A speedrunner has just employed some cunning techniques that mean they’ve managed to complete the sprawling Baldur’s Gate 3 in a shade over 10 minutes.
You know that old cliche that, just before you die, you see your entire life flash before your eyes? Watching speedrunner Mae skip and bounce their way through Baldur’s Gate 3's vast campaign in just 10 minutes reminds us of that.
Entire chapters are skipped. Reams of emotive dialogue are skipped through. Great areas of the map are dashed and bounced over. It’s dizzying to behold and – naturally – potentially very spoilery, though there’s the argument that everything flips by so quickly that it’s difficult to glean much from the plot in any case.
YouTube’s Mae is the speedrunner behind the game, and as IGN points out, they’ve found a way to use the character Gale, a jump ability, and some cunning player choices in order to make around 35 hours of campaign hurtle buy in approximately 604 seconds.
You can see Mae’s run in the video embedded below, while IGN has a more detailed breakdown of how the player managed to rapidly propel themselves all the way to the game’s second act. Again, bear in mind that both the video and breakdown contain spoilers, though.
It’s been a bit of a year for speedrunners completing gigantic fantasy games in incredibly short order. According to speedrun.com, the current speedrun record for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is just 44 minutes and three seconds, though they somehow used an Amiibo to quicken their progress. Even without an Amiibo, the same site tells us that player apple343 managed to complete the latest Zelda in 49 minutes flat earlier in August.
Meanwhile, July brought the news that Twitch streamer EZScape had managed to complete The Lord of the Rings: Gollum – a game said to more usually take around 12 to 13 hours to finish – in two hours, 53 minutes and three seconds. But then again, given the state Gollum was released in, getting through the thing as quickly as possible is perhaps the most sensible response.
