Alongside completely customizable characters, Baldur's Gate 3 offers players pre-made origin characters to play as, and Larian Studios has pulled back the curtain on perhaps the most exciting one: The Dark Urge. Making an origin character in Baldur's Gate 3 allows players to see the story with a slightly more unique and emphasized perspective, and that's especially true for The Dark Urge.
The Dark Urge is the most unique among Origin characters. Typically, players who choose this path will have a pre-made character race and class wise; if players do a custom character, then origins becomes companions in Baldur's Gate 3. In other words, Origins put players into the shoes of companions like Shadowheart or Karlach and lets them guide the story. The Dark Urge, however, is still a completely customizable character, with Game ZXC learning about the origin at a recent gameplay preview ahead of the final Panel of Hell.
Baldur's Gate 3: The Dark Urge
Whereas other origin characters are pre-determined, like Karlach being a Tiefling Barbarian, players can still set the appearance, the race, and the class of The Dark Urge to be whatever they want. The big change is a new layer of murderous tendencies worked into the storyline. The short and sweet of it is, according to Baldur's Gate 3 creative lead Swen Vincke, players have no memory prior to the game's opening but have an overwhelming urge to commit murder. This gives the MC serial killer vibes and offers a "really dark" story, as players can either satisfy their dark urges or resist them, much like the Mind Flayer tadpole in their head.
Really, whatever causes The Dark Urge adds a whole other, seemingly random and evil element to the main character of Baldur's Gate 3. This may seem like a lot, but Larian actually works this to its advantage. Some examples, given by lead writer Adam Smith, are how party members will associate the main character's murderous acts with the Mind Flayer tadpole but also wonder why it isn't happening to them. Beyond that, players are able to hide or confess some of their actions, as they see fit.
Smith also provided a few examples of how The Dark Urge works. For those familiar with Gale in Baldur's Gate 3, players first meet him as a mysterious hand reaching out of a portal. Typical players can engage with or ignore as they see fit, but Dark Urge players can, for seemingly no reason whatsoever, black out and brutally murder Gale right there. When asked why, Dark Urge players will be unable to remember their action or even consider why they did it.
Meanwhile, another example includes making camp in Baldur's Gate 3 and waking up to discover random, murdered bodies there for no apparent rhyme or reason. This forces players to either hide the body/bodies or confess to their party, and this is but a couple of examples in a storyline that stretches the entire playtime of Baldur's Gate 3. In other words, it adds a whole new, murderous storyline that players may want to check out, in addition to their own custom characters and enjoying pre-made characters. In a way, the Dark Urge is a middle ground between the two, and a very dark one at that.
With so many race + class combinations and a playtime easily crossing the 100-hour mark, it's going to be interesting to see how players engage with so many options and the resulting permutations within the story. Said permutations is why Baldur's Gate 3 has 175 hours of cinematics, as players will never see them all in one playthrough, and The Dark Urge is but one extreme example of those possible permutations.
Baldur's Gate 3 launches for PC on August 3 with the PS5 version following on September 6.
