Elden Ring speedrunners race to the bottom

theverge.com:

Elden Ring is just so massive and its bosses are so tough that the average player will probably take over 60 hours to beat it. But speedrunners, assisted by some traditional speedrunning tricks and the game’s own open design, have somehow managed to beat the sprawling game in under 30 minutes.

For a speedrunning enthusiast, the first days of a game’s release are extremely exciting. New techniques and optimizations are constantly being discovered, as boss behaviors and the runner’s own luck work with or against them, making almost every run a possible world record. While every runner is ostensibly competing against the clock, two runners have emerged in the Elden Ring speed community, each racing to post lower and lower times.

Lil Aggy is a popular member of the Souls speedrunning community, performing runs at Games Done Quick events and boasting second place in a number of categories for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. He was the first to post an Elden Ring speedrun of less than an hour.

FIRST PERSON IN THE WORLD TO COMPLETE ELDEN RING IN UNDER ONE HOUR pic.twitter.com/ukIwvxn1sW

“The main glitch in the run right now is something called wrong warping,” he explained to The Verge.

To achieve this unfathomably short time, runners are tricking the game via the sites of grace to teleport them to Crumbling Farum Azula, a late-game dungeon. There, they can access the boss fights required to complete the game in the same time it takes regular players to acquire Torrent.

But there’s an extremely wide and deadly gulf between accessing the final few bosses and defeating them when you’re a fresh-faced Tarnished.

“The general strategy right now is mostly just abusing a very overpowered Ash of War called Hoarfrost Stomp to steamroll the