Baldur's Gate 3's Patch 7 is bringing the blood-curdling horror the game's evil endings deserve
I don't have the stomach for this sort of thing.
Still basking in a post-BAFTA sweep afterglow, Larian has shared an update on Steam detailing what to expect from Baldur's Gate 3 in the immediate future, and from the studio further down the line. The marquee inclusions of Baldur's Gate 3's upcoming Patch 7 are the game's expanded evil ending cutscenes, a corollary to the feel-good party all the well-adjusted and happy gamers already got. Spoilers for all those endings ahead.
The post shared three teasers of what the new endings entail. They seem to be extended cutscenes instead of the small playable segment of Withers' Party, but that fits the tone and the content I think—who are you going to be chatting up after the dust clears when you're the dark lord of everything? The first visual teaser is a brief shot of Absolute Tav dominating a crowd of innocent Baldurians with their new brain god mind powers. Pretty sick, pretty evil, makes sense.
The second visual was way up my alley though: it's almost assuredly from the Dark Urge's Bhaalist ending, where you embrace your heritage as a child of the god of murder and harness the Absolute in the name of some kind of brutal, omnicidal apocalypse. The shot shows the default Durge, an albino dragonborn sorcerer, wandering through a lake of blood and corpses underneath a black sun. It's the sort of overt Berserk homage that I'm all too happy to lap up, and I can't wait to watch this one on YouTube (I'm too much of a softy to play it myself.)
The post also featured a snippet of new music for the endings from now BAFTA-winning composer, Borislav Slavov. It's definitely still got a Baldur's Gate 3 vibe, but boy is "March of Darkness" a far cry from the game's hopeful and fragile main theme, "I Want to Live." I'm especially fond of the queasy violin bit in the new song: it really conveys a sense of "I don't know if I picked the morally upright dialogue options to get here."
We've already got a taste in game of how bad things might get in these new endings. The Withers Party epilogues are mostly a cheerful good hang reward for being a good guy and doing everything right, but if you play as the Dark Urge, fail to break your curse, and also choose not to side with Bhaal for the megabad ending outlined above, you're treated to a chilling epilogue of your character reduced to a murderous, gibbering husk six months out from the end of the game, ready and raring to brutally murder all those companion characters we love so much.
I wrote before about how much I love Baldur's Gate 3's unambiguously happy epilogue that was added at the end of 2023, because it felt earned by the game. Now we get the absolutely brutal denouements its evil choices deserve. In the post outlining Patch 7, Larian also teased what's coming next for the studio: two projects based on its own IP (they haven't said Divinity yet) in the early stages of pre production. Patch 7 will also see the introduction of official modding tools—though we have reason to believe they won't be as extensive as Original Sin 2's—while console crossplay and a photo mode are planned for a future update.