The lead writer of Baldur’s Gate 3’s Dark Urge was extremely squeamish at first, which shows you can do just about anything if you set your mind to it
Baldur’s Gate 3’s Dark Urge is a major highlight of the story—putting the player character in the role of a barely-composed murderer with the choice to either lean into, or away from, the urge to slaughter.
Chief among the Dark Urge’s accomplishments is how it’s consistently gross with its narration, often managing to be both off-putting and just visceral enough to let your imagination do the rest of the mauling. Imagine my surprise when, reading through Eurogamer’s interview with the Dark Urge storyline’s lead writer, I discovered the Dark Urge’s writer wasn’t a fan of gore at all.
Baudelaire Welch was selected for the role by Swen Vincke himself because their “mother worked partially on the script for Silence of the Lambs, the movie”, they explain. “I think Swen got that in his mind a little bit like, ‘You’ll be good at this’.” As the interview reveals, however, Welch is a self-described “squeamish” individual (many sympathies, I can’t make it through horror movies myself) and, hilariously, that they “hate gore!”
Writing director Adam Smith, however, maintains that was exactly the point: “When you get somebody who is really into gore and horror, they want to make it cool … [The Dark Urge] came from somebody who’s like, ‘This stuff is f*cking horrible!’ That gave it something I couldn’t have brought to it; that somebody who’s written 30 years of horror couldn’t have brought to it. It was that squeamishness that actually made the delight in it kind of perverted and weird, and idiosyncratic and strange.”
I find it genuinely fascinating that someone with an aversion to goriness could be so good at implying it—though, in fairness, Welch’s work is backed up by Larian’s art and design team. Many of the Urge’s most sinful moments are accompanied by plenty of splatter built out by people who, I hope, don’t upchuck their guts at the sight of some entrails.
Maybe it’s the contrast, then, between euphemistic writing and bloody mayhem that drives it home. Though, as Welch explains: “I didn’t really want to write all of these lascivious descriptions of things that were really disgusting,” going on to highlight a scene where the Dark Urge tears a bird’s wings off, Welch notes: “it doesn’t describe doing it, it just says—while the Dark Urge is tearing off the wings of this bird—’You wonder what it would be like to fly as the birds do.’ It’s more disturbing because it’s a psychological reaction to it.”
It’s not like Welch’s strategy is uncommon in horror, though. Clockwork Orange, which Welch cites as a direct inspiration for the butler, dresses its nightmares in cheery language: “that’s what the butler character is inspired by, that this is just meant to be a bit of naughty fun going on.”
That’s not to say Welch got out completely unscathed: “I was squeamish at the start,” they add, “it desensitised me to everything.” Whether that’s gonna show in the additional evil endings coming to BG3 with Patch 7 this year remains to be seen, but I’m sure it’ll be a bit of naughty fun either way.
