The moderators at Speedrun.com are as busy as ever. It seems there is an Elden Ring record broken almost daily, which is great to see for the speedrunning community. Once again, the Elden Ring any-percent unrestricted world record has been broken.
Distortion2 bested two other runners, Ginz and Mitchriz, the other day with the first sub-nine-minute run of Elden Ring. Distortion2 improved on his previous world record of eight minutes and 56 seconds by shaving off almost two whole minutes. His current record now sits at six minutes and 59 seconds in game time, making it difficult for other runners to keep up.
From Distortion2’s commentary, it is clear there is room for improvement, especially when it comes to the “zip glitch” used throughout the run. The zip glitch is one of two main glitches used in the run, with the other being a wrong warp.
Wrong-warp glitches have been around in speedrunning for a long time. Even games like the original Super Mario Bros. has a wrong warp associated with its fastest speedrun. To see a wrong-warp in Elden Ring is not too surprising. The game has a lot of different teleport aspects within it. Whether it’s chests that transport players across the map or waygates sending players far away to new areas, teleports like these can be susceptible to wrong-warps.
The wrong-warp in the current any-percent unrestricted world record skips the largest portion of the game and teleports the player to one of the final two areas of a main story playthrough. This warp is used very early on in the any-percent run. In Distortion2’s new record, he wrong warped to the Crumbling Farum Azula within the first two minutes.
The other prominent glitch is the Elden Ring Zip Glitch. This is an incredibly powerful tool for Elden Ring speedrunners. With specific actions and precise timing, the character is launched through the air at a high velocity and “zips” around the map. This is used to get to out-of-bounds areas and skip big chunks of the game.
Distortion2’s route involves three “mega-zips” that kill the two bosses he interacts with. The first two are used to kill the two phases of Maliketh and the other is used to get the Elden Beast to fall off the map to its doom. Once the Elden Beast is defeated, it’s a simple interaction with the Elden Throne to complete the run.
It’s great to see how competitive Elden Ring speedrunning is and how fast runs have gotten. The any-percent category is shaving down to one of the fastest games to speedrun. Being that it’s so short to run, it may become similar to Super Mario Bros. in that the top runs will be close to frame-perfect and the only way to improve… is to be frame-perfect.
