I finished my first run through BG3 as a Tav at the weekend, and it was the most I've ever enjoyed playing a character I created myself in a video game. Back when I played Skyrim, I levelled up with whatever I was using at the time, and basically built an avatar of myself with no personality. My BG3 character was developed basically as I would a D&D character, and she is definitely *not* me.
Starting with a rough character idea (elevator pitch: "introverted bard"), I thought during the early game about what her personality might be like, a bit of backstory, and how being thrown into the story might affect her. My D&D characters are often fairly unremarkable people thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Over the next few levels I built up a deeper idea of her personality between my imagination, what seemed right in the game, and things I could pick out from the voice acting and animations.
So my character became an independent person in the game world and not my avatar. She gets scared of some of the missions. She gets angry at the slavers even if the party is horribly outnumbered. She has her own opinions of the origin characters. So yes, this is the first time I've actually created a proper new character for a video game. I absolutely recommend it and will be doing it in any other CRPG where you create a character from a blank sheet, but if you don't want to do that there are origin characters to choose from instead. Personally I'm planning to play as Astarion next (lawful evil run to contrast my chaotic good run).
I don't think BG2 is a fair comparison, because as I understand it you are a specific character in that game, even if you can customise them: you're a Bhaalspawn; whereas in BG3 you're just a random person plucked from the streets of Baldur's Gate. Through the game the narrator did give me several bits of information, and I could use speech, based of living in Baldur's Gate. According to the Forgotten Realms wiki, over 100,000 people live in Baldur's Gate so clearly only a part of the city is actually explorable in the game. The people my character knew must be somewhere else - and at level 1 she can't have been _that_ famous.
