Baldur's Gate 3 can be beaten in 7 minutes, apparently
7 minutes isn't even long enough for character creation.
7 minutes! It'd take me thrice as long just to get through character creation, at least. Baldur's Gate 3 may only offer a portion of the final planned experience right now, but even that lengthy chunk has been boiled down to a mere 7 minutes by speedrunner Cary “Professor Palmer” Palmer, who's figured out a way to quite literally jump through the entire thing in the blink of an eye.
As reported by Kotaku, Palmer explains that his route involves killing nothing, speaking to nobody, and skipping every quest. All it requires are some firm jumping legs and a little bit of magic.
The trick, really, lies in using the Jump transmutation spell to triple his hop height, leaping over every combat encounter and skipping through most of the game's cutscenes. There's one real testing point, in that the player needs to make a successful investigation check to make it through a well into the Whispering Depths. But from then on, it's a simple case of soaring into the game's final area and completing the run.
Of course, there is some contention over whether this "counts" as a real speedrun. Palmer doesn't engage with the plot of the game basically at all, never even minding that - as the first act of an unfinished game - Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't really have an ending to speak of anyway. As it stands, his speedrun simply gets his character to the final point in the game's map.
To be fair, though, Palmer did make a go at trying a more conventional speedrun. He just realised that the lack of a concrete ending made it all a bit pointless.
"I was able to figure out a way to end the hardest fight in the game before it even started by utilizing a team member’s dead body," Palmer told Kotaku. "I was so proud of that strategy. However, when I reached the end of the game, I immediately realized that the storyline wasn’t resolved or continued, and it clicked that everything was actually optional because none of it is currently tied together."
To his credit, though, Palmer did note that he plans to route a separate, all-quests speedrun that does get through the meat and potatoes of Baldur's Gate 3. It's just a shame the character he's speedrunning with doesn't look nearly as fashionable as ours.