The developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 put a lot of planning into making sure that players wouldn’t completely ruin the game’s story if they randomly decided to murder every NPC, but even Swen Vincke Nor was it predicted that speedrunners would actually bounce back throughout.
To be fair, do we have anyone? It feels like every time we see one of these mad dashes in a Larian RPG, there’s a new, very strange strategy emerging. From the now-infamous “Shadow Punch” tactic to one-hit flying invisible bears, it’s a shame we can’t see what kind of methods people could come up with to speed up the process of having sex with bears again, because Baldur’s Gate 4 doesn’t will become a thing.
Speaking to IGN, BG3 director Vincke talked about how he found people making fun of his game in the name of sheer speed, while also discussing why the studio chose to scrap some of the DLC for the game it started out with. Before giving up on the idea, keep trying. “No, no, I didn’t expect them to do that,” Vincke said of those who broke the ten-minute speedrun for the first time, using Gale to bounce around the game faster than you can run.
“The jumps surprised me because they jumped to very specific locations on the map and I was really impressed with the way they did it,” he continued. “I thought everything was going to be rushed, but I didn’t think they were. ” will skip the whole thing. “
Sadly, he says he’s only heard of “Shadow Boxing,” a tactic that involves killing poor Shadowheart, putting her in a box, and then tricking the game into moving around the map to really speed up the main story progress rather than seeing it with your own eyes.
That said, he does provide an interesting explanation for why Shadowheart talks to you so tenaciously at the beginning of the game. It turns out that she is the main representative of the BG3 n+1 principle. what is that? Is this a concept Larian introduced in Divinity: Original Sin to try and make the game’s story still work no matter how much players try to mess things up. “So, basically you always have to assume that all antagonists and protagonists are going to be killed by the player,” Vink explains, “and you still have to have a way to tell key parts of the story, which is the plus-one solution. It’s A fallback solution in case the player messes everything up, but they still need to know what they need to do.”
He added that there was at least one moment during development when Shadow Hearts had something like “24 [different] version for you [her Githyanki] Artifacts are just there to allow you to walk around the game without being hindered,” depending on how things go.
So, maybe thank her next time, huh? If you’re interested in finding out what would happen if Matt Mercer ended up being one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s narrators, check this out.