Baldur’s Gate 3‘s developers did a whole bunch of planning to ensure the player couldn’t totally ruin the game’s story if they randomly decided to murder every single NPC, but not even Swen Vincke predicted that speedrunners would literally bounce through the entire thing.
To be fair, did any of us? It feels like every time we’ve watched one of these madcap dashes through Larian’s RPG, there’s been a new and very weird strategy on display. From, the now infamous ‘Shadowboxing’ strategy to flying stealth bear one-shots, it’s a shame we aren’t going to get see what kinds of ways folks could have worked out to speed up the process of shagging a bear all over again, since Baldur’s Gate 4 isn’t going to be a thing.
Vincke, BG3’s director, discussed how he’s found watching people make a very entertaining mockery of his game in the name of pure speed during an interview with IGN that also saw him discuss why the studio elected to scrap some DLC for the game it’d started working on, before pivoting away from that idea. “No, no, I didn’t expect them to do it that way,” Vincke said of the folks who first cracked under the ten-minute mark speedrun wise by using Gale to bounce through the game way faster than you could ever run.
