Starfield speedrunner engages ludicrous speed, completes New Game+ in under an hour
Most of us are spending our first days of Starfield seeing the sights in space and enjoying the sandbox of it all. But speedrunning never sleeps, so folks who are well-practiced at breaking Bethesda games are of course completing it quicker than you'll believe. Speedrunner SupaScared already has a playthrough on Starfield New Game+ down to a surprisingly efficient 50 minutes.
SupaScared is working on an Any% run here, meaning he's making a beeline for six artifacts to complete the game and roll credits. Unlike the 3 hour speedrun of a first playthrough we saw tested yesterday, NG+ allows Supa to keep all his skills and abilities from his initial playthrough and, crucially, skip the main quest as well.
Supa starts out by using the Starfield boost pack to do a lot of bunny hopping to destinations, which is pretty easy on the eyes and ears as far as movement tech in Bethesda game speedruns goes. Reload dashing in Fallout New Vegas is haunting in comparison.
"Skipping the majority on the main quest and doing the Among the Stars quest before finishing with Revelation and One Giant Leap," Supa explains of his current speedrun route in the description of a prior attempt that clocked in at 57:52. "Sarah gives you a random weapon at the start of the game but you can avoid most enemies until the end."
He does manage to pull a lucky drop from that random weapon in the 50 minute run: an Assassin's Advanced Shotty which makes real short work of pirates in the remainder of the run. One obstacle that SupaScared doesn't have a way to skip yet are those lengthy cockpit sitting and landing animations that take several seconds apiece every time he needs to fly anywhere. My kingdom to whoever figures out how to glitch past those.
As Supa says, a big chunk of the run is sprinting past combat encounters on the way to pick up the artifacts. No doubt there's plenty of time left to be shaved off by optimizing those routes and avoiding collision with enemy spawns, though it seems that Starfield's boost pack and mantling are both really nice native systems to help with mobility in a run.
SupaScared says he's playing on an Xbox Series X and hopes to get this NG+ Any% run down to around 30 minutes on console if possible. No doubt he and others will be making more strides towards those tiny timestamps in the next few weeks before the official Speedrun.com leaderboards for Starfield open up on September 20.