Resist the Dark Urge

So Baulder’s Gate 3 came into my life recently, and in payment, I have given it one hundred hours of my life so far. It’s just one of those games that you’ll get fifty hours in and comfortable with the systems to the point where you think of a better build, figure out you missed a cool item, or breezed past 2/3rd of the game's content on accident; now you have a new character and playthrough. This has happened to me four times as of writing and will most likely balloon as the game progresses. Currently, my roster is as follows: one wizard I started the game with and abandoned once I realized I missed most of the game with him, a paladin who has become my new main character, a Tiefling sorceress cause I wanted to mess with sorcery points and to romance Halsin (not because I wanted to see bear sex, but because if I don’t romance him I will never use him), and a Dark Urge Monk. Four characters, one hundred hours, and the closest I’ve gotten to beating the game is the start of Act 3, and now I want to add a fifth Necromancer character to take another stab at wizards. However, at the time of writing, I am on vacation and away from my rig, so withdrawal is setting in, and all I am left with is theory crafting and watching other people play the game. In this stew of thought, I thought about recruiting and romancing Minthara in that playthrough. Minthara, for those of you out of the loop, is a boss in the early game that you can side with and recruit into your party. All you have to do is help her genocide a grove of refugees and druids, and she’s good to go; the only hitch is, I don’t want to do that.

See, I’ve never been a fan of evil playthroughs; your genocide runs and renegade Shepherds, to name two. And I don’t like them for the plain and simple fact that the foundations of storytelling are based on rewarding positive elements of the human condition: kindness, heroism, and benevolence; while punishing or confronting harmful elements like hatred, cowardice, and malevolence. You could write a story focusing on these unheroic qualities, but those are called tragedies: stories focused on the downfall of a character or characters due to a flaw in their personality. Take Shakespeare’s Macbeth for a classic example of this. The central two characters, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, are, respectfully, a coward and a psycho.

Macbeth, unable to stand up for himself, is spurred to murder the king of Scotland and usurp him at the behest of his overambitious wife. An act that drives the two of them insane, turning the meek but kind Macbeth into a cruel and despotic monster and his intelligent but ruthless wife into a jabbering, senseless madwoman overcome with regret. So, while the Macbeths are our protagonists, they are not the heroes. That title goes to Macduff, who avenges King Duncan and restores his son to the throne of Scotland, freeing them from the nightmare of Macbeth. If we were to flip the script and instead write Macbeth as an inspiring tale of murder and tyranny, the play would have been long forgotten and not held up as one of the genre's seminal works. Because it would be unsatisfying.

We already live in a world of bad people doing bad things and getting off scot-free 60-100% of the time, depending on your level of cynicism. But stories, especially fantasy, are supposed to guide and inform us morally or show us that the never-ending battle against evil is worth fighting, even if we are only raging against the night. So, when presented with the option to be the bad guy, to steer the story against the heroes and leave behind a worse world, I have very little interest in pursuing that.

Yet perhaps you find that somewhat confusing, given how I mentioned that I have a Dark Urge character amid my many playthroughs. Isn’t that the evil character? The background you pick if you want to terrorize the people of the Sword Coast as an unfeeling psycho? Yes and no. Yes, that is a possibility for the character; no, it is not how I am playing them.

See, the inclusion of something like Dark Urge or a Genocide run is something I’m not conceptually opposed to in games; in the same way, I’m not opposed to tragedies or stories told from a villain’s perspective. When done right, like with Dark Urge and the rest of Baulder’s Gate 3, it creates context and stakes for the story that makes it more resonating; all while creating an experience only games offer. Larian is giving you the tools to tell your own story. They aren’t going to outright punish you for picking one over the other, but one will be more satisfying. Without spoilers, Dark Urge is all about resisting your murderous tendencies, of not knowing who or what you are, but with this resounding pounding in your head commanding you to kill and leaving you with a question: do you resist the Dark Urge? Knowing it might one day take hold of you and lead you to hurt the people you care about most, or do you embrace it, hold dominion over it, and use it to carve a bloody swath across the land trailed by the broken bodies of any and all who dared cross you. It asks the player to wrestle with the notion that we are not a good person but want to change and battle against this sick temptation that threatens to envelop us. Loads of potential there: how long do you resist, what happens if you do, who thinks less of you, who thinks more of you, do you break, do you resist to the end, who do you hurt along the way, and can you stop yourself? The game won’t stop you from going where you want to go, but like Macbeth, it is not scared to show you what happens when you go down a dark path you can’t turn back from.

I once talked with my brother and one of his friends about the secret bad ending to Fire Emblem: Engage. For those who don’t know, if you game over on the final map against the final boss’s second form, you get a darkest timeline cutscene showing what becomes of you and the world you failed to protect. Then, upon hearing of this ending, my brother’s friend’s first question was: “So, are you going to do it?” Which is the root of the matter Toby Fox was banging on about in Undertale. Simply because the option exists does not mean you have to choose it; however, with games being an interactive experience, they need content to fill in the spaces when you fail a challenge or miss the message the writers are trying to convey. And even then, the truly great game stories treat these endings like the tragedies they are. The broken Mohave Wasteland under the Bull of Ceasar, the empty Underground filled with murderous determination, a lifeless Elyos. Each of these worlds tells a story, some of the death of democracy at the hands of tyranny, a lost battle against an unfeeling monster, a snuffed light in the dark. Tragedies, perpetrated by actors who believed this was the only way, succumbed to a dark urge or merely faltered at the final step.

Regardless of the reason, these are not the ends these worlds deserve. The Bull is destined to crumble under its own weight when it reaches the western sea, devoid of new lands to conquer. The Underground and its citizens wish to rejoin the surface and work to atone for their past sins. And the Fell Dragon will fall as he does in all his incarnations. But their dark reflections warn us of what could happen if we falter and lose ourselves in the mantra of evil and march beneath its banner. Evil is a persistent and slippery creature. Never truly gone, never truly beaten. So, it falls to the vigilant, the courageous, and the true to meet it when it rises and to battle in the never-ending fight against the night. For only when we do not and submit to the evils of the world, to the crushing will of the Absolute, only then have we truly lost.