Elden Ring players, look away. This will just infuriate you. Get back to trying to beat that boss you're stuck on without changing your approach to it at all - it'll work eventually, I promise. Looking away? Good. Now let's talk about the guy who just beat the game in 33 minutes.
That's right - just weeks after launch, the ultra-hard FromSoft game has been bested in a little over half an hour. Streamer Distortion2 earned the record just a few hours ago - and the time is dropping rapidly. Distorion2 has been consistently beating the record most days this week, and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
While the speedrun.com leaderboards for Elden Ring haven't opened yet, it appears that Distortion2 has the record. No faster recorded time has been shared at the time of writing.
If you're wondering how on earth this is possible, it all comes down to wrongwarping. Anyone who's followed speedrunning before would have seen this in many other games. Essentially, it's tricking the game into warping you into the wrong place, meaning you can die and end up in a different location than you usually would upon respawning. Distortion2 makes use of this immediately, beating the huge game in a fraction of the time it would take normally.
For those of you who aren't familiar with speedrunning lingo, this speedrun is in the any% category. This means that the runner simply has to get to the end of the game as fast as possible, using any route. Side content, or indeed, content that is usually mandatory, can be skipped if you find a way. This differs from categories such as 100% - requiring the completion of all content - or glitchless, which would forbid the use of wrongwarping.
While the speedrunning community breaks the game apart, players making their way through Elden Ring as FromSoft intended are also trying to understand it as best they can. Some fans banded together to create a soft-cap sheet, so they know when their stats stop levelling up at their maximum potential.