Game News Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access release date announcement on August 18th

[Gyor]

Will some races be inherently evil in this or have they changed that now?

50/50, they changed their stance on that during development. Presumably no, since WOTC would have known their new race agenda before announcing it, and they worked closely with WOTC. Maybe yes if it was too late to change.

Mindflayer's are scum of the universe. Purge those evil bastards!

Acknowledge this Gith's agenda.

You assume that the humaniod races not being evil was started as a reaction to events in 2020, I believe it was actually already in motion, but political events 2020 pushed them to go further on that front then originally intended, but that they were already heading in that general direction.

Look at RA Salvatore's last novel Relentless, look at Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, look at how Eberron deals with humaniods (including how it treats Gnolls), look at how Theros changed Minotaurs (they were beastly before, barely having culture and all of a sudden they got their own city and deep culture), and look at how Larian treats goblins, as people, instead of angry sacks of xp (this shift would have to have been in motion before the race riots to be in the first chapter of the game). This shift in perpective had to have started BEFORE the racist woke Orcs are black people bullshit, it just accessorated and expanded it.

Plus Orcs and Kobolds having negative modifiers was wildly unpopular when Volo's Guide to Monsters came out and Vistani have getting WotC well deserved flack for years now.

Well as far back as in PoR, you came across women and children Kobolds, and could have option to spare thankful others. Even then it was alluded through giving snippets of family life, culture, feeling of fear and other emotions that the 'monster' races weren't just 'evul for teh lulz'.

Yeah I remember (vaguely) in Pool of Radiance that one bar fight in the monster section of Phlan where you fight beside some monsters against other monsters. It was fun.

FR has a long history or monster races being more then 1 dimesional monsters. Not to the degree of eberron, but still deep roots for it in FR. Kingdom of Many Arrows is an example of Civilized orcs.

 

[Gyor]

Basically Mercer/Critical Role and streams being such an enormous push for 5e's explosive growth is why we're going to see race =/= evil/good/neutral. As much as I'd be inclined to shrug and say, it's reactionary, it's really just following the money, and if that dovetails with other nonsense that gets wotc brownie points with another crowd, they're fine by that.

It's also why I can't see Dark Sun coming out in some non-neutered fashion. How would modern day wotc handle a setting that incorporates slavery that heavily.

I could see them just giving you the needed 5e rules for Darksun and being like go buy the 2e or 4e Darksun PDFs for the fluff.

And I'll add that critical role was likely influenced by WoW and Everquest with playable orcs, trolls, ect..., so this has been building for along while now, it just has a huge amount of fuel now.

We will see how things go when we find out what the 2020 Q4 book is. It should be announced this month.

Apparently Morrus had abunch of his staff that werewl working on a 5e races update poached most likely by WotC so either they are still adding race stuff to this Q4 book or they have another major race book coming in 2020.