It's very strange to see people equating "high fantasy adventure" with "predominating ingrained racial tension and glorified racism". That certainly hasn't been a notable part of the last twenty years of my fantasy reading OR gameplay. What games were you playing?
If you look at recent videogames they are all starting to include hooved/horned humanoids as playable for some reason and WoTC joined the trend as well so as to not fall off the bandwagon.
After the poster directly above you mentioned that tieflings (aasimar too) as playable characters have been in the game since 2nd edition...
Now, I don't agree with the very latest moves to homogenise racial differences that Wizards have undertaken - I don't agree with some of the most recent moves which, to me, feel a lot like cultural erasure... I'm not going to defend that, I think it's terrible.
Different races and different cultures are different and that's a good thing; they should be talking points to share, to learn about and to celebrate where appropriate. Even cultures whose practices and ideologies are such that a western norm might consider them evil; it's great that those things exist and that they be allowed to exist in fantasy settings.
At the same time, we don't need everything drenched in overtly racist remarks and slights; we don't need even our supposedly 'good' npcs and characters tossing out racial slurs left and right. We don't need a general background radiation of cultural stigma and prejudice weighing down, or lurking behind, nearly every aspect of the game media.
I don't agree with the elements of cultural erasure that Wizards have undertaken in their lore recently... but I agree far less with Larian's idea of what the 'norm' for social interactions between people of different walks of life should be depicted as. Divinity OS2 was made damn well unplayable because of it - I played through once, and I just did NOT have the stomach for playing through it a second time, even though the mechanics were fun and I wanted to see some other things. the game itself made itself just too unpleasant a setting to exist in... I'm seeing more of that here, and it's appalling to me, because the cities along the sword coast are about as far from background racist as you'll find almost anywhere (with the exception of Luskan). It should NOT be a major element in any of this, and it certainly doesn't need to be to tell an interesting and engaging story.
I do agree that they are not doing anywhere near enough world-building; the world, its situation and its lore need a lot of work put into them to more fully share it with us and expose us to it in a variety of different ways that should hopefully feel organic, even for people unfamiliar with the setting. I agree that they are not doing that well enough yet at all.
