Elden Ring speedrunners are summoning old Souls glitches to cheat death
While the rest of us are timidly exploring the forests of Limgrave for the first time, Elden Ring speedrunners are working out how to annihilate the Lands Between in record time.
Some of the time-honored, hacky strats from elder Soulsborne games are already being replicated. One trick, called the «deathcam», is a foundational glitch in what I think is one of the coolest Dark Souls skips from the original game. Activating the death camera by jumping off places that almost (but don't quite) kill you can sometimes be used to bypass obstacles—gates or fog walls that the game won't load while it assumes you're dead.
The real headache is hunting down these magical spots where you can take a not-quite-lethal leap of faith. In Elden Ring, speedrunner Ginz managed to find just such a spot off the edge of a broken bridge in Liurnia. They don't manage to climb back out of this dangerous perch without falling, but it's proof that the deathcam glitch is definitely still on the table.
Other players have been calling out additional deathcam glitch locations, like the one found by Zelkys in Greyoll's Dragonbarrow, and another bridge fall found by Electric Spark. It seems like Elden Ring's open world may have a lot more of these useful spots than the tight corridors of Souls games. The next order of business will be sorting out a practical application for the deathcam in Elden Ring and what speedrunners can skip past by using it.
Aside from glitching through the world with deathcam-powered skips, another crucially important part of playing Elden Ring quickly will be killing its bosses as fast as possible.
In Dark Souls games, runners sometimes pull this off with a trick called «moveswap», a glitch that transfers the attacks from one
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