Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the greatest video games I’ve ever played. As a longtime fan of Larian Studios, starting with their Divinity: Original Sin series, I was in for a wild treat. This game has so much heart, characterization, and enough story and quests to last you for months. And as we’ve said before, Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the most sex positive games we’ve ever experienced.
With that being said, BG3 has a diversity problem. This is unfortunately a trend with many of Larian Studios’ games, but their main cast tends to be overwhelmingly white. Wyll is BG3′s only person of color, which is beyond disappointing in so many ways. We’ve talked about the various ways the game fails with race before, which, hopefully, will get resolved in Larian’s next game.
Luckily, some fans have risen to the occasion to rectify this problem. A modder by the name of Alanté Carter made a mod that turns every character in the game Black. They decided to do this after a racist modder created a mod that turned Wyll white. That mod has since been banned from the website it was uploaded to, but the damage had already been done: It was a painful reminder of just how under-appreciated POC are in games.
Carter’s mod not only changes the race of everyone, but gives them unique Black appearances, as well. They added Black hairstyles to each companion, such as Karlach, Astarion, and Shadowheart. In response to criticism, they said, “I acknowledge that in these games, characters are not specifically African-American, Caucasian, Asian, etc. However, it’s clear that characters can be racially coded as black or white, and so on. So when someone releases a mod that makes the sole black companion white, it feels very targeted.”
Not that they needed to give a response at all. It’s clear that the only people who have any issues with this are raging racists. Fantasy and RPGs have a long history of being very unkind to POC. Franchises such as Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings codified a lot of harmful tropes steeped in “racial science.” The concept of races at all in RPGs also comes from a long tradition of racial biases. For example, orcs are usually coded as dark, non-white “savages” who threaten white heroes and heroines.
Until the day comes that more fantasy games feature more POC, mods like this will unfortunately be necessary. Good on Carter for fighting back against the racists and showing the beauty of Blackness.
(featured image: Larian Studios)
