The Dark Urge is the most honest way to play Baldur’s Gate 3

There are many reasons why Baldur’s Gate 3 has endeared itself to so many over the past year: the intricate narrative, the deep character stories, and even, on occasion, the romance that an adventurer might find along the way. But playing as The Dark Urge—an origin character that doesn’t appear as a companion if you decide to play as either a TAV or another origin character—strips away the niceties of narrative. Violence is power, and you exist to kill or be killed. All of the themes of Baldur’s Gate 3—faith, friendship, trust, duty, even romance—can be distilled through The Dark Urge, leaving you with a game that is, fundamentally, a violence fantasy. And not a kind one, either.

As The Dark Urge, you are often faced with the compulsion to commit violence on others, and, more than that, you are asked to revel in it. You can deny this part of your character and work to overcome these desires, but these story options show that the choices in Baldur’s Gate 3 are never whether or not you can kill something but whether or not you enjoy it. This applies to every character: do you enjoy your grim work or is it undertaken with a sense of duty and obligation? More than that, if the choice whether or not to commit violence is largely taken from you by means of format and genre, the application of violence exists on a sliding scale of weak to powerful, and it’s this scale that represents the core of the game’s choices and, ultimately, the core of Dungeons & Dragons, as well. 

There is no glorious bloodshed, no honorable fights. It is all viscera and gore and if that turns your stomach, why are you here? Isn’t this it?