Baldur’s Gate 3’s Honour Mode is inherently hard — not only is it played at the game’s highest difficulty setting, but it limits players to a single save file. No save-scumming here! Since the Honour Mode update was released on Nov. 30, 464 Baldur’s Gate 3 parties have completed the game in that mode, compared to the 34,000 players who have failed their attempts, according to statistics released by Larian on Dec. 5.
All this is to reiterate that it’s hard, which makes it all the more impressive that one speed runner, who goes by Chronos online, beat Baldur’s Gate 3 in Honour Mode in just over 38 minutes. He completed the game in Honour Mode within seven hours of its release, likely making him one of the first people to beat it.
“It is definitely one of my best gaming achievements that I’ve ever accomplished, and that’s saying a lot since I’ve had quite the career in speedrunning from holding world records in many different games and working with so many amazing people,” Chronos told Polygon.
Just after Honour Mode was released, Chronos started playing around with mechanics and strategies.
“This includes throwing fireworks at the Netherbrain, using witchbolt on Ketheric, throwing Gortash off the edge, and many more just to see if everything that has been used in speedruns of All Acts in the past are still viable,” he said. Not everything worked, but after planning a route and testing tricks, he started streaming his attempts. It took 10 attempts, or four to five hours of Baldur’s Gate 3 runs, to beat the game in Honour Mode in 38 minutes and eight seconds.
There are a lot of silly tricks used to get to the end of Baldur’s Gate 3 fast and safely, one of which is stuffing Shadowheart in a box to teleport her into a mountain pass — a glitch called “Shadowboxing,” naturally, Chronos said. To defeat Gortash quickly, Chronos said he simply kidnapped him and threw him off a cliff. And to get to the final fight of Baldur’s Gate 3, he said the best thing to do is to have the pixie turn you into a frog “to be able to wall-clip through the brain stem.”
If you want to watch Chronos’ full run, we’ve embedded the video above. But if you’re looking to do this yourself, he’s got a bunch of tips and tricks on his YouTube page.
