There are some pretty chunky spoilers here about the Dark Urge playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, and perhaps one or two a…
There are some pretty chunky spoilers here about the Dark Urge playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, and perhaps one or two about other parts of the game. If you’re still planning a Dark Urge playthrough of the game, I’d suggest going in as unaware as possible. Bookmark this for later.
Being evil in games excites me. I cannot resist the temptation of pressing a big red button. I do it because I want to see what a game dares let me do, and I do it because it’s naughty. For months, I’ve been daring Baldur’s Gate 3 to see how far it will let me go in my evil adventure, and so far, it’s never backed down. I’ve pushed every red button I’ve found and the results have been extraordinary.
It’s not common. Being a villain in a game is anathema to being a hero. How can you be one and also the other? This question has fascinated me for a long time, and it’s why, when I first saw the Dark Urge option in Baldur’s Gate 3, I was captivated. Here was a background option I could apply to my character that would implant some kind of unrestrainable evil in me – a murderous desire that could race forward and take control at the merest provocation. It could mean the death of companions and majorly upended story events. Was I ready to cede so much control to something in a role-playing game?
Yes. And as my Dark Urge story finishes, many months later, I can tell you it’s been everything I hoped for and more. I’ve meddled with gods and become a literal, rampaging monster. The game has welcomed me. More than that, the game has rewarded me with a story stitched into the game’s most foundational components. I am one of its major baddies, and to say it has slaked my desire for evildoing would be an understatement. I have revelled in it. The Dark Urge might have been revealed late in development, yet it’s anything but an afterthought.
But the story of the Dark Urge began a long before Baldur’s Gate 3, I discover. It began long ago with BioWare’s original pair of Baldur’s Gate games from the late 90s. There, the story of the Bhaalspawn was told. In the first game, you played as Gorion’s Ward, a character beset by dreams of foul murder – sound familiar? They were dreams sent by the god of murder, Bhaal, who invaded your mind in an attempt to turn you to him. And he did it because you were his child, a Bhaalspawn.
Baldur’s Gate 2 continued the story but at higher levels with higher stakes. In this game you could become an avatar of Bhaal’s, a monstrosity known as the Slayer, with spines and tusks and many clawed hands. Again: sound familiar? The story of the Bhaalspawn tied those old games together. That it should reappear in Baldur’s Gate 3 was something widely expected by fans, which is precisely why it had to be hidden when it entered early access in autumn 2020. It was a fake-out.
« We didn’t want to give away that it was going to be there », writing director Adam Smith tells me, speaking on a video call from Larian’s HQ in Ghent, Belgium. « It was like the ace up our sleeves that we will have this thing. » That the Bhaalspawn would feature in the game was never in doubt – the words « Bhaalspawn companion » were on the original pitch documents, Smith recalls. « It was always going to happen. » The problem was: how?
To be clear: at this point the Dark Urge didn’t exist – that is a manifestation that’s entirely unique to Baldur’s Gate 3. But the desire to have the Bhaalspawn was there in abundance. Larian just couldn’t decide on what it would be. There were, « god, I don’t know how many versions of it », Smith says, and they were all falling on infertile ground.
It was complicated. On the one hand, there was patchy historical continuity with BioWare’s earlier games to consider: it wasn’t clear what happened to the Bhaalspawn after the events of those games. Did they wipe each other out? Where were they now if they didn’t? And how would a new character in Baldur’s Gate 3 be related to them? Larian also wasn’t sure what role the Bhaalspawn character would play. Would it be the player character or a companion? The studio tried the latter, having a Bhaalspawn companion who, as Smith says, « keeps fucking up and doing things ». But because you weren’t in their head, seeing their struggle, it wasn’t very captivating. « It’s probably more interesting if I play as it », Smith and the team thought.
Smith took an early swing at the Bhaalspawn idea that could have drastically changed the game. « This never got beyond paper », he says, « but the idea with this was: you wake up one day and the dream companion you made at the beginning, you have a dream with them in it and their head’s been cut off and there’s guts splattered everywhere and someone else has replaced them. They come up to you and say, ‘I’m in control now.’ And it’s Bhaal. He just steps in and he says, ‘Fuck them – that’s finished. You listen to me.’
« We had this thing where he literally forced the tadpole out of you », he says. « He was like, ‘No, no, no. I’m the one who’s in charge around here.’ Well, he pushed it to one side and it had no influence on you any more. So then it became this inner struggle between Bhaal and a tadpole and your own personality. It was too much. It’s the kind of thing that might work as a TV show; it didn’t work in our RPG. »
Nothing the studio tried worked well across the entire game. It needed something else. It needed Baudelaire Welch.
Welch was hired by Larian just after the early access release, so in the autumn of 2020, and they were initially brought in to oversee companion relationships in the game and expand on those storylines. Taking the reins of the Dark Urge wasn’t even a consideration at that point, but that didn’t stop them from trying to solve the problem. « Beau had this idea which was like, ‘What if it’s watered down so much that you’re something different?' » Smith says. « Almost like you’ve become this deranged leftover. » And suddenly, everything clicked. It gave the character distance from Bhaal and the murderous desires were – like the mind flayer tadpole in your head – an instantly understandable idea. They barely needed to be explained.
« Beau managed to crystallise it in a way where it feels human », Smith adds. Intrusive thoughts: people get it. « And you need that because you’re already asking people to take in a million different names and words and proper nouns. I don’t want the player to have to think, ‘Oh, I’m five generations removed from Bhaal’ – that’s really boring. What I want them to think is: ‘There’s a fucking voice in my head making me do things I don’t want to do’. »
Welch didn’t expect to be offered the task of writing the Dark Urge, but Larian founder Swen Vincke, creative director of Baldur’s Gate 3, had heard an interesting piece of trivia about Welch’s family. « My mother worked partially on the script for Silence of the Lambs, the movie », Baudelaire Welch tells me now, in a quiet room at the Develop Conference in Brighton. « And I think Swen got that in his mind a little bit like, ‘You’ll be good at this’. » So one one day, Vincke called Welch into his office and made a seemingly innocuous offer: « Why don’t you try writing some of the first Dark Urge dialogue? »
There was a problem: Welch wasn’t like their mother in one crucial regard. « I’m so squeamish », Welch blurts, laughing. « I hate gore! » How on earth would they write the depraved thoughts of a murderer? Yet it was precisely this squeamish nature that Smith believes made them the ideal candidate for the job.
