What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[Errorname]

I profoundly disagree with that. It's one of the things that bothers me most about D:OS2 and BG3. The game is written for you to be in control of one of their Origin PCs. If you don't pick one of them, you either play a cardboard cutout (in BG3's case) or lose out on a chunk of story (in D:OS2). In BG3, a custom character feels bizarrely out of place next to the rest of the party, as it contains legendary figures like The Blade of Frontiers, The Demon Veteran of the Blood Wars, Mystra's Chosen, and... Tav. There really aren't any options to fill in your backstory, so even if you try to headcanon your character as something greater, you have no way to interject that into the story. You're a guy trapped at the crossroads of everyone else's story already in progress. Even the tadpole thing isn't unique to you and your crew, as you trip over another tadpoled NPC every hundred steps or so.

When is the custom player character ever more interesting and fleshed out than the companion characters. The origin character concept and an optional defined backstory and personal quest for custom characters is way more than genre standard, and it works fine. I don't even think the 'legendary figures' for the companions is accurate, Gale being "dude who fumbled a goddess" is the only one that seems excessively important. Wyll and Karlach have previous accomplishments and ties to important people but they're an exiled noble playing wandering hero and a runaway experimental soldier, and that's still only half the origin companions.

It's not like the previous Baldur's Gate games didn't have a defined hero with a canon backstory, so I'm not sure why they didn't just lean into it*.

I feel like Tav is either a remnant of Early Access or included because someone in the chain between the coders and Hasbro wanted background selection.

The Dark Urge is an optional choice for a reason. I don't think they'd have been willing to go as far as they did with that character if you couldn't opt out of it. Either they would have watered down the Urge so that you still had a lot of freedom to define your character or they would have made a lot of people very mad that they can't play a custom character without being railroaded into murdering a nice bard who wants to be your friend.