Shadowheart and Lae’zel’s Baldur’s Gate 3 romance came naturally because their writers realised they ‘were writing the same story from different directions’

Is there any greater love than that between a weird fascist space alien and the victim of a cult abduction? There is not. That’s why Romeo and Juliet is probably about exactly that, and it’s why gamers over the globe can’t get enough of Shar’zel. Lae’zart. Lart.

They love it when Shadowheart and Lae’zel in Baldur’s Gate 3 kiss, is what I mean, which is a thing that can happen if you choose one or the other as your player character and work real hard at it. It’s a classic enemies-to-lovers thing, as Shadowheart gets over her hatred of Githyanki, Lae’zel gets over her hatred of everything, and each realises the other is a total worm-brained smokeshow. Happily ever after.

In a recent chat with Edge magazine, Lae’zel’s writer Kevin VanOrd said that, actually, writing the pair’s romantic arc wasn’t as tough as it might initially sound. With both Shadowheart and Lae’zel working their way around to questioning the systems they were raised under, John Corcoran (Shadowheart’s writer) and VanOrd realised “we were writing the same story from different directions, and so that allowed us to reframe their initial clash and inform their later conversations.”

They had a whole bunch in common, in other words, which is a pretty decent basis for a relationship. Just, you know, once they’d both gotten over themselves a bit. That part could have taken longer, actually, as VanOrd remembers that his earlier versions of Lae’zel were even harder to handle.

“If you can believe it, she was more aggressive initially. But I realised that you wouldn’t want her around, that you wouldn’t want to engage with her,” so we got the (slightly) more chilled version of the character we know today. Early access helped with that, as players were able to tell VanOrd that Lae’zel could be a bit much. “For me, the feedback mostly confirmed things I knew already. It gave me confidence to go in the direction I already wanted to go.”