Oh, I don't know. Sure, Candlekeep was fine - but there is a bit of a disconnect in the freedom of creating your character, as well. At the start of BG1, you;ve never set foot outside of the walls. So, who in Candlekeep taught Charname to be a ranger, or a druid, for example? You can roll an adult Dwarf or Elf, but you're also only twenty years old. The game doesn't adjust for this, it is up to the player to head-canon that. Just like you should for Tav.
I'm not so sure *if* Tav is more of a party leader than Charname is, either. Everyone joins up for their own reasons, just like in BG1/2. More so even; Anomen, Keldorn, Mazzy and others have no real reason to stick with you other than 'I'm an adventurer, this is what I do for a living'. In BG1, only Jaheira and Khalid have some connection to the main plotline, where most others just have a 'I'll help you if you help me" thing going, such as Minsc, Viconia or Edwin.
The elements that build the story and the identity of your character should have connections within the storyline and the game world. [.....] You can see this in games like Dragon Age Origins, the old BG series, Pillars of Eternity series, and so on.
Yeah, Origins was awesome in that, but at the same time, that game had three classes and five thirty minute Origin stories. I really liked that, but that made character creation severly limited compared to BG3, or any other game mentioned. In Pillars, it was a meaningless statblock that gave you a +1 bonus to something and a paragraph of explanation. Everything else is just class/race reactivity; just like BG3. In Mass Effect, you get one of three [Red, white and Blue] choices that comes up in a five minute sidequest and never again.
They form the foundation of an RPG
The foundation of an RPG is playing to your imagination, I'd argue here. The most true roleplaying I've done in a crpg is in Elder Scrolls games, really. And that's a *true* blank state character. You're a prisoner, end of. Everything else you have to imagine yourself. The more they narrow your character down, the harder it becomes to imagine things yourself. This was a common complaint against Fallout 4, for example; giving you a family, where Nate was a soldier and Norah a lawyer. It limited people to imagine their own backstory.
