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Kind of unbelievable.
Elden Ring has been out for, what, twelve days, and I’m still bumbling around in a bloody great swamp and taking the odd break to get shivved by giant evil birds. In the realms of the talented, however, we have streamer LilAggy who, despite dying five times, has managed to clock up the first sub-hour completion time for the game: 59 minutes and 38 seconds.
While this record is inevitably going to fall (heck, probably by the end of the week), managing this landmark so soon after release has to be applauded as an incredible achievement.
LilAggy uses some in-game tricks that are intentional on the part of the designers: around 12 minutes in, he dies to a specific Virgin Abductor enemy that then warps the player to the Volcano Manor. He also uses some warp skips that FromSoftware didn’t include on purpose: «Basically I am repeatedly forcing the game to spawn me at a default position for whatever area I was in when I last died. This all leads up to me dying in the Farum Azula preview area and then spawning in the actual Farum Azula main area, then playing to the end of the game from there.»
Among the other exploits he takes advantage of is a trick that makes the Godskin Noble inactive if you enter the fog gate from max distance. I am currently stuck on this Godskinned bastard and it is going to take every ounce of my being not to use this glitch later tonight.
The streamer chose Samurai as his starting class because of the katana’s bleed damage, before switching to the Icerind Hatchet. The reason is a skill that comes in incredibly useful for killing bosses: «[it] doesn’t scale with your stats like normal attacks would; it’s damage is almost entirely based on what upgrade level your weapon is,» writes LilAggy. «Therefore I can just dump all my level ups into HP and FP without losing out on any significant amount of damage.»
The streamer reckons that sub-50 minute times should be possible, although that may depend on how quickly FromSoftware patches some of the exploits here that are definitely not supposed to be in the game. Either way: what an achievement.
Rich is a games journalist with 15 years’ experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as «[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike.»
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