As someone who wants to run dragonborn eldritch knight, I ain't complaining about these changes nah nah hahahahhaha. Does it make sense? Kind of floating racial stats is similar to Wotr, with their tags. I think it opens a lot of choices which I am more then thankful for. Know here comes my unpopular opinion, no one cares about half Orcs, and halflings and the stats prove it.
You are a minority of players, barely 8K of the 100K people remotely care about these races or play them. Larian making changes that make 90% of the most picked races more appealing is a big win. We should be thankful.
But this shows that the plurality of player choose humans, which have fewer attributes in BG3. Half-elves and Dwarves are the #3 and #4 most picked races, again which have fewer attributes in BG3. So Larian's changes make 35% of the most picked races less appealing.
The changes aren't fundamentally and universally all good or all bad. They're a buff to certain races (at the cost of immersion for some players) and a nerf to others (with a possible benefit of giving human monks better weapons). The latter nerf could at least be addressed by providing the original PHB racial features as an option.
I agree that humans got shafted to the point that it deserves to be addressed. However, I still think a toggle between two rules is an unreasonable expectation. If I were to make such a decision, I *might* be persuaded to revert the change if the uproar was big enough, but I certainly would not implement two toggleable rulesets. Far too much added complexity in the system for too little gain. This might seem a small thing to people not familiar with software development, but believe me, in a project this complex, where everything interacts with everything else, there is very rarely such a thing as "almost no effort". There tend to be unintended side effects that have to be considered in advance.
If the system is there to stay, expect to have to mod the game.
However, I find it odd that they chose to implement a system that leaves a third of all player's characters worse off. And I wonder if there were some illegitimate non-game-related considerations that went into the decision.
This is basically how I feel. I hate this change as it removes flavor from the game, but making it optional is probably more of a pain than just reverting it.
I know other people have stated that they don't like it for lore/immersion reasons plus the nerfed races, but for me it also makes things less interesting. I would have been interested to see someone's halfling barbarian build or maybe I'd even try one myself because it would be a unique combination. But what is unique or fun about that now? They just have the same starting stats as every other barbarian in the world. It's just my opinion, and obviously I'm sure others may like the change.
If anything I wish they would have given us a chance to test it or provide feedback on it. They've got a game with a tested ruleset that is set to do really well, and I'm not a fan of last second balance changes, especially when they detract from the previously established lore.
