Picking a favourite Baldur’s Gate 3 character is a bit like picking your favourite limb, but there’s little question that the best villain in Baldur’s Gate 3 is Raphael. The smooth-talking trickster cambion is as charming and charismatic as he is utterly, incontrovertibly evil, such that you kind of want to do what he asks of you even though it’s clearly the worst idea ever.
If you do choose to side with Raphael for the game’s climax, the results… well, they’re a little disappointing. Originally, you only got a glimpse of what helping Raphael actually means for Baldur’s Gate. According to BG3’s lead writer Adam Smith, however, Larian has since updated the game to give player’s greater insight into the demon you love to hate.
“There’s actually seven Raphael endings now,” Smith said in an interview with IGN. “We added a whole bunch more. So he’ll talk a little bit more about his plans. I’m really worried of spoiling too much.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 famously has a ton of different endings, but some endings are end-ier than others. As Larian CEO Swen Vincke explains, the reason for this is Larian simply wasn’t able to give every possible permutation the full cinematic treatment. “We played a lot with Raphael,” he says. “There were so many versions and so many endings of [Raphael’s story], and don’t forget that we had to make cinematics out of all of them also. So we shortcutted it sometimes. Players were right to be upset about it, that’s why we added the epilogues.”
According to Smith, Larian has now also bulked out the permutations for siding with Raphael. “We had to figure out where the crown [of Karsus] was at the end of the game, and we started to look at that. There’s versions where Gale takes the crown for instance, and there’s versions where Gale takes the crown and becomes a God. So we’re like, “What does that mean? What does Raphael have to say about that?” And we put it all in.”
There are tons of other fantastic insights in the interview, covering Lae’zel’s character, how the game chooseswhich member of your party to kidnap, and the fascinating results of combining the Dark Urge with the paladin class. Truly, this is the game that keeps on giving, and it seems that Larian is far from finished with tweaking it, polishing it, and further fleshing it out.
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