Shannow said:
And Gaddafi was no brutal tyrant because he dressed funny, spouted nonsense all the time and depended on women as bodyguards. Made him some funny excentric, obviously...
I realize it was not very clear (mostly because I deleted large portions of my post), but that ties into one of the main reasons that I don't consider DA:O grimdark: reality is routinely a worse offender, even in the era that DA:O was trying to emulate. You've got the black plague killing half of Europe's population, the Hundred Years' War (a slight misnomer), Timur the Lame executing 100,000 captives after the capture of a city (and repeating such spectacles quite often), and, slightly off date, you've got everyone's favourite crazies in Elizabeth Bathory and Vlad the Impaler. Maybe I am forgetting portions of the game, but what even compared to say, Timur the Lame creating thirty-ish piles of heads, of about two thousand heads each, after he massacred seventy thousand non combatants.
Are my examples cherry picked? Absolutely, but doing the same to DA:O I can't think of anything, and what is the point of the term grimdark if reality is worse?
It is an anecdote, but, while playing Dragon Age, I never thought to myself that this was a very grim game, or that there wasn't a hope for a better tomorrow, because in fact there was. In fact, the purpose of the game, whether you are good, evil, or something in between, is to stop the calamity that could have turned the game grimdark if it had been a permanent fixture. As it is, you stop the darkspawn before they accomplish much of anything. Maybe it is not a fair comparison, but that doesn't sound like the eternal war promised by the franchise which the term grimdark came from.
Between the significant focus on romances, the generally lighthearted and nonchalant companions (outside of Alistair, no one even seemed to really care about the darkspawn), the save the world story, and the general lack of menace provided by the primary antagonists, I just don't consider the game to be grimdark.
The lore may have been, but that is not what I saw represented in the game. You explore most of the world through dialogue with your companions, but you are also supposed to be learning about the characters through these conversations, so you end up with some mix of the world, good memories, sad memories, and Biowarean jokes.