Given the current climate I think they will be strongly considering implementing -in BG3- whatever changes WotC has in mind re ‘races’ going forward. They would be mad not to.
It’s not that difficult to see why some people might get upset about the most obvious visible difference between the ‘Usually Evil Drow’ and the ‘Not Usually Evil’ other Elves being that they are dark skinned. Nor is it difficult to predict that there will be a significant backlash (particularly by the ‘woke’ game journalist fraternity) if BG3 is released with that representation still in place. ‘But they’re just fantasy races wtf!’ just isn’t going to fly anymore, whether it should or not.
I think the entire concept of assigning morality to races will have to go (ie. no ‘Evil Races’). A culture or an ideology could be defined as ‘Evil’, and there could be significant overlap between a given race and an ‘Evil’ culture/ideology, but the difference between defining the culture/ideology as ‘Evil’ and the race itself as *inherently* ‘Evil’ is still important and that message must be consistent. As far as I can tell they have started moving in this direction already, which seems sensible.
I would also recommend being far less liberal with the use of the word ‘race’ and more liberal with the use of ‘species’, which is a harmless change but removes a lot of the heat from the issue. People generally get less upset about speciesism than racism. If you want to have an ‘Evil Species’ it’s probably a good idea to make it physically Very Obviously Not Human, not just human but bigger, human but smaller, or human but with pointy ears etc.
None of this is to say racism can’t exist and be explored within the game world itself of course - that’s a different issue.
