Baldur’s Gate 3 can be completed in under 5 minutes. A player proves how absurd this is – and how badly Shadowheart is affected.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is not only one of the best role-playing games in recent years, but also one of the most extensive. Finishing the game is sure to take new players about 100 hours of gameplay – those who want to see everything will need even longer. So it sounds almost absurd when you read that some can complete the game in just a few minutes.
The current record from start to finish stands at a crazy 4 minutes and 15 seconds – and everything about it is “morally wrong.”
Spoiler warning: This article discusses one of the endings of Baldur’s Gate 3 and the story of Gale.
YouTuber Mae shows in his video how he completed Baldur’s Gate 3 in 4 minutes and 15 seconds. To achieve this, he does not play with a self-created character, but takes on the role of the Origin character Gale. He is a wizard and therefore has access to some special spells that are particularly suitable for a speedrun.
Directly after starting, Mae hops around the map as Gale, finishing the Nautiloid in just seconds, without even fighting once. This strategy continues. Within just a few minutes, the credits are already flashing across the screen.
How does it work? The trick is a combination of two spells, namely “Feather Fall” and “Enhance Leap.” The first spell completely prevents fall damage by making the character lighter. The second spell triples the character’s jump range.
In combination, these two spells allow extreme jumping during their duration, even jumping through (or over) some walls: jumps that were not intended by the developers. This allows Gale to jump from the second room of the Nautiloid directly to the “final battle” and trigger the cutscene for the crash on the beach in just one more jump.
Gale continues jumping across the entire map, skipping various events and battles to reach the mountain pass. Just before transitioning to the next map, Shadowheart joins his group – this is essential for the player to come into contact with the artifact that is so important to the story.
In the second area, Gale then kills Shadowheart, puts her in a box, and burns her, which shortly thereafter triggers the final scene of Act 2. Here, Gale can activate the explosion of his body, which triggers a “bad ending” – but one that counts as a full ending and even earns the achievement for completing the game.
What does that have to do with Shadowheart? The crucial trick in Act 2 is difficult to recognize at first glance but is necessary to reach the final cutscene.
The exploited mechanic is the fact that party members can trigger cutscenes – even if they are a corpse. Gale utilizes this by first killing Shadowheart, then placing her corpse in a box. Subsequently, he sets the box on fire and throws it across the entire map. It ends up at the end of Act 2 and breaks. Since Shadowheart’s corpse is now there, it triggers the corresponding cutscene. However, since Shadowheart is dead, Gale is instead “pulled into the conversation.”
This in turn allows Gale to detonate his bomb, killing himself and all enemies. This triggers the “bad ending.”
This “mechanic” has now been referred to in speedrunning circles as “Shadowboxing” – i.e., locking the dead Shadowheart in a box.
Whether one sees this as a “real” speedrun is, of course, up to each individual to decide. However, it does meet the criteria of an “Any%” run. In this case, the goal is simply to reach a valid ending of the game as quickly as possible – regardless of the means used.
In any case, it’s impressive to see what is possible in Baldur’s Gate 3 and especially how fast.
Although Baldur’s Gate 3 is really large, a lot of content did not make it into the finished game.
