The Speedrunners trying to break ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’

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for the average player, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will take up 50 hours beat, that is, complete the main story of the game and save Hyrule. In it sprinting community? Just over 60 minutes. For regular players, conquer Tears of the Kingdom It’s all about diligence, patience and creative elaboration. For speedrunners, it’s all about using all the tools at your disposal to push the limits of what the latest version of Zelda will allow. His is a game of strategy, where each player competes against himself to work faster and smarter.

The first to claim victory, Carl Wernicke, what happens gymnast86 Online, he hails from the US and set the record for his community with a time of 1:34:33. He has a decade-long history of trying to win Zelda games as fast as he can. “It’s a completely different experience than just playing the game casually, and it’s possible to do both,” says Wernicke. “I really enjoyed my casual exploration of the game and will probably continue to enjoy it when I get to [completely] finishing it.”

In a video posted on May 12, which he (correctly) assumed would soon be outdated, Wernicke gives players a brief explanation of how he achieved his record. He explains what weapons he searched for, what parts he needed to put together using the game. fuse tool, and how he defeated each boss. The familiar technical problems of the last game, breath of the wild, aren’t present here, which means Wernicke speeds along without tinkering with any glitches or using Amiibo to unlock useful rewards, like weapons or the trusty steed Epona. Instead, the time he spent refining his routing was mostly focused on boss fights: how to approach each one “in a way that would yield decently consistent results without sacrificing too much time.”

But there is one thing that Wernicke wants to clarify. “The biggest misconception by far is that somehow I must have done this run right when the game was released without any prior practice or forethought,” he says. “While that would be very impressive, it’s just not the case.”

Wernicke had already sunk for about 35 hours in Tears of the Kingdom by the time he achieved his career. He not only played a leaked version of the game, but also bought it through the Australian eShop to get ahead of some gamers, and bought a physical copy to calculate load times between formats. The fact that the game is a sequel also played in its favor. “I didn’t have to get used to a fundamentally different system to get around well in this game,” he says. The basic mechanics and controls were already old.

Tears of the Kingdom Director Hidemaro Fujibayashi says the team anticipated that the players would try to circumvent the path laid out for them. If a player finds a way to dive right into Hyrule Castle, for example, that could break the game. While it’s possible someone could pull it off, Fujibayashi says, “it’s still within the realm of what we were hoping for as a potential outcome. We made the game so it doesn’t completely break it, but that’s, I think, a potential spot.”