Powered by spite, Baldur's Gate 3 speedrunner cleaves 12 minutes off the world record with dozens of glitches—like trapping a villain in a child's body and knocking them out

pcgamer.com:

If there's one thing I've learned from my time on the internet, it's that you never, ever challenge a speedrunner. They live for challenges. Baldur's Gate 3 is so open-ended it nudges into immersive sim territory—which means that its speedrun tactics have been suitably hare-brained, and runner Mae has been at the centre of them time and time again. Heads up, I'll be getting into some spoiler territory here.

First, there's the speedrun that kicked off this whole controversy. It's technically legit, since the game rolls its credits, but it skips the whole of Act 3 by simply… not playing it. See, Gale's got a Netherese Orb in his chest. At the start of Act 2 a messenger from the world's worst ex, Mystra, arrives and instructs Gale to blow himself up all over the game's main villains. This ends the game prematurely—mainly due to the Elder Brain and its three taskmasters getting atomised, but also because your whole party's caught in the explosion too. 

Then there's "Shadowboxing", which Mae used to make that run even faster. Kill Shadowheart, cram her body into a container, and light it on fire—and then you're, uh. You're at the end of Act 2. 

From what I can research, this works because you can move the box out of bounds to where Gale's big explosion cutscene would usually trigger. Then the fire destroys the box, dumps Shadowheart's limp body onto that trigger, and begins the final encounter. Horrifying.

This brings the run to under five minutes, but that still wasn't good enough for some people. As spotted by our friends over at Gamesradar, Mae's gone on the warpath.

«Pretending like you beat the game in Act 2 is so dumb,» reads one comment. Another calls it a «mess, not a real speedrun.» A third detractor deemed it