In Exile wrote...
Bioware's almost never done a game where you have no past and it's never referenced. They could do it in DAI, but it would be a radical departure from every single game they produced since BG1, with the one exception of the NWOC which could barely be said to have a campaign (and was itself a radical departure from BG2 and every subsequent Bioware game over the last decade).
How different from BG was NWN, really? both established a place that you were (Candlekeep and Neverwinter). BG established how long you'd been at Candlekeep (since you were young), but not what you did while you were there. NWN established what you were doing in Neverwinter (student at the Academy), but not what you did before that, or why you were at the Academy.
And we both know KotOR didn't place any restrictions on the PC's background at all. Never does the game give any hint as to why the PC is on the Endar Spire at the start of the game, or what he might have been doing before (with regard to his memory of events). Regardless of how much freedom you think that grants the player, there's no question that the game didn't ever fully resolve that for us (I'm not talking about what actually happened, but what the early-game PC thinks happened).
Jade Empire did lay out a fairly limiting background, but placed no restriction on the PC's interpretation of those events.
DAO was more limiting in this respect, yes, as have been the ME games, and DA2 was extremely limiting. But these limitations are a new trend.