Baldur’s Gate 3’s Dark Urge Doesn’t Exclude You From A Hero’s Ending

I’m very excited to play as the Dark Urge in Baldur’s Gate 3, even though I’m only in Act 1 of my first playthrough. I can’t help it – I always play good guys when I dig into a roleplaying game for the first time, and the Dark Urge gives me a clear opportunity to do bad things. You know, for the plot. I’m excited to see how dark Baldur’s Gate 3 can get, and what will happen when I go full villain. How many lives will I destroy? How many corpses will be left behind in my wake? Just how much of an impact can I, one evil person, have on Faerûn? I really want to know the answers to these questions, but something has now stopped me in my tracks: the possibility of being the biggest hero Faerûn has ever known, despite my sadistic urges.

On the PC Gamer Chat Log, Lead Writer Adam Smith spoke about playing as the Dark Urge, and it’s completely changed my perspective on how I want to do my own run. Smith, who has played the game with almost every combination of class, race and background, is trying a Dark Urge run as he’s never played it all the way through without cheating. “I’m playing the Dark Urge who’s resisting all the terrible things and is deeply regretful of all the terrible things that have happened,“ Smith said. “To me—and I’ll be as spoiler light as possible—the Dark Urge is potentially the most heroic playthrough, because resisting what’s inside you and actually getting through that and surviving it with your friends alongside you still, most of them intact, is I think the most heroic version of the game.”

God damn it. He’s right, and I hate to say it, but I might end up trying to be good all the way through again after all. There’s nothing that appeals to me more than a tortured hero. Ever since I started going to therapy in my early twenties, I’ve realised that I am very often the problem and I have to make conscious choices to do good things for the sake of the people around me. There’s no creepy voice in my head telling me to murder my friends or rip the hands off wizards, sure, but there certainly is one egging me on to be toxic as hell, and living a healthy, peaceful life often means telling that voice to shut the fuck up.

Playing as the Dark Urge and not giving in to my darker impulses would mean I get to still be the good guy even if there’s something deeply, innately wrong with me, and that’s beautiful in its own way. It might even be a much deeper story – fighting your demons is much more compelling than just being a morally upright, decent person from the get go.

Smith says the Dark Urge isn’t just the evil run, and while you can be completely terrible and murderous to the people around you, fighting your urges could net you a good ending. I think that might be what I really want, although I still want to see just how much havoc I can wreak on Faerûn. Maybe my good Dark Urge run will be my third playthrough… if I ever finish my first.