After 800 hours of practice finally paid off, hitless runner explains why a no-hit run of Borderlands 2 was way harder than games like Dark Souls or Skyrim

gamesradar.com:

Hitless runner HeyBlasty finally bagged one of his white whales, a no-damage run of Borderlands 2, after more than 800 hours of routing, practice, and attempts. Astonishingly, the world-first feat was actually nabbed just hours earlier by another runner, darksmoke11, who was inspired by HeyBlasty and had spoken to him about strategies. In an interview with GamesRadar+, HeyBlasty reckons this is the hardest game he's ever done hitless – the pinnacle of a list of 112 games that includes the likes of Dark Souls, Skyrim, and Celeste.

My assumption going into our interview was that Borderlands 2, as an FPS with a lot of unpredictable and hitscan damage sources, would be a nightmare to do hitless, and much harder than outwardly difficult games like Dark Souls where damage is more clearly communicated. But HeyBlasty says the real killer is just how long the game is, and his decision to stream his final clears uninterrupted only ratcheted up the pressure. 

"That's something that a lot of people will think," he says of the difficulty. "And I'd say that is true just because the run is very long. But if I were to slice – for example, a run of Dark Souls 3 is like two hours, an hour and a half. If I were to slice an hour and a half of any part of Borderlands 2, there's not a single slice that would be harder than Dark Souls. And that's the way the game is routed. If you look at it from a casual perspective, a first-person shooter is not a game you can do hitless or damageless at all, but the way we do Borderlands makes it very doable." 

HeyBlasty has been poking at Borderlands 2 since December 2023, and at the beginning he was just hoping to clear the first chapter, assuming that "there was no way" to beat later chapters, let alone the full game, without taking damage. He didn't succeed at first, but soon returned to the idea and started theorycrafting with different characters. Vault Hunters like Zero and Gaige wouldn't work, so he eventually settled on Axton and his