Originally Posted by Sozz
the one in FR seemed pretty staid at least, it isn't a living entity because it's supposed to take on a life of its own after the fact. Which is why any kind of shift in the world undergoes this kind of scrutiny. It doesn't help that WotC has been pretty up front that these changes have little to do with any artistic impulse, it's to make D&D more marketable, or at the very least, stop it showing up as the butt of so many clickbait articles.

It’s interesting you say the FR isn’t a living entity, because I have the opposite impression. I freely admit I’m only an occasional visitor through cRPGs and the odd novel and comic book, but Faerun for one seems to have undergone massive changes as well as over a hundred years’ of in-game time. Of course, we know that the out-of-universe explanation for many of these shifts are updates to game versions including updated lore, rulesets and responding to the changing social context, but while some changes have been more successful than others, that the changes are in service to the D&D game rather than internal artistic logic doesn’t seem to me a necessarily bad thing given that’s mainly what the setting is for. The trick for the developers is to try to give in universe rationales for changes that (okay) have actually been made for other reasons, which personally I find kind of fun.

I know some folk will miss the old days of the FR, but whatever is behind it I actually enjoy the feeling of time having passed in the game world and, purely from a BG3 player perspective, my hope is we’ll get more of it as it makes the world feel more real. I think there’s lots of potential given we’re revisiting the locations of BG1 a century or so later for giving us that sense of some things having undergone the shifts and changes you’d expect in society and other things still being the same.

"You may call it 'nonsense' if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"