If there's one thing I've learned from my time on the Internet, it's that you should never challenge the speedrunners. They live for a challenge, and Baldur'sGate3 is so open-ended that it's even entering the realm of immersive sims. That said, the speedrun tactics are suitably haphazard, and runner May was at the center of it all time and again. Please note that this is a spoiler.

First, there is the speed run that started this controversy. The game is technically legal because it spins credits, but it skips the entire third act by simply not playing. On Gail's chest is the Orb of Neceles. At the beginning of Act 2, a messenger from Mystra, the world's worst ex-lover, arrives and instructs Gail to self-destruct all over the game's main villains. Mainly to atomize Elder Brain and his three masters, but also to get the whole party caught in the explosion.

Then there's "shadow boxing," which May uses to make this even faster. She kills Shadowheart, stuffs her body into a container, and sets it on fire. End of Act 2.

As far as I can tell, this method works because it allows the box to be moved out of range to where Gail's big explosion cutscene is usually triggered. When it does, the fire destroys the box and the limp corpse of Shadowheart is dumped on top of its trigger, beginning the final encounter. Terrifying.

That's less than five minutes of playtime, but still not enough for some; as discovered by our friends at Gamesradar, Mae has gone to war.

"Pretending to win the game in the second act is so dumb," comments one. Another said it was "a mess and not a real speed run."

A third objector considered it "boring cheese" and called for the category to be banned. May took this personally." I now realize I was a fake speedrunner," they write, and you can almost hear their fists cracking. So I decided to break the "all acts" record by 12 minutes.

What followed is a masterpiece. With Gail gone, May has to do much more content than before. She captures Shadowheart and gets the anti-shapeshifting relic she carries in her pocket. Using the Enhance Leap spell as a weapon, she bunny hops into the second act. Shadowheart immediately beats May's custom gnome to death with his bare hands.

Incidentally, this is due to an infinite duration glitch that keeps Enhance Leap and Feather Fall on Mae's two-man army for the entire act, which is triggered by picking up the corpse and stuffing it into his inventory during turn-based mode.

Things get even wilder from there. To bypass Balthazar, one of the main bosses of Act II, May uses a cloud of mist, pickpockets a potion, and then reaches the end of Act II. I have no idea "how". May executes their glitches and exploits so quickly that I genuinely don't know half of what is going on.

At one point, everyone's least favorite shapeshifter, Orin, disguises himself as a child. May triggers a cutscene with the Shadowheart artifact:

"While the artifact cutscene is playing, the game cannot trigger Olin's cutscene, so Olin's cutscene is skipped entirely, but she does not return to her original boss form and remains disguised as a child; you cannot normally kill children in BG3, but you can damage them non-lethally, and by defeating Orin's child disguise, you have killed her."

I'll leave the rest to detectives with more esoteric knowledge than me, but I'd say safe safe - May grabbed Baldur's Gate 3, got down on one knee, and broke it. Nevertheless, given the nature of speedrunning, it's only a matter of time before the game breaks even more." The bear sex speedrun is almost over." May says in a pinned comment, but at this point it feels like a threat.