Drath said much of what I had started saying before, but didn't post because I felt I was writing too abrasively at the time...
Onward from that,
To @Leurotta's point I do think the Seldarine / Lolth is division in the lore but, so far, the Duegar pantheon doesn't include a good god like Drow pantheon does. So this is case where Larian got the lore (mostly) correct. There are Elistraee worshiping drow living in the high forest and silver marches. But for some reason the game doesn't treat Seldarine drow as surface dwellers, instead they are assumed to have come from the underdark.
There are drow that have abandoned Lolth and chosen to follow Eilistraee instead, definitely... but that's a personal, moral, social and/or religious choice... is should not, under any circumstance ever imply that it is something irreversibly determined by your race -
which is what the game currently does. It's a choice, not a thing of race or subrace, and part of the entire difficulty that surface drow face is
*Precisely* that surface-dwellers have no real way of distinguishing them from the kinds of drow that would enslave and torture them... because they're
All Just Drow. They don't HAVE a neat little get out of gaol free card that lets people identify on sight the fact that they're the "nice good safe drow, and not those nasty bad evil drow", because there is no such identifier; they are just people making a personal choice.
This is a large part of the whole point of what it is to be a surface drow trying to be good, and BG3's racial distinction here is completely obliterating it like a tactless, ignorant wrecking ball, as well as reinforcing and making tangible the concept of
racially distinct "good drow" and "evil drow", which is, frankly,
absolutely disgusting. Remember: where video games and source books contradict, the source books are considered to be the correct and factual canon. The source books are clear enough on this matter: all drow express eyes of varying pale shades, with red being the most common (the red hues are also more visible in the dark), but with a range that includes blues, purples, lavenders, lilacs and silvers.
This applies to all drow, though drow with mixed blood from other races more commonly trend towards the blue end of the spectrum, and BG3 is pulling this line about Lolth "marking her followers with red eyes" entirely out of its own orifices. At least it gives you the option of unlocking the full colour chart. The whole "Evil Drow Have Red Eyes" thing is absolutely and entirely non-canon. It's false writing, and is attempting to create a narrative of physical racial distinction between "good" drow and "evil" drow which doesn't exist and is really very gross. Othering by eye colour is one of the most common racial slurs that exist at cultural levels, and generally the derogatory comes from an existing trend, however in cases like this, that racist epithet is just that - it's not real or accurate, and while that kind of language, judgement and behaviour may (and does) exist in the world space between characters, it should absolutely not be enforced as a legitimate racial difference when creating characters.
Yes; As a surface drow, unless you're dealing with people who already know you, it would be common for people to be extremely cautious of you, and to perhaps assume before they learn otherwise that you have come from the underdark... that is what you must expect as a surface drow; it's part of your struggle.
I really don't care about what's "easier for coders", overly much. To address some other posters here; that's entirely irrelevant. What matters is the presentation to the players; the job of the designers and coders is to make it work.
You would not, ever, need any mysterious "sub-sub-race" distinction, because Drow are Drow, full stop. There is no racial distinction. That is the point, which BG3 has missed entirely with this implementation.
The game's tag system is already set up to support the only implementation that you would need for this: It can already read and deliver a tag for being the follower of a specific deity. That is all that is needed. Everyone should be able to elect a deity (or choose none specific or some other neutral option if they want, etc., that's a different discussion). A drow that picks Lolth would have both the [Drow] and [Lolth] tags, and that is ALL the game needs to support everything that it currently offers and does for drow. Drow that choose a different deity would not HAVE that [Lolth] tag, so the Lolth-drow options would not appear. Lolth followers who weren't drow (if you're still allowed to pick such a thing...), wouldn't have the [Drow] tag, and so the lolth-sworn options would not appear for them either. And yes, there are places in the game already that present options responding to a double tag read - that's already a thing that we've seen the game can handle. A Non-lolth-following drow would be a default setting, and it would provide Lolth-following drow the option to 'pretend' to be 'good drow' if they want to. Certain dialogue situations could present Non-lolth-following drow the opportunity to pretend to be lolth-sworn drow as a deception check, such as in the shattered sanctum or in any future dealings with absolutists.
There is no strange or unique or weird coding needed to do this properly, and in fact, doing it the way that BG3 does it currently is actually more code complex, more 'exception to standard' in places and overall more work for Larian than it needs to be if they didn't make multiple distinct drow sub races, or drow as a distinct race from elves.
