Baldur’s Gate 3’s shapeshifting final villain is definitely going to murder and impersonate one of your party members at some point
Baldur’s Gate 3 is, wait, let me check… 144 hours away, and Larian has just formally introduced the third and final villain of the game’s “unholy triumvirate” of bad guys. Orin the Red is a nefarious knife-loving lady voiced by Maggie Robertson—of RE8’s Lady Dimitrescu fame—and I think she’s going to do a lot of deeply undesirable things to me and the people I love.
“Orin is affectionately unhinged” says Robertson in the character’s introductory video (above). “You don’t know when she’s going to pop up, you don’t know in what form she’s going to be. She’s incredibly tricksy”.
Tricksy is, uh, definitely one word for it. Robertson’s narration is overlaid atop a video of Lae’zel, your beloved githyanki warrior companion, undergoing a kind of full-body osteopathic emergency. Her bones crack and snap, her limbs bend out of place, and her neck bends at angles that evolution never intended. Don’t worry, though, because it turns out that’s just what happens when Orin drops her disguise and reveals herself. Lae’zel’s probably been dead for days! Phew!
I know BG3 doesn’t have D&D’s alignment system, but let’s be real, Orin looks as chaotic as evil gets. When she’s not donning the visage of your trusted party members, she’s standing in ritual circles and summoning creatures that probably aren’t very nice, rolling her eyes at her more measured evil allies in their daily stand-up meetings, and licking her knives. “She has a very intimate relationship with [her weapons],” says Robertson, “they feel real and personified to her”. I feel the same way about the laptop I write all my articles on.
I’m pretty into Orin’s vibe, and Robertson is—as ever—a delight in the short snippets of voicework we’ve seen so far. In particular, I feel like the character’s presence will add an especially powerful atmosphere of paranoia to my interactions with the game’s cast. The original Baldur’s Gate games were all about your attitude to your party members (especially 2) and it’s going to be an interesting twist to build relationships with people while wondering if they might, at some point, have been bodysnatched by your enemies.
