Given that the 15-minute barrier was first broken two weeks ago, it’s wild that top players like Distortion2 and seeker have already managed to cut almost another ten minutes from that time, with the world record currently at 6:38 (above), politely by seekers. This particular speedrun category – Any% Unrestricted – is the only one where the ‘zippers’ you see that send the Tarnished soarers all over the world are allowed, and the run makes extensive use of the technique to cover the ground quickly and skip … well, pretty much everything. Zippers are technically possible on console as well as PC, but the trick is to hit several extremely specific frame windows in sequence, introduce large degrees of luck and variance when dealing with the less stable frame rate in the console version and make them inconsistent to the point where they are impractical. Heck, PC gamers have been known to refuel their resolutions just to guarantee optimal performance and make this difficult error more reliable, or even to use metronomes to help determine the timing.
This crazy run is now extremely optimized, which means there is not much room for additional time savings, which would take it much lower. In addition to a faster way to skip Maliketh near the end of the race, it’s mostly going to come down to zip execution, as even the best players miss out on dozens of attempts in these lightning-fast Elden Ring races. Consensus seems to be that there is still a minute (or even a little more) to be trimmed clean from reaching most of these frame-perfect inputs, and that’s no small feat. “I can see that time is barely going below six with a lot of grinding,” Seeker said in response to a comment on this world record video. “5:59 would be the ultimate goal.” It looks like the race is on to see who can stick the zippers and run that time down to what looks like the last big milestone by writing a time on 5:59 or better, and after trading the lead several times in the last week, seeker and Distortion2 must be the hot favorites. As the two do, sub-sex seems to be a matter of ‘when and by whom’ rather than ‘if’.
Interestingly, the Elden Ring patch 1.04, which landed yesterday, got a lot of other tricks and bugs used in other speedrun categories, but it seems that Any% Unrestricted was not hit at all – seeker even goes as far as to say that it “actually works better with the new patch,” probably since any improvement in performance naturally makes zippers more consistent. Runners of these other categories will not be so lucky and will probably end up using older unpatched versions so as not to lose things like the ‘Pegasus bug’ that allows Torrent to fly, or indeed any of the countless other time-saving tricks, which was lost with 1.04’s release.
Categories like Any% Unrestricted are obviously quite divisive, especially outside of speedrunning circles, where many do not see the value in a race that is just trying to break a game as much as possible instead of actually playing it. Still, even if you do not find this zipper-heavy barrel interesting, it’s hard to deny the skill involved in hitting so many of these ridiculous zippers, where positioning is crucial and input windows are often only a frame or two wide. Still, when you fly over everything, at least you do not even have to worry about grabbing the Elden Ring’s most powerful call to have your back.
If you prefer to see players actually beat bosses and play the Fire Ring a little closer to what could be considered ‘correct’, you can always check out some of the other categories. Yokai’s All Achievements race (above) somehow comes in under four hours despite having to beat all the big bosses, collect a lot of unique gear and meet the conditions for all three finishes to unlock all the Elden Ring achievements . The route here is particularly impressive, using all sorts of tricks to sequence-break the hell out of the game and grab gear and materials in a more optimized order. It’s hard to see a whole lot of time being trimmed from this race given the shopping list of tasks to be performed, though Yokai notes that this route should at least be able to get under 3:50:00. Although this run is also performed on PC (speedrun.com does not have a single current console time, in any category), most of the tricks used could be copied on Xbox right up until yesterday’s update, where many of them were fixed. I actually used some of the jumps myself on the console on my New Game ++ run, and grabbed the third and final finish I needed for completion in just a few hours as a result, including time spent learning the tricks.
The standard Any% category makes liberal use of a wealth of skips, so it would probably not be of much interest if you thought the fastest races break the game too much, even though it is another well-optimized category and is fast approaching 25- minute mark – less than a minute away, in fact, with RockCandy’s current WR for the zipper-free category at 25:48, though it will take some time to reach the next milestone. All Remembrances are among the longer popular categories (which you would expect from having to defeat all the big bosses) as they fell below 1:30:00 for the first time last week and now down to 1:26:00 on the nose, thanks to a run of catalystz that was first verified earlier today. As with most longer runs, there is still room for improvement as there is so much to do in this category and I am interested to see if any of the top players decide to play on the latest patch, now where so many abilities have been honed. That said, it will require a good bit of testing to see if anything new can match Sword of Night and Flame’s absurd damage output to dethrone the currently chosen weapon.
Last but not least – in fact, probably best, especially if you’re looking for gameplay as intended – the category is Any% No Wrong Warp, which is itself divided into subsets that either allow minor errors or are completely error-free. If you want to see clean showcases of gameplay skills and route planning, this is the place to look, especially as it does not rely on bugs that can be fixed, meaning this is the category with the most room to change / improve with each new patch. It is also the category where console gamers are most likely to be able to compete with the PC crowd. Alt F4’s 57:24 (above) is currently the WR race in this category, with ingne135 topping the completely flawless category almost exactly 20 minutes slower, but without falling back on breaking the game in even minor ways. Both should be interesting to follow, not least as there is more possibility that new builds and strategies may come into play based on balance changes, whereas even destroyed new builds in later patches would probably result in a net loss of time due to losing the big ones glitches. However, how much space is there to cut back on time? It’s a difficult one, and the scope is likely to change with each new patch, but with the game still only six weeks old, there are probably still plenty of time-saving strategies to discover, whether existing or new.
How long did it take you to hit the Fire Ring? I can tell you that none of my runs have quite get close to the seven-minute mark, but at least these groundbreaking Tarnished have taught me plenty of tricks, skips, and routes that I can use in future replays … and some that I can no longer thanks to patch 1.04. Oh yeah.