Even Elden Ring speedrunners can’t keep up with it

digitaltrends.com:

If you don’t know anything about speed runs, their most basic principle is that they’re fast. Players finish games at blistering speeds, and in Elden Ring‘s case, they whittle down the game’s 80-hour playtime to less than you’d spend watching a cartoon. But now, Elden Ring‘s speedrunning scene itself is moving too fast for players to keep up.

One runner, Mitchriz, knows that better than anyone else.

Mitchriz is the same person who did a run of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice blindfolded during AGDQ 2022, and at the time, he told me that he wanted to be the number one Elden Ring speedrunner — and for a while he was. I spoke to him recently, after he’d beaten the game in 12:32, a new world record. In the middle of our conversation, that record was shattered by another speedrunner, Distortion2.

By the time of writing, just three days after our interview, that record had been left in the dust thanks to a new strategy that let Mitchriz beat the game in 9:40. Distortion2 would then crush that time by beating the game in 8:56. By the time you’re reading this, that record will most likely be considered slow, because, as Mitchriz told me, Elden Ring‘s speedrunning community simply won’t stop improving.

Before you did this run, you had another that was fantastic that you couldn’t count because a minute of it wasn’t recorded. What was the time?

That was 18:25, that was back before we found these mega zips, so that was, I don’t know, a week ago, roughly.

So mega zips were discovered and now you’ve hit a sub-13. What’s a mega zip?

OK, so. First, to explain what a zip is: You block and then, 2.1 seconds later, you walk forward for a specific number of frames, and the game just kind of teleports you forward with super high speed for some