The Youtube speedrunner Mae has already beaten his own speedrun record for the Steam hit Baldur’s Gate 3 once. After receiving great criticism from the community, he accepted the challenge and completed all three acts in 30 minutes.
Who is Mae? Mae is the name of the Youtube channel of a speedrunner. He continuously takes on the challenge of completing video games as quickly as possible. Mae started the channel with a so-called Any-% speedrun for Baldur’s Gate 3 in August and has since also tackled Starfield.
What is an Any-% speedrun
A regular speedrun involves playing a game from start to the official end – that is, 100% – completed.
For games like Baldur’s Gate 3, which have endless completion possibilities, so-called Any-% speedruns come into play. These are speedruns that have been completed after a non-specified percentage and do not reach the ending set by the developers.
What matters here is that the player sees the credits. Nothing more, nothing less.
We reported on Mae’s first speedrun record in August. For this, he had the character Gale blow himself up. The credits rolled after just 10:03 minutes:
Player finds secret ending in Baldur’s Gate 3, has to sacrifice the most popular character, but at least it’s fast
The Youtuber beat his own record in early September with a new Any%-run in under 5 minutes of gameplay:
World record: Speedrunner finishes Baldur’s Gate 3 in 4 minutes by putting Shadowheart in a box
“I now know I was a false speedrunner …”
How did the community react? The community reacted generally positively, surprised, and euphoric. Many made jokes like you beat me by about 100 hours
or Short video, no dialogue spoilers, underwear ending, that’s the perfect speedrun
.
Unfortunately, Mae also received many negative comments, which he featured at the beginning of his new video:
Pretending to have defeated the game in Act 2 is dumb, you might as well just choose the ending with the thought-killer and finish in 50 seconds, it’s the same ending.
Can we ban this category? You can’t find real speedruns here, just this boring cheese
“… so I decided to beat the record for all acts by 12 minutes”
Warning Spoiler: Below you will read spoilers for all acts of Baldur’s Gate 3.
And what did Mae do with the feedback? The Youtuber took the comments as a challenge. After he once again beat his own 4-minute record with another Any-% speedrun on Youtube with 3:32, he set out to do a full speedrun with all three acts.
And Mae succeeded. The new speedrun record now belongs to him with 30:22 minutes – entirely without Gale and his explosion:
To achieve this, Mae used some of his old tricks, but also some new ones. Here are a few examples:
- The party mostly consisted of a self-designed Tav and Shadowheart.
- The combination of the spells
Featherfall
andEnhance Leap
was used again to jump faster over the map. For this, Shadowheart must kill Tav, otherwise the glitch doesn’t remain active. - In Act 2, Mae steals a potion with a mist cloud, thereby bypassing the fight against Balthazar and jumps to the end of Act 2.
- Act-3 villain Orin disguises himself as a child. Mae triggers a scene with Shadowheart during this and prevents Orin from transforming back. This way, the party can simply steal Orin’s plot-relevant item.
The entire speedrun is a masterpiece of glitches, bugs, and effects utilized. Since Mae strictly follows the rule to play all three acts, this run should silence the critics once and for all.
Have you actually finished your first run of Baldur’s Gate 3 yet? Whether speed or normal. MyMMO editor-in-chief Leya Jankowski has already surpassed the 200 hours mark and the end is still not in sight:
I am still in my 1st playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3 after 200 hours
