There’s a new Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrun method, and it’s setting records by doing something unusual: putting Shadowheart in a box. BG3 speedrunners call it “Shadowboxing,” and the quirk in the popular RPG lets them skip the entirety of Act 2 and the Shadowlands before reaching an explosive ending. YouTuber ImTaiyl successfully pulled the method off and set a record of completing Baldur’s Gate 3:in 3:57:96 (thanks, IGN).
That’s three minutes – not three hours.
“This was a long time coming and blows my mind that this run has gotten this fast,” they said in the video description. “Its [sic] been a heck of a ride and im not stopping anytime soon.”
Shadowboxing builds on a set of tricks that speedrunners have used since the game launched, and it works best if you play with Gale as your Origin Character. No Dark Urges allowed here.
The idea is to avoid saving Shadowheart on the Nautiloid and then to skip other companions and use Gale’s Enhanced Leap and Feather Fall spells to leap through pretty much all of the Act 1 area, stopping only to hear Elminster’s spiel about Mystra before moving on to the Shadowlands.
The next bit is kind of gruesome and bizarre. Once you regain control of Gale, the trick is setting the ground on fire, killing Shadowheart, and putting her in the box, before setting the box into the fire. You then end up in the middle of Act 3, where Gale has a (bad) option to end the game.
It sounds weird, but ImTaiyl explains in a separate video that there’s a fascinating set of glitches behind the method.
BG3 has a box glitch where if you drag a box to an area that’s too far away, then open the box, and drag it somewhere nearby while the opening animation plays, the box will appear in that original, out-of-bounds area. The reason you need a dead Shadowheart and a blazing box is to trigger that Act 3 scene. Boxes break after catching fire, and ImTaiyl said that a dead companion will trigger the Act 3 cutscene.
The very precise trick is finding a glitched spot in the void at the start of Act 2’s Shadowlands to drop the box, so that when you set it on fire and put Shadowheart inside, it breaks, drops her over the scene trigger point, and lets you switch to her to enter Act 3.
Shadowboxing takes a sizeable amount of time off the older records, but ImTaiyl said they could’ve finished it even faster if it weren’t for an accident with the burning box.
Whether this set of glitches gets patched out in a future update or Larian lets it stay remains to be seen.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
