One of Baldur's Gate 3's leading speedrunners has returned after five months, reigniting the game's hottest rivalry by setting a new world record and stating that she's coming for the other categories too.
Mae is one of the biggest names in Baldur's Gate 3 speedrunning, having held records in all three of the RPG's major categories. The biggest of those is Any% (All Acts), which requires runners to get to the game's true ending, but the far faster category is Any%, which can be triggered by getting the credits to roll at the end of Act 2. Even faster than that is Sex%, but that's extremely silly, so we're not worrying about it right now.
In the weeks after Baldur's Gate 3 release, Mae set repeated records, eventually establishing a time of 3.31 that she "didn't think was possible to beat." Five months after that, however, rival runner Bisc established a new record, beating Mae's time by just under three seconds to set a record of 3.28. Now, six months later, Mae's returned to the scene, shaving an extra five seconds off Bisc's time to reclaim her title with a time of 6.23.
Interestingly, while Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 7 dropped over the weekend, Mae turned back the clock nearly a year in order to set the new record. While Bisc's time was set on Patch 4 and other top ten times were mostly set on patches 4, 5, or 6, Mae's new world record time was set in Patch 2, which was live for less than a month in September 2023. Sadly, she doesn't explain why she opted for this specific version of the game, but it does seem as though this new record is a result of more than sheer optimization, implying it could drop lower.
At the end of the video, Mae confirms that she'll be coming back to reclaim more of her crowns, announcing that "I will be tackling other categories too." There are four other categories in Baldur's Gate 3's page on key community leaderboard Speedrun.com; Any% (All Acts) is split into Explorer and Honour Mode, while Sex% is divided up between times set before and after the updates that severely restricted the category. Mae sits in fourth on Explorer Mode, and second in Honour Mode and both Sex% categories, less than 100 seconds behind Bisc on all four counts. Of course, more than a minute is a substantial hurdle to overcome in any speedrun, let alone those as tight as these, but it seems as though the hottest rivalry in CRPG speedrunning is reigniting regardless.
