I might also mention - we have something we choose, in character generation, called "background".
If they fleshed those out from the hand book, into proto-story bases that pre-define a certain handful of details about your character, and then build on those details within the world using those background tags, it would at least somewhat do the job of creating an anchored feeling for our character that we nevertheless got to choose... all the groundwork for doing that is already there, and they could most certainly have focused on doing that, rather than creating dialogue lines that anyone should be able to say and gating them behind race or class tags (apparently, according to Larian's current design, only halflings are allowed to council people to calm down and talk our their arguments...)
