Speedrunner Professor Palmer has beaten the Early Access version Baldur’s Gate 3 in just seven minutes, without engaging in a single round of combat. That’s quite a lot of time shaved off of what developer Larian Studios says should be around 20 hours of content currently available in the game.
For its Early Access launch, Baldur’s Gate 3 makes its entire first act playable. It’s all subject to change, of course, but what’s already there is impressive, offering players five companions to recruit and a wealth of quests to take on. Despite being only a fraction of the full game and more than a little rough around the edges, players who’ve already gotten on board for Baldur’s Gate 3’s Early Access period seem to be largely enjoying their time, with the biggest issues standing out in most reviews of the game being the many, many bugs still waiting to be ironed out.
Click the button below to start this article in quick view.
The game’s quirks also enable some pretty creative ways to play, though, including paving the way for Professor Palmer’s impressive seven-minute run. As Palmer shared in a video posted to the Baldur’s Gate 3 Steam community earlier today, his method involves using a spell to increase his jump distance, then simply leaping across the map to get to the current end of the game. As he later told Kotaku, Palmer achieved his seven-minute time after 200 runs through the game, which involved significantly more complicated tricks to skip certain sections and pages of notes to keep track of them all. In the end, though, he says he realized that Baldur’s Gate 3’s unfinished state means that players don’t actually need to complete any of its quests to reach the current end point, making hopping above it all a more viable option.
During Baldur’s Gate 3’s Early Access period, Larian is keeping an eye on player behavior to see what’s working and what isn’t in the game so far. So far, that’s led it to insights like where players are dying the most as well as revealing that a lot of them are choosing to fight Gale rather than recruit him and using the game’s rich character creator to give themselves the most generic starting character possible. Larian can use its peak into player habits to improve the game for its full release, and it may end up eliminating some of the cheapest ways to get through the first act in the process.
Professor Palmer’s first-act speedrun is impressive, but tackling the final game in that manner will be another challenge altogether. Baldur’s Gate 3 will grow several times longer and way more complex by the time it exits Early Access, meaning that speedrunners are going to have to up their game to keep making good time.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is available in Early Access now on Stadia and PC.
Source: professorpalmer9/Steam, Kotaku