Baldur's Gate 3 has something called Honour Mode—an optional, permadeath difficulty that's supposed to be the hardest challenge it has to offer. Naturally, a speedrunner just cleared it in under 20 minutes.
While I was over here laboriously planning builds and tentatively shuffling my way through three acts of terrifying boss fights, Mae was studying the way of the bear—the orbital bear, to be precise. In case you're unfamiliar, here's the cliffnotes on why this strategy works:
- When a creature falls on another in Baldur's Gate 3, it deals damage.
- That damage is based on the weight of the offending creature and the distance they fell.
- This damage doesn't have an upper cap.
- This damage is applied without a Saving Throw.
- Increasing the size of a creature also increases its weight.
- For some reason, falling onto someone while invisible doesn't trigger combat.
Prolific speedrunner Mae (thanks, GamesRadar) on YouTube has once again weaponised this sacred technique to help her blitz through Larian's toughest challenge, beating it in around the time it takes for me to go to the shop for some milk.
The timestamp here is more notable than the techniques employed. There's not much new here, Mae's just playing the hits in record time. Glitching out buff spells by beating her party members to death, kidnapping Gortash and hurling him off a bridge, and who could forget: trapping Orin in the body of a child, stuffing a party member's corpse into her pockets, shoving her with a mage hand, then swapping places with that body at the exact moment the game plonks Orin into a dev room (a checkerboard plane of reality used by the developers for testing).
From there, she's able to swipe up the netherstones with zero effort. You know. Normal adventurer stuff.
What staggers me is that this isn't even the upper limit—there's still a perfect run out there. For example, Mae has to cast command twice on everyone's favourite lantern-carrying drider in Act 2—and at around 18 minutes, she hits a 'softlock' that forces her to exit to the main menu and reload the game. We'll be seeing this record shattered again whenever the dice roll in her favour, I'm sure.
This brings the Honour Mode speedrun to within 12 seconds of Mae's all-acts record on the game's regular difficulty settings—though that's not too much of a surprise. For us plodding plebs who care about things like character builds, Honour Mode presents a whole host of new challenges.
For a speedrunner, though, the only major obstacles are some buffed health pools. You're already skipping over most of the game anyway, and even when Mae is fighting, she's doing so in the form of an invisible bear repeatedly belly-dropping a powerless avatar of bones—or launching a silo of suped-up magic missiles that could kill just about anything. Difficulty settings, clearly, are beneath such godlike power.
