Thanks to a combination of glitches, sequence breaking, and some seriously skilled clicking, speedrunner Jiseed has turned Obsidian’s epic new RPG into a 40-minute cakewalk.
In this speedrun, which appears to be the current world record for Pillars of Eternity, Jiseed takes advantage of a few different game-breaking glitches to bypass chunks of the game that might otherwise take hours to complete. As pointed out by Redditor TheOnin over on the r/speedrun subreddit (one of my favorites), when Jiseed kills off his character early in the game and then goes through a screen transition, it’s automatically replaced by a level-7 Cipher, immediately giving him a giant leg up for the rest of the run. (Jiseed discovered this glitch last week.)
Then, Jiseed uses a major sequence break (around 17:10) to bypass all of Act Two, saving at least a few hours. You can see it all above. Really impressive stuff here. I love watching talented speedrunners figure out how to pick games apart.
You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.