, until you realize that Githyanki culture is primarily martial, almost Gish-heavy, which is in line with her class, Halsin is literally an Archdruid, how are you going to swing that one? It's a prominent feature in the story. "Oh, you were an Archdruid 10 minutes ago, but now, while on the road with the party, you have become....A SORCERER. Yes, no massive destruction of storytelling there.
Minthara's culture is literally gender-specific, women are generally clerics, men are fighters and wizards. Sure, there might be a rogue here and there, but there are no Drow Druids, at least Lloth Drow Druids.
So yeah, this is another example of a massive change shore-horned into the game as we sprint to the finish line, just like many of the other things we've seen. The main problem with it is it literally slams, and I mean slams, up against the whole notion of character development, narrative, consistency, and base storytelling, which is one of the primary, if not the omega, selling point of this game at this point since it waved bye bye to tabletop observance and mechanical fidelity.
I mean sure, you CAN do it, and now you have the party you want while still keeping the companions around, but from a storytelling perspective, this would be akin to Tolkien suddenly saying that Samwise is now considered an Ishtari, or that Aragorn is a bard. The characters motivations, backstory, and experiences are predicated on a sense of identity, and Larian decided to make those identities closely tied to, in many cases, race and class. They could have written them differently, Kivan in High Hedge could have been a Rogue, his story was one of revenge against Tazok. Coran could have been just about anything as his goal was to obtain a Dragon head. You see what I mean here? Their backstories weren't gated along racial and class-based lines, but Larian chose to go that route and now, again, at the 11th hour they decided that we can completely upend those stories for gameplay convenience in a genre, and by a developer, that prides itself on storytelling and character development.
