Climate-wise, the Sword Coast goes from tundra to desert. In the original BG game, you could explore dry grassland and desert zones all within a few days travel from Baldur's Gate itself.
Elves within the Realms can have odd skin coloration, but don't have to.
Climate-wise, I agree. I am just skeptical re: the terrain because it looks extremely similar to the terrain in the early areas of Larian's two previous games. It's like, can their artists do other styles? This has never been a problem for companies like Bioware or CDPR or Obsidian. Maybe it's just an accident/coincidence, but I suspect when we find out where the stuff we've seen is occurring, some of it will indeed be areas that should be a lot greener.
As for "can", try "often do" or "usually do". It's downright weird for them to both ignore that, and the angular features of elves, whilst having multiple elves in the game. Especially as we know they can do very interesting-looking Elves from DOS2. Astarion just looks like a random white dude in his 40s who is wearing Spock ears to a ren faire. At best it's a bizarre aesthetic choice.
And that doesn't answer any of my other points, nor the fact that there's literally nothing identifiable clearly as "Forgotten Realms" in anything we've seen from the game so far. The names are a particularly bizarre decision. It's why not just go with names that fit the setting? Why come up with a bunch of super-generic and non-FR-ish names? They're not even cool names (imho).
The whole thing has this vibe to me like Larian were working on a new fantasy game, then got the BG license, and repurposed that game's assets to fit the BG deal. That's probably not the case, but it has that kind of mismatched vibe.
World of Warcraft got a lot of crap back in the day for not trying to be hyperrealistic with their graphics, as EverQuest 2 and others were trying to do, but in the long run, that looks like the right choice to me.
Yeah and this is one of the issues I have with the strange style Larian seem to have gone for here. It's "realistic" enough that it will date extremely fast (unlike DOS2, say), and indeed makes some of the characters look more like bad cosplayers as a result already.
Hopefully I can kick Astarion (aforementioned cosplayer) out of my party because "40-something Euro dude with dyed hair and fake-ass-ears pretending to be an elf vampire" (ugh to elf vampire especially, how did they manage to find something worse than a Drow in terms of eye-roll-inducing-ness? Amazing really) is not a vibe I need in my Baldur's Gate game.
(As an aside, it actually looks like all five of the companions revealed so far have hilarious edgelord-adjacent backstories - elf vampire, priestess of shar on a suicide mission with a dark secret, wizard with a bomb in his chest, outcast githyanki, and warlock who is somehow keeping the fact that he is a warlock secret despite being a famous adventurer (?!?) and trying to overcome his "dark bargain". Must we? When wizard with a bomb in his chest is the least edgelord-y companion in a game you know that game has issues...)
Solasta does look good at least.