Baldur’s Gate 3 is a massive CRPG that can engross you for hundreds of hours. It’s chock full of adventure, romance, and creative shenanigans that take multiple playthroughs to experience fully. But what if you’ve got dinner in the microwave and only have a few minutes?
Well, if you’re like Mae or ImTaiyl, you can beat Baldur’s Gate 3 in less than four minutes (not counting loading time) using a technique known as “Shadowboxing.”
What is Shadowboxing?
In Baldur’s Gate 3, you can typically only throw objects a certain distance from you. If you try to throw an object to an invalid location, the game simply won’t let you and the object will stay at its original position. However, the game will store the location you tried to move the object to.
Let’s say the object is a box that has an opening animation. For some reason, this animation breaks all logic. If you open the box, trigger the animation, and move the box to a valid location, the box will instead move to the invalid location you chose earlier.
This is already brimming with possibilities, but how is this relevant to the speedrun? Well, let’s say you want to trigger a cutscene at the end of Act 2 that takes you to one of the game’s endings. You would normally trigger the cutscene yourself by walking into it, but walking is slow and boring. Why do that when you can throw the corpse of one of your companions into the cutscene trigger? It turns out that a dead companion counts as a valid entity that can trigger the ending cutscene.
Unfortunately for Shadowheart, she is the easiest companion to find and kill for speedrunning purposes. The route for the Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrun involves brutally murdering your companion, stuffing her corpse into a box, setting the box on fire, and then launching the box across the map to the end of Act 2. Because the box is on fire, it will break soon after it lands, releasing poor Shadowheart’s corpse and activating the cutscene for one of the endings.
The current world record actually uses this technique twice during their run to transport the party to where they need to go. If you’d like to try this for yourself, ImTaiyl has put together a helpful tutorial.
Where do Baldur’s Gate 3 speedruns go from here?
Baldur’s Gate 3 is still a very recent game, and Shadowboxing was only discovered a few days ago. It’s hard to imagine the route becoming more optimized than it is now, but there’s still plenty of time to discover new glitches or strategies that can help bring the time even lower. Mae and ImTaiyl are the first speedrunners to break the four-minute barrier, but there will certainly be others as more players perform their own runs!
In the meantime, enjoy your microwave dinner and marvel at what people can achieve in the time it takes to reheat it.
