So, Dark Urge is the last addition to the origin characters.

It’s a path for those, who either want to be Murderhobos or those who like protagonist with an internal conflict and redemption.

After playing both TAV and Dark Urge, I have to admit, I will probably never come back to TAV ever again. Not that Tav is bad, they are just a blank page, perfect for those who have never played dnd or previous games.

Having said that, despite me liking the origin, I couldn’t help but notice certain hiccups along the way, which I hope will be adressed in future patches. To start off with:

-Losing a very rare unique piece of armour due to origin, unless you metagame the encounter.

The only problem with it is that you get locked out of a quest, without knowing it 30 hours later. There is no backup npc to give you the reward, if you play Dark Urge, like in the Grymforge, thus soft locking the quest without a way to complete.

-Very few moments, where you can actually feel the urge come into play.

What I mean by this is that you only need to resist the Urge at the end of ACT 2, but not sooner. The game constantly says about horrible thoughts of your character, but rarely forces you into a situation, where you have to resist it. There should be more of those, especially if you come across people or animals in vulnerable circumstances. Not in all dialogue options, but resisting the urge should be a bit harder than it is right now.

Although, kudos to the writers for the Dark Urge scene we get in chapter 1, it comes across as a good gut punch.

In the same manner, it should be like constant whispering with promises of power.

-Lack of any real incentive to commit to urges across the game, with 2 exceptions.

To put simply Dark Urge moments are good for RP, but nothing else. It doesn’t matter how many atrocities and urges you commit across the game, because most of them don’t matter.

The way I would solve it is making something similar to Ilithid powers tree, but a bit simpler. Think of something similar to a pillar. You start at the bottom, but the more you commit to the urges, the more powers you get. The downside could be reputation loss, harder DC to resist in the future and of course, endings being locked out/worse than they would be in a different circumstances.

TLDR:

Overall, the Dark Urge should be more impactful on the gameplay and the rewards should be worth it. As of right now, playing an evil character is simply worse than being good/neutral, as you lose out on magic items, quests, etc.