Speedrunning is a fairly common practice on Elden Ring. While FromSoftware's game has only just been released, a lot of performance has already been achieved by gamers.
The record holder is Distortion2 , which for the past few weeks has been breaking its own speed records. So far, the player's best performance is finishing the game in 28 minutes and 29 seconds.
Most Elden Ring speerunners do it in "Any%", which means that all means are good in order to finish the game as quickly as possible, including bugs or other glitches.
A problematic update
Patch 1.03 brought many fixes to Elden Ring, including one that didn't sit well with speedrunning players: "Reduced damage from Ashes of War: Freezing Stomp and increased casting time" .
Indeed, Freezing Stomp is a very effective ash of war, commonly used by speedrunners. The reason is simple, these ashes of war are overpowering and the community had, on many occasions, brought back its totally disproportionate power. But on the other hand, it allows players to defeat various bosses in the game faster .
The fact that the damage as well as the casting time of this technique have been reduced will force players like Distortion2 to find other ways to smash the records.
"All that remains is to find the best way to defeat the bosses"
Distortion2 is not the only one concerned because many players devote themselves to the art of speedrunning on Elden Ring.
This is the case of LilAggy (first to speedrun the game in 2.5 hours) who, in an interview for Eurogamer , said: "With the Freezing Stomp that has been greatly toned down [...] the speedruns on the current patch currently have no way of competing with those of the previous patch.[...] On the bright side, pretty much all of the glitches we used to advance through the game still work, so it doesn't just have to find the best way to defeat the bosses ".
A recurring problem
It is true that, for all video games used for speedrunning, patches and updates are always a problem . The fact that these fix bugs used to achieve exploits is often an obstacle.
In general, speedrunners are content to perform on the old patch of the game or divide competitions into two categories: "old patch" and "current patch".
In the case of Elden Ring, we still don't know what will happen to the speedrun, but one thing is certain, players will always find a way to surprise us!
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