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Mod author: The Artisan

Version used for review: 1.8.

Should you ever find yourself growing tired of the uptight, lawful good schtick that the paladins and knights of Faerûn have to offer in Baldur’s Gate, look no further than Drake Caulfield to cleanse your palette — a neutral good Priest of Tyr with a penchant for alcohol and a complex family history that he seems to carry with him wherever he goes.

When you first encounter Drake in Beregost, he’s drunk and weary, revealing to you that he’s hunting Bassilus, the deranged killer from Zhentil Keep (though if you’ve already killed him, he’ll join you nonetheless). One’s first impression of Drake is likely to be that he’s a crude cynic that seemingly should have no place in the Order of the Radiant Heart — especially compared to his more stereotypically noble peers in Ajantis and Keldorn.

While Drake remains a bit of a friendly bastard throughout the entire game, through the process of getting to know him the player will discover that he is, really, just as good and noble as any member of his order ought to be — he’s just a bit of a public relations disaster for the Radiant Heart, and so his father, a prelate in the Order, sent him off to the Sword Coast to keep the smell of his ale-tinged breath out of Athkatla.

There’s more to it than that, of course, and since much of Drake’s conversations revolve around his family, I don’t want to spoil every little thing. I actually found it rather enjoyable to parse through Drake’s history in dialogue with him, fitting the pieces together to find that many of the issues that plague Drake revolve around the not-so recent death of his older brother during the Sythillisian War, which Drake himself fought in — and the different methods and pace with which his family grieves.

Usually, I find family drama to be too often greatly uninteresting and a cheap way of giving a character some depth. Even the original games suffer from this, in my opinion: Cernd, Mazzy, Keldorn, and Jan all have family-related quests that are… well, they’re not to my taste. Drake, however, manages to be more interesting in the simple retelling of his family without the chance to interact with them firsthand. It is all written with a very graceful masculineness that I found refreshing.

Something that often distracts me is when an NPC mod injects itself into a pre-existing quest in a way that sticks out like a sore thumb, but Drake manages to handle this rather well by not dwelling on the quest for too long or making it too essential to his character. It’s a little akin to Coran’s hunt for the wyverns, which is rather fitting given that they both deal with Kelddath Ormlyr.

It is all of these qualities that lead me to describe Drake as first and foremost a very grounded mod. There are no outlandish ideas here, at least not in the way that one might expect from the same author that wrote Aura Glimmershine. To some, that might be appealing or unappealing, though I lean toward the former. Drake has a simplicity to him that makes it easy to want to dig beneath the surface, and when you do, you’re met with rich characterisation and the prose to back it up.

You’ll notice that I didn’t use Drake’s default portrait. The mod comes with a variety of different options for the portrait and voice sets. These all vary in quality but there’ll certainly be options that appeal to you more than others.

They each have their own appeal to them. I like the more painterly look of the third and the atmosphere of the second, though I’m left wondering why the default portrait is the AI-generated one, given that it suffers from the typical issues that AI-generated imagery usually does — small, blotchy pupils, odd details on the armour, and a facial structure that does not suit a man that drinks as much as Drake does. To each their own, of course, but I don’t believe that the mod puts forth its best foot by making this the default portrait.

For Drake’s voice, you are given two options: the default, recorded by Kieran Walsh, and the original, by BillyYank. The original voice acting has its charm but Walsh’s brings a believability and charisma to the character that the original lacked. It truly leant itself to my enjoyment of Drake’s character, even if none of his actual lines are voiced — it’s much easier to record a quality soundset than proper conversations, and the mod is better for it. The audio mixing on a few of Drake’s lines could use some touchups but in general the default voice stands out as a positive for me.

The fact that the default soundset makes Drake British didn’t help to quell the fact that I kept comparing him to Trevor Belmont from the Netflix adaptation of Castlevania. I can’t help myself, I suppose. I love me a scruffy drunk from a prestigious family.

There were a few moments to Drake as a mod that brought down the experience somewhat for me, however. Particularly, the quest that Drake receives once the player arrives in Baldur’s Gate has a major pacing problem as is — entering the Elfsong Tavern, Drake gets into a long conversation with a former friend/lover, Stoneheart. Quite frankly, it went on for too long, and by the end of it I had emotionally tapped out. The quest then involves meeting Stoneheart in the sewers and helping him kill some Shadow Thieves. Long conversation, brief sewer-crawl as you search for the man you just spoke to, and then you get transported to some tough enemies. The battle was fun enough, and the dynamic between Drake and his ex-friend/lover had potential to be engaging, but ultimately it just fell flat for me. The conversations with Drake about his relationship with Stoneheart following the completion of the quest were more engaging to me than the man himself.

Also, while I gave credit to the writing of Drake’s family drama, you can discuss the specifics of his family with him via player-initiated dialogue before he decides to reveal nearly the exact same information to you voluntarily sometime later. The player-initiated dialogue lines are largely single-line responses that add little depth, and it would just be nice if they were optional.

The other thing that consistently annoyed me while I had Drake installed in my game was his introductory sequence in Siege of Dragonspear. It, once again, is very long. It’s an unskippable cutscene that leads into dialogue, and it could be made more player-friendly by simply reframing it to a player-initiated conversation without anything being lost.

I found it very easy to enjoy Drake as a character despite these small gripes, from both a narrative and mechanical standpoint. He fulfills a niche that somewhat bothers me with its lack of options in the game — a male cleric available early in the game. The only other male clerics are Yeslick, Quayle, and Tiax, and they’re all late-game companions, so it’s nice to have a character that you can pick up nearly straight away.

He’s also quite competent on the battlefield as well. As an optional component upon installation, you can allow Drake to use crossbows. While this is fun and I don’t have a problem with it — I think giving companions unique quirks like that is part of what makes them enjoyable — I found more satisfaction in using Drake in melee combat. As a generously-statted character and a Priest of Tyr, Drake has a lot of potential and many different tools at his disposal, not to mention the unique items brought in by his small Siege of Dragonspear quest.

These are only a few items that the mod adds, but they turn Drake into an effective warrior in his own right, and I like that. It’s a shame they don’t get that much time to shine, like Drake himself in Siege of Dragonspear.

Not to say that he’s not a welcome addition to the adventure, but travelling with him towards the end of the game made me hungry for a storyline with more meat to it. There is some seriously good potential for Drake in Baldur’s Gate 2, and as someone who simply likes him as a character, I want to see more from him in a more emotionally perilous situation, as well as how his romance develops with a Bhaalspawn suffering through the events of the second game.

Drake gets my recommendation for those who enjoy complex characters without too much noise surrounding them, or those who simply want an early-game cleric that doesn’t fit the feisty woman category. He feels tangible and believable in the game world, and that’s always something I greatly value.

Thanks for reading.