Elden Ring speedrunner breaks the game to beat it in under an hour

polygon.com:

The Soulborne games have always had a vibrant speedrunning community, so it’s no surprise that Elden Ring already has some impressive times. In fact, Twitch streamer LilAggy completed what seems to be the first sub one-hour run of the game on his stream on Wednesday.

As impressive as the video might be, don’t expect it to make your own Elden Ring play too much better. Beating the game in less than an hour requires quite a few glitches, bugs, and teleports, which LilAggy makes great use of.

He quickly runs past most of the game’s opening and gets himself ported all the way to one of the Elden Ring’s Volcano Manor, near Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy, one of last few demigods. After bugging out another boss, and picking up a few necessary upgrades, he makes his way to the Farum Azula, Elden Ring’s last area, and takes on the stack of bosses that guard the end of the game. While these give him a little more trouble than anything else up to that point, he still manages to dispatch them to achieve his unbelievable time.

While LilAggy seems to be the quickest so far, other speedrunners are approaching the game in a slightly different way. YouTuber Niko Bellic — named after Grand Theft Auto 4’s protagonist — uploaded a deathless run of the game that clocks in at about two and a half hours. This run still involves plenty of skips, but obviously cuts out a few of the death skips and glitches that faster runs like LilAggy’s make use of.

While both of these feats are extremely impressive, Elden Ring has still only been out for a couple of weeks now; the speedrunning community is only getting started. With such a wide open game and so many different ways to approach it, there are sure to be dozens of weird, unique, and extremely fast