Pass Baldur's Gate 3 in 10 minutes?

Pass Baldur’s Gate 3 in 10 minutes? Fastpass gamers have found the evil way again

According to the first week of gameplay data released by Larian Studios on August 11, only 368 players managed to pass Baldur’s Gate 3 in 3 days and 72 hours.

And a poll of a handful of players on the How Long to Beat website suggests that it will take an average of more than 80 hours to get through Baldur’s Gate 3 in near-perfect fashion.

The wealth of content in Baldur’s Gate 3 is evident. If you count the time spent pinching faces, reading the files for trial and error and reading the plot text, and even the two-weekend journey that opens up in order to experience the multiple endings, it’s not unusual to hitch hundreds of hours into the process. However, with less than two weeks to go before the game’s official release, most players are probably still in the midst of the first week of the game, with the exception of fastpass players.

The exception to this is the fast-passers: on August 13, Canadian gamer Mae uploaded a video of his fast-pass, meeting the producer list in just 10 minutes and 52 seconds.

The following day, he uploaded another video, setting the record at 10 minutes and 03 seconds. You heard right, not 10 hours, but 10 minutes.

Mae’s speedpass was a bit speculative. He went with the origin character, Gale, because one of Gale’s personal endings comes a little quicker and doesn’t even require beating all three chapters of the game.

[Note: The following contains mild Baldur’s Gate 3 Chapter 2 spoilers]

Gale is an unfortunate human mage who has an unstable mana orb implanted in his chest because of his relationship with Mistral, the goddess of magic. The power contained in this mana sphere is capable of destroying an entire city, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is a nuclear weapon in a magical worldview.

And in one of the episodes at the end of Chapter 2, Gale can follow the goddess’s instructions to detonate the mana ball and die with the villain.

Of course, this would certainly not solve the most central problem in the story, and it wouldn’t be a good ending by any stretch of the imagination. But since the game ends immediately after the self-detonation and pops up on the producer’s list, this is indeed an ending.

Mae, who sees this ending as the ultimate speed-passing goal, just needs to arrive at the end scene of Chapter 2 as soon as possible to rush Gale’s reincarnation. During the 10 minute and 03 second process, Mae doesn’t utilize any bugs and relies solely on her understanding of the game mechanics to get through the game.

At the character creation screen, Mae points Gale’s strength to 17, boosting the jumping distance to its maximum. With the help of Enhanced Jumping and Featherfall, Gale followed a carefully planned route over the mountains, skipping most of the gameplay elements that would have kept the average player stationed for dozens of hours over the course of the two chapters: scenery, dialog, battles, spinoffs, companions ……

For plot reasons, the half-elf cleric Shadowheart will be forced to join the party at the end of the first act, and her sheltering spells help Gale avoid several deadly attacks. Those battles that weren’t skipped helped Gale get to level 3, learn the Misty Step that has a teleportation effect, and then use that to escape the crucial boss fight at the end of chapter two.

Misty Step

On the lift before stepping into the last room of Chapter 2, Gail strips naked. This isn’t part of the speedpass strategy, simply because Gail can’t do anything on the lift.

So, clad only in a pair of underwear, Gale suddenly jumps in front of the villain and without hesitation chooses to blow himself up, accomplishing Mae’s speedpass record while going down in infamy as the most egregious exhibitionist and explosives maniac in the history of the continent of Feren.

On many subsequent attempts, Mae even optimized the process into 9 minutes at one point.

As one of the speedpass pioneers, Mae successfully applied for supertube access to the Baldur’s Gate 3 section of the Speedrun speedpass site. He designed three Speedrun programs, namely “Any%”, “Any% (No Gale)” and “Bear%”.

The first program is available as soon as you see the end credits, and Mae’s new record is filed here. The second item prohibits the player from using the Gale Self-Explosion speed game, which theoretically requires the player to beat all three chapters, which apparently takes longer.

The third item presumably refers to “going to Witch Mountain” with the bear, or rather the druid character Halsin, which Mae claims was made possible by the will of the forum players, and “I’m terrified to see what you’ll come up with.”

Scared as he is, Mae has already embarked on his fourth project. The new projects are called “Romance%” and “Sex%”, a preview of “Bear%”, and they don’t have to be bears, just random NPCs.

In the August 15 Speedpass attempt, Mae’s self-built character jumped up and down like Gale, winning the heart of Laezel, a female Gith Yankee warrior, in just 7 minutes and 54 seconds. That number was also condensed to 4 minutes and 12 seconds by him over the past two days.

The four speedpass projects are currently unchallenged except for Mae, but wait a little while longer, and when more players get through the game and eat up the content and mechanics, the Baldur’s Gate 3 speedpass community will grow even further, contributing even more jaw-dropping projects and records to the table.