Elden Ring has been creating a huge buzz around the world in the last two weeks. Since its release, there’s been a huge amount of discussion about the game’s perceived difficulty, and near-universal praise for its overall content and design. However, the devil works hard, but the speedrunning community definitely works harder. After yesterday’s news that Dark Souls speedrunner Distortion 2 had completed the game in 34 minutes, the player has just gone one better. Today, they’ve posted their latest speedrun online, and it clocks in at an unbelievable 28 minutes and 59 seconds. This makes it the fastest completion of the game (so far and at the time of writing) in the entire world.
The Elden Ring speedrunning community is, of course, still being established. However, this is said to be the new fastest ‘Any%’ run. This means that the run skips large sections of the game entirely and makes use of a range of game exploits to make that happen. This is basically in order to reach the end of the game in the fastest possible time.
The fact that Distortion2 has managed to achieve this feat is pretty incredible, especially when you consider the well-reported difficulty of Elden Ring. What’s more, this will be the fifth time he’s done so. When you examine the sheer scale of Elden Ring’s open world and non-linear structure, this is all the more intriguing. 28 minutes is probably the amount of time many players would spend just working through the tutorial or opening segments of the game.
If you want to watch the latest video from Distortion2 to check out his record-setting new speedrun, you can do so here. Be warned, however, the video will contain portions of the game that don’t crop up until far later into the story, as well as endgame bosses and spoiler content. Watch with caution if you don’t want to spoil the experience for yourself.