Elden Ring speedrunner breaks down what it takes

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. This group of highly-skilled players is able to compress a complex and difficult game into just 19 minutes using a mixture of glitches, technical skill 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.

Speed runners will attempt to win a game as fast as they can while adhering strictly to certain rules. To view the full list of rules, click here Elden RingThis means that you will need to create a save file, play through the character customization screen and then roll to the 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.

LilAggy had known from the start that he was going to speedrun Elden Ring since he’s a Soulslike streamer who pulled off other challenging runs, like beating all of Dark SoulsOnly poop can be used as a weapon. Polygon received an email from him confirming that speedrunning was his idea. 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. You can find it here. Elden RingYou can also run to the final if you have a strong character (and are skilled enough), as in most open-world games. LilAggy stated that this left many choices for speedrun approaches.

The larger community’s prior experience with other Soulslikes helped give LilAggy a starting point for speedrunning the new game. Elden RingRuns on the same engine as Souls game, which means that many glitches from these games are carried over. “Right off the bat the community knew what kind of exploits and techniques to experiment with to see if they worked in Elden Ring,” he said.

Some techniques like “wrong warps,” where players use spawn points to skip vast portions of the game, carried over from previous games. “I think the most surprising thing was how simple it was to wrong warp in Elden Ring.” He said, “All it takes is respawning or fast-traveling to the right location and then immediately quitting out of the game.

Although it’s easy to fix all of our attention on the streamers who execute the feats, LilAggy stressed the importance of the larger community in speedrunning. Everyone brings their own talents and helps others to find the most efficient way through speedrunning.

“Some people are very talented at finding glitches, others are good at figuring out how to utilize these glitches to form a route for the speedrun, and others just focus on executing the speedrun using this knowledge,” he said.

Despite the knowledge and expertise speedrunning requires, LilAggy sees other players giving speedrunners flak for not enjoying the game “properly,” since Any% runs use glitches to play the game. “I’d hope this would be obvious, but any person that’s speedrunning a game does so because they love it,” he said. LilAggy was already playing the game for about 75 hours before he began speedrunning.

“I can see how the abuse of glitches and exploits can be off-putting to some, but there’s a real beauty and art to figuring out exactly how to break games like this wide open, and oftentimes is much, much harder than playing the game normally.”