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.
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."
