A typical post nuclear world? I don't know about you, but I don't think I've played a single other post-apoc game worth mentioning, nor read more than one or two books, and never one done in the retrofuturistic style of Fallout. I don't think there IS such a thing as generic post-apoc. Everything I've seen from Fallout to certain webcomics have been very different in style, substance, and setting. Most science-fiction is that way, you don't have a whole glut of authors or game devs patterning themselves after someone like Tolkien or D&D. Starship Troopers (the book) is very different from Star Trek, which is fairly different from Star Wars, which is very different from Downbelow Station, which is very different from whatever. Total Annihilation is a much different type of sci-fi than Starcraft, neither of which have anything in common with Star Control II, which doesn't have a lot in common with Master of Orion, which has nothing in common with
In Fantasy, we get all of the D&D games (with some exceptions like PST), TES, Warcraft, almost all fantasy games which are superficially different but in the same way that WW2 shooters are all superficially different. They are all pseudo-medieval societies with other races which are usually some variation of smaller/taller/faster/slower/smarter/dumber than humans and/or taken from Greek mythology and/or unimaginitive anthromorphs (Warcraft is terrible about this). Contrast Githzerai from PST (which, I'm pretty sure, don't have a lot in common with the D&D githzerai that it was based off of) to the incredibly non-generic Night Elves.
The dinosaur people in TES are exactly like the Night Elves. Someone said, "Hey, how about dinosaur people," and someone else said, "Yeah, who are from place X and here is part of their history Y and this is their basic outlook Z, hooray we created a new race." Different in flavor, but not substance.
The same way the people are blizzard went, "Hey, how about purple elves?" and someone said, "Yeah, who are from Kalimdor and here is their history Y and this is there basic outlook Z" hooray we created a new race.
Contrast that to the thought that went into the super mutants from Fallout, who aren't just conjured out of nothing, but they are a direct result of a major device in the setting (FEV). Someone didn't go, "Hey how about really big mutants?" someone went "Hey, what would happen if supervirus was introduced to radiation, then infected people?"
Basically, what KC is saying is that "TES has generic races and shit so it's generic fantasy".
Wrong, I'm saying that TES is generic fantasy because it is generic fantasy. The setting is superficial and so obviously based on fantasy clichés that I've already forgotten most of the lore as uninteresting. I played Baldur's Gate through and I don't remember any of that setting, either, just because it was so generic. When was the last time that you played a fantasy game that wasn't based around a medieval kingdom? (disincluding PS:T).
You've pointed out a bunch of stuff, but it falls directly into what I said:
Okay, we have <cliché>, only wait!! <minor deviation from typicality>!!
You are thinking an order of magnitude to small in difference. Planescape: Torment was not generic fantasy. It had practically nothing in common with the settings of games like Warcraft or TES or Baldur's Gate. The Thief games are not generic fantasy, as it doesn't have much in common with games like Fable, etc. The Final Fantasy games aren't generic fantasy (I've only played down to FF6). Think about how different those are, and how similar the settings I mentioned as generic are. They all have worlds that have different filler, like whether they believe in good and evil or shades of grey in their religions, but beyond the superficial flavor it's almost the same.