Such nonsense. The BG2 beginning is already super dark. BG had his own style. Sure it's not always super dark, but it's dirty and everywhere can be some maniacs or psychopaths and there are Cleary some really dark parts like the beginning.
"release master, I no longer wish to come back"
Bullshit.
Just because it starts in a dungeon and you throw in the words "torture" and "trauma" it doesn't give a particularly dark tone to the entire adventure.
If that was the case Divinity Original Sin 2 would already be orders of magnitude darker than BG2 ever was.
There are multiple factors here, at least for me. Yes you are right, Forgotten Realms has areas of high Fantasy, a dash of rennaisance and highbrow cosplay, lol. But what BG1 & 2 definitely had were, for the time, quite grown up concepts and stories and themes running through them. for a PC RPG. By today's standards less so, but back then it was like what we get with Witcher now. It was more mature than most RPG's of the time, at least so far as I remember. It wasn't Diablo dark, it was more varied in tone, with humour, colour and darkness.
Then there is the fact that the still old graphics and story fuelled the imagination. Of course D&D has always been cleaner than a Game of Thrones style setting, but I at least back then imagined it leaning towards that muddiness and grit, even if it didn't really. I often took Greyhawk as a setting when doing ADD back in the day and i always made it a little grittier, but that was because I wrote my own campaigns. Still, by todays standards it would still be considered high fantasy because I was at the time still heavily influenced by LOTR and LOTR is very clean, by modern fantasy standards, even the films (and they were more "realistic" visually than the books suggested).
So I don't think anyone is saying BG3 should be what Diablo 1 was back in the day by any stretch, or even the new GoT, but you can give it a
dark feeling without losing the artisitc style unique to D&D. You can make the story rich and complex, with subtleties and adult enough so that you don't feel as though you're playing D&D the movie.
But no, Grimdark BG was not. Not to say I would be against as much
horror (or horrible things)as the rating allows, in the areas where it makes sense. I.e. Tadpoles in eyes is a good thing (only there was a distinct lack of screaming in that trailer :-S )
