- Lizard(men/kind/folk) which apparently Larian just calls Lizards which makes absolutely no sense to me because lizard is already the word for a type of animal. So whats bad about using an artificial word that does NOT clash with a well established real world word, like in TES Argonian ?
Transparency and ease. Making up new terms takes some more effort and isn't always clear what is meant by it. So often existing terminology is used for clarity (For example, many settings have "Earth" magic despite their planet not being called "Earth" thus there is no reason for the term "Earth" to exist)
Especially back when Larian were first making Divinity games and wrote the established lore, it was less common to come up with new terminology for things.
Also, speculative, these races could also be playable, or appear as companions:
Halflings are also possible. They are in the lore, but have yet to be seen.
- Eternals which are a part of the lore as the precursors to all races
Technically, Eternal is not a race. Much in the same way "Wizard" isn't a race.
Races were created in the image of Eternals - Meaning that they would in fact be the 6 main races from the Seven Gods (The 7th "Race" being the aforementioned "Wizard" which isn't a race - There are Wizards among all the main races)
All in all I'm under the impression this is a surprisingly short list of races that are playable, and a surprisingly low number of race differences as well.
For comparison, in BG3 there are a total of 11 races and a total of 31 subraces. Not all of them have much differences (Lightfoot vs Strongheart Halfling barely matters 99% of the time), but overall theres a substantial difference in gameplay from picking your race.
Divinity races have more impact than BG3's races.
BG3 races don't really affect gameplay outside of maybe a minor buff or a crappy spell.
With Divinity, you have things like Undead that completely change gameplay by way of being harmed by healing effects and healed by poison effects as well as having Elves who can consume pieces of corpses to gain new skills and see memories of the person they eat.
Original Sin 2's races had also more impact in dialogue (While BG3 basically has very little besides Drow)
This is on top of the minor buffs and crappy spells.
Prior editions of D&D had more substantial effects from race than BG3 (I.e. Human master race due to their free bonus feat. As well as racial stat modifiers), with 5e and BG3 especially, races have been watered down a lot.
