For me, all of that is a positive. I'd much rather be able to be a clean slate with no special background, just whatever I bring to it. I've said it before, but my Tav always felt like the main story in my game, she took the lead, people called her a hero, they asked her for help, they loved her. She was MY character. Not Larian's. That alone is worth so much imho. There were no pushes to act a certain way, no existing ideas of her personality and struggles, just who I decided she was. With BG1/2, you HAD to be Gorion's ward, you had no choice. Same with Mass Effect, you WERE Shepard. Do I love those games? Yes, but it is nice to have a wrath of the righteous situation where I am who I chose to be.
@Gray Ghost already said a lot of what I was going to say in response. I agree with everything you say here, and this is what I want and value too. I totally get that a clean slate custom PC cannot have an infinite # of backgrounds/backstories that the game responds to. I merely want a clean slate custom PC whose *in-game* actions and choices and behaviors are respected and acknowledged by the game. Key word there: in-game. This is not something major or crazy to ask for in a cRPG. Many other older cRPGs have given us this exact thing to one extent or another, and as @Gray Ghost points out PoE did it quite well. All you have to do is to add tags to the PC whenever the PC engages in actions and behaviors and choices in-game that are unique to the PC, and then have the game respond to those tags. Not tags for my generics like race and class, but tags specific to my in-game actions. So for me, the only logical conclusion I can possibly come to is that Larian chose, intentionally, to not provide this to us, for whatever reason(s).
