If you’re going to rip and tear until it is done then maybe savor it a bit. Take your time, stop to smell the plasma. Try telling that to the speedrunner community, who, by employing tricks used in the 2016 iteration of DOOM, are already crushing DOOM Eternal speed times in under an hour. While the DOOM community is a dedicated group of players all doing their best to beat back the demon horde in as brisk a pace as possible, famed Soulsborne speedrunner Distortion2 appears as a runner to watch. His best attempts show him beating the recently released DOOM Eternal in under 50 minutes.
Distortion is known in the speedrunning community as the master of all things FromSoftware related, with multiple world record attempts in Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, and more, but he does occasionally branch out into other genres. Dis, as he is known to his Twitch community, is no stranger to the DOOM franchise, having held the world record title numerous times over the past few years in the Any% category–a type of speedrun where the only goal is to finish the game as fast as possible and by any means necessary.
Past world record attempts include completion of 2016’s DOOM on Any% in a few seconds over 33 minutes. Those unfamiliar with the tactics in speedrunning may be wondering how this is possible when you yourself could sometimes barely manage a double-jump or ledge grab in DOOM. The secret lies in the game’s architecture and a glitch that employs high-frame-rate maneuvers such as super jumping and what the community calls ‘rail boosts’ to reach amazing, normally unobtainable heights. These moves have a secondary effect of breaking the game world, allowing the player to go “out of bounds” or out of the confines of where the game expects you to play, allowing the runner to slink by obstacles in the game world with the greatest of ease.
The combination of the two glitches leads to insanely fast runs where the runner moves through the game space in seconds instead of hours. DOOM Eternal furthers this game-breaking with its new platforming system. Featured in the video above, Dis is able to chain super jumps together to create an almost gliding effect that isn’t normally possible, skipping huge swaths of levels while also jumping out of bounds.
One can assume that the 46:52 clear time isn’t Distortion2’s final form based on his past body of work (and a number of times he admits that he makes mistakes during the video. He has a few more days to fine-tune his run, as the Speedrun Dot Com leaderboard isn’t accepting world record attempts until March 30.
Will Dis take the world record? Only time will tell, but you can probably be sure he’ll be in contention for the best time.
