For being a role-playing game based on 5e Dungeons & Dragons, Baldur’s Gate 3 is notoriously horny. Regardless of mythical race, gender, or social station, many of the game’s alluring party members are willing to at least spank you, and because of this, BG3 has a thriving and official sex speedrun category. For a time, there was little stopping you from watching a reality-bending interspecies cutscene within minutes of creating your custom character. But after developer Larian Studios issued its massive Patch #4 on November 2, Sex% speedruns are in jeopardy.
Githyanki warrior Lae’zel has so far been the premier choice for Sex%. Up until now, her requirements for getting naked were pretty low—speedrunners, like Mae, who currently holds the world record at one minute and 58 seconds to fuck, just needed to jack up her approval rating and seal the deal. But Patch #4 makes Lae’zel more selective with her partners.
“For Lae’zel to decide to romance you, you no longer only need to gain high enough approval from her,” Larian’s patch notes say. “You must also have proven yourself worthy through your actions.”
“Whereas bullying a tiefling used to be enough to get Lae’zel down horrendously for us,” Mae told me over email, “she now has new criteria that’s seemingly based on quest progression. We’re not entirely sure what all of the different ways we can fulfill that criteria are yet, but we’ve so far confirmed that resolving the druid grove questline in addition to the previous relationship requirements seems to do it.”
But “we’re still very much in the research phase of this new era of sex speedrunning,” Mae says, “so it’s too early to know [new strategies] for sure.”
Read More: Baldur’s Gate 3’s Latest Big Patch Brings Over 1,000 More Tweaks And Fixes
BG3 players on Reddit suggested speedrunners could move on to characters like Astarion, whose storylines make them willing romance partners in about two hours. The official Sex% category has also quickly adapted and added a separate “Patch 4+” category, which is no big deal, Mae says. “I think a lot of people think speedrunners take the category more seriously than we actually do. Like, yes, we’re going to optimize the hell out of it, but that’s because the concept of sex strats is too funny for us not to.”
And, less importantly for Sex%, but good to know for anyone without ulterior motives: Patch #4 also makes it so if “you initiate romance with Lae’zel for the first time in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, the romance path will […] jump straight into Act II,” and “you can no longer initiate romance with Lae’zel right after certain events in the crèche until she has cooled down a bit.”
This could all be for the better. “Keeping it fast for githyanki would have made sense from a lore perspective,” one popular comment on Mae’s YouTube video declaring traditional Sex%’s death said. But, post-patch, “It does make sense that [Lae’zel] might take her time with other races, since she is a huge racist.” There are bigger problems than fucking.
