I do have sympathy with your take on Warcraft orcs, though personally I'd be really disappointed if Larian and WotC remained stuck in the old days of orcs as straightforwardly evil and brutal as I would find it a bit uninteresting, easy and frankly creatively lazy
. . .
So while I'm happy to say no to Warcraft orcs for the Forgotten Realms (insofar as I understand what that means given the last Warcraft game I played was Warcraft II!), I still hope for new and interesting takes on the race in the Forgotten Realms and I think there's absolutely the potential for that. My expectations for Larian and BG3 are perhaps unreasonably high just because I think their goblins are such a triumph. They are hilarious, and awful, and compelling, and lay painfully bare the limitations of some of my most deeply held moral and political beliefs just by being what they are. Perfect!
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! And I appreciate the fantastic reply even if we (partially) disagree. For me if you eliminate the 3.5 supernatural reason for goblins or orcs to be awful, stupid and inferior it's really difficult not to tell stories about real world people.
For them to work as "monsters" they have to awful in some way. That can be because their culture is not as advanced as ours or it can be because biologically their brains can't process morality or because an evil god has enslaved their soul and forces them to be awful. Of those, only the last seems sufficiently distanced from ideas that circulate in the real world.
While I partially agree with your point that the realms needs to be "constantly interrogating, evolving, challenging and recontextualising" it doesn't take into the account that the realms is "recovering, repairing and healing". I want to move away from the evolution metaphor and instead liken to realms to a train crash. 4e was a a train crash, the second sundering was attempt to right the rails but the repair job is incomplete and WotC is trying to move the train down tracks that aren't fit for purpose.
There is still demons, devils, mindflayers, Beholders, most kinds of Undead, Yugoloths, Succubi/Incubi, etc...
True, yes. Although I think we are about 5 years away from a romanceable zombie companion
(which DOS2 sorta, kinda did already) Might also mention that WOTR has a good, romanceable succubus . . .
I think of this as the Star Trek cycle. TNG starts out deciding to humanize the Klingons. "The Klingons aren't bad, they are misunderstood" And this is interesting and fun and the TNG Klingons are infinitely more interesting than ones in the original Star Trek series. And then the writers realize that they still need a BBEG -- so they invent the Borg. And the Borg are amazing because they break the de facto rules of TNG, i.e., any conflict can resolved through negotiation. And then they decide to humanize the Borg, give the Borg a queen, introduce a Borg character and suddenly the Borg become less interesting. And so the "devs" decide they need to have multiple spinoffs with BBEGs - one series goes back in time to when the Klingons were still the bad guys, another deals with space nazis (looking at you Cardasians) and still another takes place inside a collapsed federation.
The point of that wall of text is that any attempt to humanize fantasy monsters start a kitchen timer. Once it dings the story possibilities of a misunderstood people are exhausted a new big bad will be introduced.
Now, having said all that I think BG3 is doing a better job with goblins than Solasta did with orcs - the later of which did, unfortunately, fall out of the Warcraft mold. Larian should just tell WotC "we're implementing alignment, deal with it"
