The Baldur's Gate 3 speedrun scene is heating up with a very wholesome war over a world record that's been traded back and forth multiple times over the past handful of days.
As of January 25, the world record for Baldur's Gate 3's any% all acts category - where you reach the game's true ending by any means necessary - was set at 19 minutes and 20 seconds by a runner named Mae. If you've spent any time looking at Baldur's Gate 3 speedruns you'll probably recognize Mae, since she holds records in almost every major category and played the game at AGDQ earlier this year, a presentation which remains probably the best explainer for how all the tricks in the run actually work.
Mae's 19:20 stood for 18 days, which might as well be an eternity for a speedrun game as new and popular as Baldur's Gate 3. But on February 13, another runner named bisc broke Mae's record by a full 44 seconds, bringing the overall time down to 18:35. That's a pretty ridiculous improvement over a record that stood for weeks, especially since as far as I can tell there've been no major new discoveries in the route. This run just had substantially better luck and execution than any that had come before.
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The very next day - Valentine's Day - Mae took that record back. In a run now archived under the name "and I took that personally," she brought the record down to 18:30, another five second improvement over bisc's record. "Trying to take my Baldur's Gate 3 speedrun records may result in unforeseen harm and new gold splits," Mae jokes in the video description. "Proceed with caution."
Of course, this is all in good fun. Mae explains in the YouTube comments that "It should go without saying but running with other people who can match my times makes things all the more enjoyable and I love having competition on the leaderboards, I just like trolling bisc."
But then, bisc apparently likes trolling too. They say in the YouTube comments: "And I'm taking this personally." Clearly, there's a lot more life in the Baldur's Gate 3 speedrun community yet.
These new records certainly widen the gap between speedruns for easy mode and Honour mode in Baldur's Gate 3.
