Elden Ring Can Be Beat In Under 30 Minutes And This Record Speedrun Proves It
The thing is, like most open-world games, Elden Ring actually has an incredible amount of optional content. It's likely that most players would argue that completing the game's main story isn't really the "point" of the game. Still, that's how you see one of the endings and get the credits, which is by classical reckoning the point at which you have "beaten" a game.
Because the vast, overwhelming majority of the content in the game is completely optional, you can in fact "beat" Elden Ring incredibly quickly. Under 30 minutes, as it happens, demonstrated skillfully by speedrunner and Twitch streamer Distortion2. You can see an archive of the run below, which he claims to be (and almost surely is) the world's first sub-30-minutes run.
***VIDEO CONTAINS SPOILERS*** (Our article does not)
With that said, we don't actually recommend watching the video if you are still playing Elden Ring or if you intend to do so, because obviously, as a game-winning speedrun, it is full of spoilers on late-game content. Even earlier than you think, in fact; by the eight-minute mark, Distortion2 is running around in areas most players won't see for at least fifty-plus hours.
This speedrun follows in the grand tradition of "breaking" open world games by skipping the majority of their content. Other legendary speedruns in this vein include beating The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in just 25 minutes, and the gigantic Elder Scrolls Part III: Morrowind in under three minutes, or even more impressively, under five minutes without glitches. Hats off to Distortion2 for making one of the hardest games in recent memory seem like child's play.
