Larian CEO says Baldur's Gate 3's Dark Urge character was originally going to be a Paladin by default, which makes me even happier I played it that way

pcgamer.com:

When I played Baldur's Gate 3 back in the autumn, I decided to roll with a Dark Urge Paladin, and it was such a fascinating experience that I wrote a whole article about it. But to give you the notes, combining a class that's sworn to abide by justice with a character who just flippin' loves murder creates an incredible internal conflict, leading to a character arc which, for me, felt like the closest you could come to a canonical playthrough of BG3.

I'm sure everyone says that, because BG3 is designed to make whatever character you create fold into the story in a way that feels like it was always meant to be. As it turns out, though, I might have been closer to the mark than I thought, at least according to what the game's own developers say.

Speaking to IGN's Kat Bailey, Larian's CEO Swen Vincke and lead writer Adam Smith discussed the development of the Dark Urge character. In the interview, Bailey says she's considered rolling a Dark Urge Paladin for her next playthrough to which Smith responds «I think a Dark Urge Paladin is super interesting.» At this point Vincke reveals «The default class was originally going to be Paladin, but then we started thinking about it and said, actually that's bringing in a lot of narrative problems, so we'll let them make that choice themselves. But we're not going to plug it in like that because it actually does have issues in role-playing.»

In the final game, the Dark Urge's default profile is a Dragonborn Sorcerer, but you can choose to play them as any race or class, including Paladin. Vincke doesn't explain what the narrative problems caused by playing a Dark Urge Paladin are, but one of them is likely the simple contradiction at the heart of the character. If you play as a Dark