On July 9, late into the evening, Twitch streamer Ainrun roared in aid after beating Elden Ring’s remaining boss. After a grueling two-and-a-half hours he had completed the sport with out taking a success from any enemy or spending a single rune to make his character stronger. “Oh my god it’s over dude, let’s go, sure!” he mentioned deliriously. “Oh my god dude fuck this recreation. Elden Ring rune degree one no-hit run, sure!”
Elden Ring could be a irritating however rewardingly troublesome recreation by itself phrases. As soon as full, nevertheless, die-hard followers have needed to discover different methods to maintain the problem alive. Speedrunners end the sport as rapidly as humanly doable (presently simply over an hour with out utilizing glitches). One has defeated each main boss utilizing solely their ass. Even amongst these feats, the no-hit, no-leveling runs maintain a particular place. There’s one thing each easy and extremely old-school in regards to the endeavor.
“I’ve been doing no-hit runs and velocity runs of FromSoftware video games ever since 2020, beginning with Darkish Souls 1,” Ainrun informed Kotaku in an electronic mail. He’s since achieved no-hit runs of all three Darkish Souls video games, in addition to Sekiro, and even accomplished a “trilogy” run the place the no-hit playthroughs needed to all occur sequentially. He’s now targeted on Elden Ring, whose open-world design permits for some attention-grabbing decisions and extra room for strategizing.
Whereas well-known Souls streamers like The Completely happy Hob have already accomplished RL1 No Hit Runs, these skip the sport’s first boss, the Grafted Scion. It’s a must to leap over a cliff and die to progress to the beginning of the sport, no matter whether or not the Scion is defeated. However the place different streamers bypassed the preliminary struggle, Ainrun considers it an vital a part of the run (he cheekily refers to his because the “greatest” model of this sort of run).
“I personally really feel like this breaks a sequence that the builders supposed you to undergo to progress with the sport, so I choose to do the struggle,” he mentioned. In his opinion, that first Scion is definitely one of many harder bosses within the no-hit run. “I spent a whole lot of time practising it, on the lookout for openings to make the most of,” he mentioned. “I used to be additionally motivated by the truth that a majority of different gamers select to skip this boss. For my part, a ‘problem’ run like what I’ve achieved is meant to be difficult, [so] utilizing shortcuts doesn’t actually make sense.” Gamers like YeetsMeMario have additionally integrated the Scion struggle into their runs.
From there it’s about executing a number of key methods towards a few particular bosses. Since there’s no leveling, character builds are fairly minimal, however nonetheless play an vital function. Ainrun prefers to wield the Serpent-Hunter nice spear because it’s fast, offers a lot of injury, and requires little funding. After choosing that up from Rykard’s boss area, he additional optimizes with the Ash of Battle Flame of the Redmanes. It does a whole lot of posture injury, and Ainrun’s objective is to stagger bosses after which punish them as a lot as doable whereas they’re shocked.
Whereas that’s a tried-and-true technique in Elden Ring usually, it’s particularly vital within the boss struggle towards Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy. In his serpent kind, his ”groundshock” assault is extremely onerous to dodge, so Ainrun makes certain to kill him earlier than he can ever get it off. “A member of my group referred to as Arham got here up with an excellent technique of utilizing sleep pots on Rykard at first of his part one that may sleep him for round two seconds,” he mentioned. “This struggle was probably the most exact struggle of the run the place I needed to execute completely.”
Gideon Ofnir is one other doozy. The sorcerer has an arsenal of splashy spells that must be confronted head on. Beforehand, gamers would skip him utilizing an out-of-bounds parkour trick. Within the newest patch that’s now not an possibility. One runner referred to as Vswed devised a technique to stunlock Gideon utilizing a bleed-spec Rapier. That didn’t work for Ainrun, nevertheless, so as an alternative he and his group settled on using crouch poking, which is extra typically utilized in PvP to roll-catch invaders. “This meant that I might simply kill this boss relying on my execution relatively than depend on [an] additional buff,” he mentioned.
However even with observe and planning runs can nonetheless finish in catastrophe. In an earlier RL1 No Hit run try the identical evening, Ainrun executed all the things completely solely to run right into a needle assault within the remaining moments of the ultimate boss struggle. “The Elden Beast was purported to do one other assault (Rings) that I normally use to determine the place the boss will seem subsequent and kill him as he comes up, however he did a needle rain assault as an alternative, which could be very troublesome to keep away from and the previous couple of needles clipped me and ended my run,” he mentioned. With out lacking a beat he began over and nailed all the things.
One of the wonderful issues in regards to the run isn’t even ending as a level-one scrub, however doing it so rapidly. At simply over two hours, the playthrough unfolds at a breakneck tempo. Subsequent, Ainrun is specializing in finishing the no-hit run trilogy by including a profitable All Primary Bosses try. As soon as that’s achieved he’ll sort out it with the “no leveling” requirement. Whereas Elden Ring will get DLC sooner or later, gamers like Ainrun present that even after a whole bunch of hours there are all the time new mountains to climb.
