I hope not. I'm not a big half-whatever partisan, but making people give up a feat to play as one would be wildly unpopular, and rightly so.
it still limits people's options for the sake of what is often just a roleplaying choice.
Not disagreeing, but this thinking is why I am deeply suspicious of this design iteration leaning deeper into feat territory.
"Give up a feat" speaks to scarcity thinking - you only have so many feats, and you NEED EVERY ONE. Can't afford to spend any on anything other than the most worthwhile ones (which, presumably, these half-race feats wouldn't be).
This increases pressure on the "best" feats, making them more expected and more required and making any other option basically a "waste of a feat." Can't take Actor, that's a waste of a feat. Gotta take one of the -5/+10 feats, those are the best. Can't wield a bow without Sharpshooter, you're just handicapping yourself.
"Feat tax" is similar thinking.
An average campaign is probably only going to see 3-4 feats for each character total, so it's not off base to think about them as scarce resources. They are! But even in 4e where every character had a BUTTLOAD of feats, there were still "required feats."
Hypothetically, every feat is balanced against every other feat, but this is, in practice, an IMPOSSIBLE task. There will always be "trap" feats.
If half-races
are feats (and again, just an inkling, could be way off base), and assuming they are still worth taking (not guaranteed, either!), we'll still likely have a situation where they are only taken by characters whose builds reward them. Don't take the half-orc feat if you're not a melee fighter, don't take the half-elf feat if you're not Dex-based, etc.
I suppose this is just a version of the problem where people only take races that are suitable for the classes they're picking, though.
Right now you can only be half human (half-orc, half-elf).
Since humans get an extra feat, adding feats that allow humans to get half-elf or half-orc features won't make the situation worse compared to 2014, where taking half-orc or half-elf as species would grant you one less feat anyway.
If for example, the half elf feat comes with fey heritage, darkvision, resistance to sleep and charm, trance and maybe even an extra skill, you can quite well replicate the half-elf of 2014. And the added bonus, you can be a dwarf and still take this feat while giving up the background feat. Which is still better than the 2014 situation where you could not be half elf/dwarf at all.
This is a part of my inkling! Humans get an extra feat, that extra feat could just be Elf Ancestry or Orc Ancestry, and the power of the half-elf and half-orc races aren't out of line with the power of a feat (honestly a little on the weak side, maybe). I do think we'll see some version of half-elf and half-orc in this update. I
hope it's more than "fluff how you want!", because that is a non-solution, I could take a bloody dwarf and re-fluff it as a 7 foot tall tentacled alien with six limbs and the ability to see the future through its sphincter, re-fluffing is dodging the question rather than seriously designing for it. And a feat/background (which now come with feats!) seems like a pretty elegant place to put that, if we don't have an actual ancestry write-up for it.
