Where possible, I try to keep my terminology here to 'small-sized characters' and 'human-sized characters', because yes, the intent is that we'll have more than halflings to pick from soon enough. I don't know any more about that than anyone else, but certainly I'd say that the gnome in the myconid camp is written and pitched to be a possible future companion. I don't know what they'll do in terms of poses and animations for them. Initially I expect they'll probably be mostly the same, but if we're lucky we might see distinct variations filter through in time.
Similarly with goblins, a lot of their assets are already sorted out, but they lack hook ups for all of the poses and animations necessary to be playables for the time being. It's a possibility, but likely a more distant one. I don't know anything beyond what the community knows, unfortunately.
To Biomag...
Yes, non-human body types pretty much always get the shaft in video games, and always suffer bad clipping, bad placement, poor anchoring, misaligned positions, disjointed cutscenes, inappropriate camera work, and are usually immersion shattering at important points because of it. Should they be? Should we accept that as okay, because it is the norm? You can if you want; I don't. This game, more than any that has come before it, stands at a prime point to not do that, and to get it right, for once in the history of gaming... I intend to do everything in my relatively minor and inconsequential power to help ensure that they do. The top of this thread talks about body proportions in great detail (though I could go back and replace some of the in game shots with better images, probably...), but I've said as much as there is to say about that, and can't do any more without simply repeating myself on that score. I noticed, however, that Larian are actively fixing small-race poses and animations as they go, even if they aren't making a big deal about it in their patch notes, so I'm adding this to this thread in light of that. Do Larian know about all of this? No, actually they don't. They know about a lot of it, yes, but in my reporting I've received responses a number of times indicating a known animation issue, and a number of times indicating a new, previously unrecorded, one being sent through to the animation team. They will fix them on the timeline that they deem is appropriate, but they have to know about it and have it on record to fix it, and we don't know for certain what ones they are aware of and what ones they aren't. So I report them all.
The changes to the model only need to be subtle; in most ways, it is unlikely to affect their animations and posing, since it is to do with hip width and depth, chest depth, head size and the proportions of their lower legs. None of these features, if altered on the model, will affect relational poses, height and relative placement of limbs, or any of the other major factors in smoothing an animation.
Thanks for your input; let me leave you with an anecdote:
When we build a tower of bricks, we find the magnitude of the task hard to comprehend, and the size of the bricks impossibly small. We only have one pair of hands, and even if there are others helping us, laying one brick can seem insignificantly small compared to the magnitude of the tower. It can even look, if there are many people laying bricks, that a single person's individual placements is so insignificant that they are functionally wasting their time and effort doing it. However, every brick must still be laid, and each brick laid down by someone is a brick that the next pair of hands can be grateful for when they lay their own. Indeed, the only person who is actually wasting their time and energy is the person who stands to one side telling other people that they are wasting their time and energy.
