Elden Ring speedrunning takes a whole community

polygon.com:

It’s easy to marvel at the feats of speedrunners, especially players who are currently working on speedruns of the hard-as-hell adventure Elden Ring. These highly technical players can condense a difficult and enormous game into a mere 19-minute playthrough, with a combination of technical skill, glitches, and exploits. The game was only released in late February, but players continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible. To better understand just what it takes to speedrun FromSoftware’s latest game, Polygon spoke with Tom “LilAggy’’ Agnew, who currently holds a personal record of 59:38 and was one of the speedrunners to beat the game in under an hour.

Speedrunners will try to beat a game from start to finish as quickly as possible, while also adhering to a set of rules. For Elden Ring, this means starting a new save file and playing through the character customization screen, doing what it takes to slay the Elden Beast, and rolling to the end of credits. LilAggy, and sub-20 minute speedrunner Distortion2 (who beat the game in a stunningly short 18:57), compete in a category of speedrunning called “Any%,” where all glitches are fair game.

From the get-go, LilAggy knew that he would speedrun Elden Ring since he’s a Soulslike streamer who pulled off other challenging runs, like beating all of Dark Souls using only poop as a weapon. He told Polygon over email that the idea of speedrunning Elden Ring especially appealed to him because it would “lead to a very different kind of run than the previous Soulslike games,” since the previous games were more linear and required you to progress through multiple bosses before reaching the end. In Elden Ring, if your character is strong enough (and skilled enough) you can run