Starfield: A New Speedrunning Dimension
Starfield, the popular Bethesda’s game featuring sprawling galaxies that players spend hours exploring, has a whole new dimension recently. While some players are enthralled by the game's ship-building mechanics and similar activities, there are others who are breaking records by completing the game at an insane pace.
The Speedrun Wonder: 'SupaScared'
In stark contrast to the majority of players, speedrunner 'SupaScared' recently made headlines when they completed Starfield’s New Game+ mode in just over 50 minutes. Despite this achievement, SupaScared believes they can further shorten the game’s completion time.
The Any% Run
The speedrunner has been fine-tuning their Any% run, a style of speedrunning that focuses on finishing the game as quickly as possible regardless of completion percentage. By skillfully navigating through the game, SupaScared is able to bypass the main quest line and focus solely on collecting the six artifacts required to complete the game.
Strategy and Challenges
SupaScared's strategy involves using a lot of boost-pack travel to get from one location to another. According to SupaScared, the speedrunning approach largely involves running past most combat encounters on their way to the artifacts. In their recent speedrun, they were fortunate enough to get a powerful weapon at the start of the run, which facilitated their progress.
In addition to having good fortune with weapon allocation, the skilled speedrunner was able to make the most of the Assassin’s Advanced Shotgun to swiftly eliminate anyone that stood in their way. SupaScared also capitalized on their high Boost Pack Training for fast traversal. The main hindrance to their completion time was the unskippable cutscenes for landing and taking off from planets.
Future Projections
SupaScared believes they can improve their time by at least 20 minutes, which would bring their completion close to the half-hour mark. Despite achieving this on an Xbox Series X console, they disclosed that loading screens did not impact the runtime.
The Community and Competition
Speedrunner communities are often seen preparing for competitions such as the opening of the Starfield Leaderboards on Speedrun.com on September 20th. In the meantime, SupaScared's impressive achievement has indeed set a high standard for other Starfield speedrunners.