Baldur's Gate 3's all acts speedrun record is now under 20 minutes, thanks to flying stealth bear one-shots
Ah yes, chucking a not-quite Halsin right at Ketheric’s face, the battle tactic we never knew we needed.
Baldur's Gate 3 speedruns have been a near endless source of entertainment for a good while now, with the latest milestone to have been achieved by runners being a sub-20 minute all acts playthrough. Oh, and Ketheric Thorm is casually one-shotted by a flying bear midway through it.
Whether it’s managing to bed Lae’zel in a fashion that even one of Larian’s romance quest designers thinks is cool, quickly dispatching honour mode in under 40 minutes, or, best of all, finding a way to rapidly get it on with Halsin in bear form, the community’s put out plenty of videos that you need to show your BG3-loving mates if you haven’t already. The latest of these, funnily enough, also involves bears.
Yup, runner Mae is still doing great things, having just managed to record the world’s first all acts BG3 run that clocks in under twenty minutes. Amusingly, the runner revealed on their Discord server that they first managed to pull off this feat in unrecorded and therefore unofficial fashion in the practice room at this year’s Awesome Games Done Quick event, adding: “So I decided I would simply do it again.”
That repeat run saw them romp through the game in a zippy 19 minutes and 20 seconds, with the biggest highlight taking place when their moustachioed halfling reaches the boss fight with Ketheric at the end of Act 2 (it occurs around the video’s eight minute mark). Having transformed Shadowheart into a bear using wildshape and made her invisible, Mae one-shots both stages of the battle by having this ursine buddy leap right at Thorm.
How does that work? Well, the answer, as Mae demonstrated in their actual AGDQ stream, is an exploit that combines the bear’s hefty bludgeoning damage with the boost that comes from catching someone off guard with a stealth attack.
To be fair, can you blame poor Ketheric for not expecting to suddenly have a massive invisible animal land on his bonce once, let alone twice in quick succession?
So, GG Mae and I’m honestly terrified to see what BG3 players will manage to do with bears next.
If you’re feeling bad about how good you are at Baldur’s Gate 3 after watching that, you’ll probably enjoy seeing this streamer’s honourable honour mode run end in truly tragic fashion.