Elden Ring speedrunners race to the bottom

Image: Bandai Namco

The average player will probably take over 60 hours to beat Elden Ring because it is so tough. The game's open design and some traditional speed running tricks helped speed runners beat it in under 30 minutes.

The first days of a game's release are exciting for a speedrunning enthusiast. Boss behaviors and the runner's own luck work against them, making almost every run a possible world record. Two runners have emerged in the Elden Ring speed community, each racing to post lower and lower times, while every runner is ostensibly competing against the clock.

A popular member of the speedrunning community, Aggy is second in a number of categories for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and performs runs at Games Done Quick events. He was the first to post a speedrun.

The main glitch in the run right now is something called wrong warping.

Runners are tricking the game to get them to a late-game dungeon. They can access the boss fights needed to complete the game in the same time it takes regular players.

There is an extremely wide and deadly gulf between defeating the final few bosses and accessing them when you are a fresh-faced Tarnished.

He said that the general strategy right now is to steamroll the bosses with a very low level character called Hoarfrost Stomp. The weapon skill of the Icerind Hatchet is Hoarfrost Stomp, which can be found in Caria Manor. It covers the ground with ice spikes that explode.

Aggy's run was a matter of using the save feature and quitting the game to get rid of the boss, Hoarfrost Stomp against bosses he couldn't glitch, and hoping no stray enemy shot him with a lucky hit. The Black Blade had a run of 59:38 after a couple of unfortunate deaths. It was a world record that stood for a few hours before another runner beat him.

Another popular speedrunner is Distortion2. He holds several records and top 10 spots in FromSoftware games, like Aggy. The Elden Ring speedruns can be found on his channel almost daily, from 49:29 to 37:15, 36:20 to 33:55, and finally 28:59.

A lot of the same elements are present in his runs. They both start with the samurai class and run immediately to the Raya Lucaria Academy to get the key and the Icerind Hatchet, but their strategies differ a bit. The Royal Knight's Ash of War increases the damage of a player's next hit, giving him an extra edge in combat.

His progression to sub 30 minutes does feature some of the same pitfalls as Aggy, in that he will occasionally get got by a random enemy he is running by. The Godskin Duo fight causes problems because enemies hit him through objects and one-shot him.

These world records are impressive, but they are technically not official. Speedrun.com, the authority on video game speedrunning, decided to keep the Elden Ring leaderboards closed until March 18th. This is to give verifiers enough time to create a proper ruleset, as well as to decide which timing method and categories are appropriate, according to a mod post on the forum.

If runners can figure out how to make a specific glitch more reliable, this particular category of Elden Ring speedrunning can go even lower. A bug in the game can cause a character to be thrown over great distances.

In the early days of Elden Ring speedrunning, the Godskin Duo fight is a required boss fight. The only reason it isn't being implemented into runs is because it's unreliable. If glitch hunters can figure out how to make it work consistently, it could make the game even shorter.

He says in the video that the glitch could be one of the most game-breaking things to ever be in a Souls game.