Here are some comments from Citan on this subject.
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I'm sorry to say that a race change option isn't necessarily going to happen -- because of how race is implemented, it's not trivial to change.
However, we can change your appearance and gender more easily, and we'll definitely have a way for existing characters to change that. (And maybe race too, depending on exactly how hard it ends up being.)
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The other two races, fairy and orc, will have racial features too, but they won't be optional. They'll just throw you into the deep end with all the racial stuff active immediately. For that reason, they won't be available to newbies -- you'll have to unlock the races by completing quests in-game."
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if you didn't participate in the Kickstarter then the way to unlock the other races is by completing quests in the game with the first three, and then making an alt using those races.
The other three races have more difficult play styles and they aren't for novices. You will need to know how to play already in order to succeed with them.
This has been the publicly-explained design for years, and it's not something I could change now if I wanted -- it's too late in development. But I don't want to change it: I like alts. And most MMO players like rolling alts, too. But I want my alts to play differently, so that's what the other races are: different ways to play.
I know that lots of alpha players like doing every single skill on a single character, but I've explained over and over that that's not a reasonable thing to do in the final game -- the skill dependencies just get too broad to try to do it all at once. So when it comes time to roll an alt, the other races are variant ways to play. They aren't just cosmetic changes.
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Shieldbreaker's links are a good starting point for this topic. I can give some updates on the race development: basically, fairies are blocked by other things that need to be done first.
Fae - We now have the needed fairy animations (just the bare-bones necessities of flying, landing, etc.), but I still need to figure out some of the systems involved in fighting-while-flying. Because it's insanely abusable atm. Fae also have a custom death system, and to integrate that into the game I need to finish changing the REGULAR player death system -- that is, changing how "Enter the Light" works, among other things. But I know that players use "Enter the Light"'s infinite-travel-back-to-Serbule feature as a fast-travel system, and I don't want to diminish that until we have other travel tools in the game. So I've been pushing on getting travel systems in. The biggest remaining one is horses -- at this point I think horses probably have to happen before fairies. And horses have their own set of bottlenecks -- the new GUI has to come online before horses, for instance. So I don't know when fairies will be ready. Their newbie area also needs lots more development, but that's fairly straightforward. (And interesting -- they have an unusual home place.)
Orc - here we ran into problems with our plans of using Gazluk as the newbie area. Basically, I want to let new orcs run around inside Gazluk Keep -- but it can't be the REAL Gazluk Keep, because (for instance) there's valuable level 70 loot just lying around in there. I'd planned to make an alternate version of the place, with different spawns and stuff for the new orcs. But the tech to do that optimally ended up being tricky, because other technical features need to be completed first. Orcs are still likely to be the first new race to come online, though.
Dwarf - not very far developed yet and will almost certainly be the last of the three to come online.