A former Larian Studios developer has revealed that they didn’t anticipate Baldur’s Gate 3 fans to fall head over heels for one of the game’s primary antagonists, least of all ship them with the Dark Urge.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is arguably one of the best role-playing games ever made, from its fantastic story-telling, replayability, and accurate rendition of Dungeons & Dragons. But among the game’s most dedicated fans, it’s the game’s in-depth romance system that keeps them coming back for more.
In the game, you can choose to get down with a vampire, a shapeshifting druid, a sad wizard, and even the devil himself. Yet, some players are determined to romance the non-romanceable Gortash, one of the game’s main villains, with many shipping the character with the Dark Urge due to their narrative link.
Unfortunately, no matter how much fans plead for a Gortash romance, Larian Studios has confirmed it won’t be adding any additional romance to the game in a future update. However, former romance and companion design lead Baudelaire Welch has revealed that they are in full support of the fan-favorite pairing.
Speaking in a recent interview with Eurogamer about the creation of the Dark Urge, Welch revealed that they hadn’t anticipated the community ship between the character and Gortash, and wished they’d seen it coming.
“I believe in the Dark Urge x Gortash ship wholeheartedly, but I never saw it coming,” Welch said. “I think we always imagined that Gortash was going to be an 80 year-old man over the course of development, and then we saw his [character] model and it was like, ‘Oh!’.”
“I so, so, so wish that I had seen that coming and added some optional hints of reactivity into that whole thing.”
The writer said that if they could do things differently, they would’ve had more Dark Urge moments throughout the game, like in cutscenes, but a lot of the work regarding main story beats had already been completed by the time they took the Dark Urge into development
Larian is, however, planning to release Patch 7 next month, which will implement additional Dark Urge endings for players to experience.
Following up on X / Twitter later on, Welch responded to a fan, saying: “Sorry I fumbled the aging scene band frontman x bad dragon you guys, at least you know I ship it – seeing durgetash stuff is perhaps my favourite fan content.”
