If Warhammer Fantasy is normal looking to you, then the logical conclusion is that dark & bleak is normal for fantasy games!

Like I said, I'm mostly talking about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition, that's what I have experience with. I can't show you the rulebook here, but trust me - most of the world in that book looks more or less like normal late medieval/renaissance-ish world. Armor is just armor, without crazy spikes and "grimdarkness" oozing out of every picture. Like this - It's just... a guy with a big sword and a slightly silly hat. Sure, you can crack open the Tome of Corruption and get all the crazy mutants, lovecraftian stuff and over the top Evil Dudes, but that's not the world of the game on everyday basis. The aesthetic of most of the game, even the monsters manual, was relatively toned down. It just doesn't have the glamour of high fantasy.

Not empty words, they are code for "we copied everything we could from existing FPP RPGs".

Just like "spiritual successor to HOMM" meant "we're cashing in on the nostalgia by releasing a similar game with less depth". edit: although, "cashing in" isn't really the right phrase as they didn't own the rights to HOMM. Maybe freeloading or piggybacking would be more apt.

Basically yeah, "love-letter" usually means it draws heavily from popular titles, in this case from TES (well, Skyrim in particular), and while copying popular games is a common practice, if your read "love-letter" it means it comes as close as it can without infringing copyright lol

Personally I don't see it as a bad thing, sometimes you just want to experience something pretty similar

High fantasy is classically defined by works such as Lord of the Rings, glamour isn't what makes it high fantasy but epic good conquering evil storyline. Empire looking like Holy Roman Empire from 16-17th century doesn't mean it's not fucking corrupt hellhole only less horrifying than it's 40K counterpart, which is what it makes it dark fantasy. But humor is indeed always present in both settings;D

From what I can tell, you can swap at any time. Though the 3rd person animations are really lacklustre or look outright unfinished. I hear it was a very late addition (pretty much right before rease) after many requests, so they didn't really have a lot of time to polish it. The game is very much meant to be played (and was developed for most of its history) primarily in FPP. The TPP should be considered more as an extra/mod more than anything else.

EDIT:
Just started the game, here you have it black on white (see screenshot).

Of course. I'm not saying Warhammer isn't dark fantasy. I'm talking about aesthetics only. It's the "we hired Cenobites to do character designs" visual side of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon that I find a bit off-putting, not the idea of dark fantasy as such.

A remarkably cool RPG that reminds me of the atmosphere of Gothic 1-2. You can get lost in it for dozens of hours. :)

But what's surprising is something else. It's the first time I've seen a serious Action/RPG game (not trash) on the Unity Engine. I thought that was impossible. But this game looks quite solid. A large game world without screen loading. Is this really Unity?

Haha, they made Oblivion Remastered on UE 5 with loading screens. :D

Pulled the trigger on the Supporter Edition. Been a while since I bought a full priced new release. The most recent one I can think of was Serious Sam 4, so coming up on 5 years :P

The UE 5 in that remaster is just a facade on the outside. Underneath, it's still the original game engine, which was made with loading area transitions.

On my wishlist it goes. I guess I'll get it when the prices are affordable and I got a new GPU.

Loving the game, but once I reached the second map, it felt like my character was back to level one. Everything became a sponge to kill and killed me in few hits..