The Biggest Differences In A Dark Urge Playthrough Of BG3

Highlights

• The Dark Urge offers a unique backstory, with decisions affecting companions and key plot events.
• You can embrace the urge or resist it, leading to different outcomes and interactions with characters in the game.

When starting a new campaign in Baldur’s Gate 3, you have two options during character selection; you have ‘Tav,’ the custom hero where you can choose the appearance, class, race, and name, and you have the Origin characters, who are companions you may find during the adventure. Still, you can choose to play as one of them.

However, one fascinating Origin character works as a mix of both concepts: The Dark Urge. Though he’s a Dragonborn Sorcerer by default, you can customize them completely, just like Tav, but they have their unique backstory that affects the events of the game.

Updated on April 15, 2024, by Lucas Olah: When we first wrote about the Dark Urge and how they affect the story, we chose to talk about these differences vaguely to avoid spoiling the adventure for you. However, being vague prevents us from actually mentioning the things that make this playthrough so good, and let’s face it, this isn’t an article you should click on if you want to avoid spoilers. So, instead of vague mentions, we’ll tackle the biggest, specific events that come up during the story whenever you play as the infamous ‘Durge,’ which also means there will be light spoilers here.

11 Initial Stakes

You Have Your Own Backstory

The most obvious difference is the proper backstory. When playing as Tav, you’re essentially a random adventurer caught in the whole Absolute business, and your goal is to save yourself from becoming a Mind Flayer.

Tav functions like a generic adventurer, with some dialogue options giving backstory details based on your class and race, but they’re all pretty basic. Ideally, Tav is the best way to insert your original characters from your D&D games or ones you come up with as you’re toying with the character creator and imagining their backstory in your head. However, that changes a lot when you choose to be the Dark Urge.

As a being with no memories and urges to kill, your initial goal is to find out who you are. As the plot goes deeper, you’ll see how connected you are to everything going on. Instead of just being there as a spectator to your companion’s stories and the plot itself, you’ll also get events centered around you as you play, with cutscenes, interactions, and even an exclusive character.

10 Alfira’s Fate

Press F To Pay Respects

Regardless of which character you play as, you’ll run into the extremely talented Bard Alfira — though almost no one in the story recognizes her talents for some reason. As if not being recognized isn’t enough for the poor girl, you signed her death certificate when you created your character.

To really hit home how your character has powerful urges to kill, you’ll have a brutal scene where your Dark Urge kills Alfira in her sleep when she visits your camp. You can technically save her, but you’ll have to go out of your way to ensure that.

9 Sceleritas Fel

Be True To Yourself

As the Dark Urge, you get to know an additional character that doesn’t appear in other playthroughs: your magnificent butler. He appears pretty early, too, and helps shed some light on the urges and a bit of your backstory after the Alfira incident, and shows you that whatever is going on goes deeper than you may think.

Still, Sceleritas is a fun character despite being quite evil, and he’ll encourage you to embrace the urges, meaning your relationship with him will end up very differently depending on whether you’re good or evil. Some interactions with him in Act 3, after the big secrets are already exposed, are pretty entertaining, like him telling you the worst thing you’ve ever done — but we’ll leave that to you to find out.

8 Isobel’s Fate

To Kill Or Not To Kill

The next victim of your urges will be Isobel, the Cleric of Selûne who protects the Last Light Inn. However, you won’t kill this one in your sleep like you did with Alfira. Instead, it’s up to you to decide on killing her or not.

Killing her will have huge consequences in the story, as she’s the reason the inn is a safe place, and a lot of people will die along with her. Killing her also grants you the Slayer form.

Not killing her will make your urges go haywire, and you will attempt to kill someone you’re close to (aka whoever you’re romancing). This is avoidable by talking to your partner and passing some saving throws, so you can still spare Isobel and not suffer significant consequences. May the dice roll in your favor.

7 The Slayer Form

Bhaal’s Favorite Child

Though this detail comes later, we’ll spoil a bigger detail to make things easier to understand: The Dark Urge is a child of Bhaal, the God of Murder and one of the main reasons the whole Absolute plot is happening.

The evil Gods in this game, known as the Dead Three, have their chosen, and each chosen can transform into an avatar of said God. Killing Isobel will make you the Avatar of Bhaal and grant you the Slayer transformation, which is very powerful. This makes the Dark Urge a very fun playthrough if you want to be an evil character.

If you resist the urge, then Orin, one of the game’s baddies, will become Bhaal’s chosen instead, meaning she’ll have the Slayer transformation available during the boss fight against her.

6 Enver Gortash

Partners In Crime

To add even more to the whole backstory your character forgot, the Dark Urge will eventually find out that they were part of the bad guys, and the Absolute scheme was their idea, in a plan they executed with their friend and maybe former lover, Enver Gortash (lots of hints, but the game isn’t clear about it).

In fact, Gortash is very nice to you and clearly respects your character, and would love nothing more for you to take your place back in the group from Orin and continue things as planned. How that will go depends on your choices.

5 Bhaal’s Unholy Assassin

Plus Talking To The OG Baddy

While any character can turn into one of Bhaal’s assassins, you’re the only one who can recover said title, should you choose to. There, you’ll interact with the main villain from the first Baldur’s Gate, Sarevok Anchev.

This is also the part where he usually gives some background on Orin, but since you and Orin have a personal connection, he drops even more details, essentially giving you all you need to understand how you lost your memory in the first place.

4 Dealing With Orin

Family Reunion

Orin the Red seems like a very basic villain in most runs, as nothing more than overly violent woman who wishes to make ritualistic kills to honor her God Bhaal. But if you are the Dark Urge, she’s then your sister, and the one who took your place in the Absolute scheme out of power hunger and envy of you.

That makes her a far more interesting character and gives you a personal vendetta to deal with, which boils down to a 1v1 fight against her, and it’s vital to win this fight if you wish to get rid of the urge. She’ll have the Slayer form if you didn’t kill Isobel, which makes things more difficult. A powerful martial class like a Fighter or a Paladin will take her easily, however.

3 Resisting Or Embracing The Urge

What Will It Be?

After winning the duel and having either embraced or fought against all the moments your urge came knocking, you’ll have the main choice that will decide your fate: you can accept your God, Bhaal, or reject him completely.

Rejecting him will have deadly consequences, but luckily, Withers has got your back to make sure you won’t die for good for disrespecting a God. So, you can continue the game free from Bhaal and find a happy life for yourself. Or you can continue as his favorite child and conquer it all.

2 Endings

There Are Many Outcomes Here

Embracing or resisting the urge is a key part of your story and will also dictate how your story ends — along with how you deal with the Absolute. You can live a life free of your urges, devote yourself to hunting Bhaal’s followers, live with whoever you romanced, or conquer the Absolute and everyone else in Bhaal’s name.

However, losing the duel against Orin will make you fail at getting rid of the urge and honoring your father, Bhaal, meaning it can lead to terrible endings where your characters lose their minds completely to the urges, killing everyone they love in the process.

1 Bonus: Class And Race

Be Whoever You Want

We confidently say that the Dark Urge is the ideal way to play this game, as it combines the best of all character creation options. As much fun as it can be to play as an Origin character like Astarion or Wyll, the protagonist becomes a nearly silent protagonist, and more often than not, experiencing their stories as a separate character is better than controlling them.

Then, you have the classic comparison between Tav or the Dark Urge. Creating your own character is more fun to most people in games like this, but with the Dark Urge, not only do you get to do that exactly, but you also have a unique storyline added in the game that you can’t experience any other way — well, unless you go multiplayer and one of the players is ‘Durge.’

The only situation we would not recommend the Dark Urge is if you don’t think this gory backstory fits your character. Otherwise, this character origin will only add to your game, and make it far more entertaining than it already is.