Most of us probably spent hours in the first town of Fallout: New Vegas. Here, you can watch someone beat the entire thing in a ridiculous 20:47.
That’s the latest world record speedrun time for New Vegas, and it was cracked by “Kungkobra.” You can watch the “any percentage” run below:
It can be a little difficult to understand what’s going on at the start, given how fast things move—but here’s what you need to know. The game is played in a different language because that’s an easy way of speeding up things up—turns out, the english voice actors for New Vegas don’t say lines as fast as the Italian voice actors. Funnily enough, even with that, the NPCs still take too much of the player’s time with blabber. So the speedrunner also makes use of a saving/quick loading exploit that can skip NPC dialogue.
Secondly, the character prioritizes Charisma and speech skills, and also tags the “Black Widow” perk for good measure. The idea is to empower the character such that she can talk her way into obtaining the Platinum Chip quickly.
You might also be baffled by the fact that Kungkobra immediately cripples themselves after leaving Doc Mitchell’s house. This is intentional! As it turns out, if you quickload before crippling your character, New Vegas will grant you a speedboost on the quickload, allowing your character to walk at 160% their normal speed. The timing on nailing that is tricky, though.
The playthrough is fantastic, and well-worth a watch—it’s hilarious to see KungKubra talking to Yes Man after only seven minutes into a New Vegas game, and hearing Benny in Italian is great, too. But it’s also worth noting the wider circumstances surrounding this speedrun as well. As r/speedrun notes, the world record for Fallout: New Vegas has been beaten not once, but three times over the last couple of days. First, Kungkobra got a 21:02 time on the 27th. Hours later, speedrunner Swags_The_Dog claimed the title with a 20:54 run. And earlier today, Kungkobra nabbed the prize once more with the speedrun embedded above. It’s been a wild week for Fallout: New Vegas!
You can check out the leaderboard for Fallout: New Vegas speedruns here.