GamesRPGBaldur’s GateBaldur’s Gate 3Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrunner beats Ketheric Thorm to death with 11,000 pounds of invisible bear, shaves another 2 minutes off her Honour Mode world recordWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesRPGBaldur’s GateBaldur’s Gate 3Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrunner beats Ketheric Thorm to death with 11,000 pounds of invisible bear, shaves another 2 minutes off her Honour Mode world recordWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Larian Studios)
Baldur’s Gate 3has something calledHonour 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:
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.
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.
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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 Maeisfighting, 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.
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2024 was still the year of Baldur’s Gate 3: Why we’re all still playing Larian’s once-in-a-decade RPG 16 months later
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The voice of Shadowheart, Jennifer English, would love to return to the role after Baldur’s Gate 3—as long as Hasbro doesn’t mess it up and ‘make her into a cartoon’
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