I don't actually make it a habit to playing games through multiple times, but like many of you when I do so I try some things differently the second time around. However, the issue I often run into is that there is a latency period at the beginning of the game before my character has had the chance to make any choices, or at least before those choices have had a chance to affect the gameplay experience. Even if later on in the game's trajectory a lot of differences do come into play, the beginning of successive playthroughs always seems to feel the most repetitive part and skipping through the same exposition cutscenes becomes a chore.
Thus I wonder whether people could see the main character's backstory being customizable in the manner described in this thread, or if it's something that people feel is out of PE's scope or is undesirable regardless. Given the amount of effort being put into PE's setting, and the fact that it features multiple races, I thought it would be cool if certain elements of your character's background could even affect your character's starting location. The first objective could still be "report to large city X" or whatever it is, but this would definitely add a lot more variety in the game, as long as we were willing to part with a bit of linearity.
I realize that this may interfere slightly if most locations are designed around relevance to specific quests that you're not supposed to reach until later in the game, but one would hope that there are at least enough self-justifying locations that a handful of them could be used as starting locations.