I’m generally not the kind of person to talk about my personal experience with a game to any great degree. Naturally, for reviews I’ll dive into some choice encounters that create a broad picture of what shaped my opinion along the way. For example, what it felt like to overcome a particularly arduous challenge, how a narrative absolutely enamored me in presentation or prose. But Baldur’s Gate 3 brought something out in me I thought was long since dead. That was an abrupt and extreme hyper fixation over a game that I felt was really “just fine.” So fine, so very just OK, that I decided to teach myself how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3 to make Enver Gortash a companion member in my very own party.
Editor’s Note: There will be spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 and Enver Gortash below.
If you haven’t made your way well into Act II of Baldur’s Gate 3, you probably won’t know who Enver Gortash is. That is, unless if you’ve watched promotional materials or The Game Awards trailer that introduced this character into the larger cast of the game. Enver Gortash is a scheming politician voiced by Jason Isaacs, who tends to voice diabolical or outright devilish men, who are often the devil, in video games. He’s a man who was sold to the devil by his very own parents and clawed his way out of unfortunate circumstance to become the Chosen of Bane. He is cunning, clever, and wildly arrogant, but is willing to offer a tenuous alliance to the player character.
Me being me, I was immediately attracted to this prospect. This not only would make the game significantly easier, due to having the Archduke of Baldur’s Gate as an ally, but I’d certainly get him as a party member, right?
No.
For all of his posturing on alliances and how valuable you are to each other (especially if you pick the Dark Urge Origin, where he reveals that you were once his “nearest and dearest” of companions), he sends you out to do his dirty work. Once all is said and done, he dies a quick death at the hands of the true antagonist of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Admittedly, I was pretty disappointed. I don’t know what I was expecting. Given how Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal allowed you to breathe life back into Sarevok to make him a companion, I had assumed you would be able to make at least one of the three Chosen a companion character, short-lived as it might have been. Regardless, unable to sate my sudden need to have Enver Gortash as a companion, I took to Twitter and forums to see what the modding community was up to. Mostly, people just really wanted to wear his clothes, which is fine. Over-embellished monstrosities aren’t my kind of thing, but I get the appeal. There were also some mods that made small adjustments to his face, making him appear a bit younger or outright re-sculpting it to make it look closer to the propaganda posters found in Baldur’s Gate. But none of it was what I was looking for. At least, until I saw someone talking about a cheat engine in Cyrillic.
I scoured through this Twitter user’s feed as they detailed how they managed to use a cheat engine to import Orin as a party member, though only as a skin fitted over Lae’zel, the Githyanki warrior you meet in the early hours of the game. But that was enough for me. If I could just get him in my party, then that would satisfy my need and I could finally uninstall Baldur’s Gate 3.
If only it was that simple. To put it plainly, I’m terrible at modding games. It took me at least 30 minutes to figure out how to successfully get the Elden Ring Seamless Co-op mod running the first time I installed it, afraid that I would damage my game and destroy my save files in the process. I once streamed modding Skyrim on my Twitch channel, which took me days to do correctly. However, I suppose Skyrim is just like that, and modding that game is a test of loading and unloading mods and reorganizing them to make sure they run properly. So getting the cheat engine to work with Baldur’s Gate 3 was a task. It took me days of trying to figure how to get it to run, wondering if I could circumvent having to manually find Gortash’s file and slot him into to someone else’s place in my party. Every day while I toiled I checked Nexus Mods thinking someone had to be just as desperate as me, someone infinitely more competent and generous to those have no experience with modding. No dice.
Eventually I got it working, somehow. I’m still too afraid to mess with anything else in the game, in case if the mod breaks. Enver Gortash was finally part of my Baldur’s Gate 3 party as a companion, having replaced Gale. But I didn’t stop there. On Bluesky, I mused over what Class he could be, pondering this as I’d never really fought him since I’d only ever been his ally. Someone suggested Rogue, and I wasn’t convinced. So I loaded up a save right before heading down to the final encounter, and hit him with a couple Magic Missiles to get the encounter going. He mostly just ran around shooting me with crossbow bolts, which didn’t really tell me what Class he was. So I kept whittling him down until he finally had enough, channeled the spirit of his God, Bane, and appropriately beat me to death with his hands. (God of Tyranny aside, there was a letter that described him as having “burly” arms so I guess he’s shredded despite looking like an evil, mustache twirling magic user, minus the mustache.) I got what I needed and re-loaded my new, fresh save with Enver as part of my party.
Sprinting over to Withers I changed his Class from Wizard to Monk. Somewhere down the line, I thought having him Multiclass into Warlock would be nice, but ended up changing it to Wizard. I don’t know. I just think he’d like casting spells, even if he was more preoccupied with punching me. But I had finally gotten what I wanted! I achieved what I set out to do! Enver Gortash was here, in my Baldur’s Gate 3 party! And despite it really just being Gale with an Enver Gortash skin, I got what I wanted. I ran around the goblin encampment for a few hours, slayed a few gnolls, and called it a day.
Was this a monumental effort to run around in Baldur’s Gate 3 for maybe three or four hours? Absolutely. Was it worth it? To me it was! Would I ever do this again? Absolutely not. But I had a lot of fun trying to make this work while I still had some investment in Baldur’s Gate 3. Who knows, maybe I’ll boot the game up again in a few months, and assuming the mod still works, I might just finish a playthrough with the companion I wanted most.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is available for the PC and PlayStation 5.
