If there's one thing I've learned from my time on the internet, it's that you never, ever challenge a speedrunner. They live for challenges. Baldur's Gate 3 is so open-ended it nudges into immersive sim territory—which means that its speedrun tactics have been suitably hare-brained, and runner Mae has been at the centre of them time and time again. Heads up, I'll be getting into some spoiler territory here.
First, there's the speedrun that kicked off this whole controversy. It's technically legit, since the game rolls its credits, but it skips the whole of Act 3 by simply… not playing it. See, Gale's got a Netherese Orb in his chest. At the start of Act 2 a messenger from the world's worst ex, Mystra, arrives and instructs Gale to blow himself up all over the game's main villains. This ends the game prematurely—mainly due to the Elder Brain and its three taskmasters getting atomised, but also because your whole party's caught in the explosion too.
