Everything moves faster in Vegas, baby.
Watch as speedrunner Kungkobra demolishes Fallout: New Vegas in a ridiculous 19:52. Damn.
Some of the tricks used in this playthrough include:
- Breaking his own legs to gain speed. This works by saving and quickloading just before crippling your character; if done correctly the game grants you a 152 per cent speedboost.
- Playing the game in Italian, as it is quicker than the English voice acting.
- Skipping NPC dialogue through quicksaves.
- Clipping through walls using quicksaves — Kungkobra notes that “wall collision is kinda dodgy in this game”.
- Freezing enemies. As Kungkobra explains it, if you bring up the map screen and then place a custom marker fast enough, the process will halt enemies around you. This is how he blazes past difficult enemies — the speedrun is a lot of literal running through the wasteland.
Much of that might sound familiar if you’ve been keeping up with previous New Vegas world records, but what’s new here is the usage of what Kungkobra calls the “McCarran skip”. You can see it pretty early in this run, as it is a method that allows the player to enter the strip fast.
My favourite part, however, is watching Kungkobra murder both Benny and Mr House within the first ten minutes of the run. It normally takes me that long just to decide my SPECIAL stats! Nevermind that the game keeps trying to remind Kungkobra to go talk to Sunny Smiles when he’s clearly nearing the end game, heh.
You can check out the leaderboard for New Vegas here, or follow Kungkobra on Twitch here.
Comments
7 responses to “Fallout: New Vegas Beaten In Under 20 Minutes For A New World Record”
Another exploit run, these things are meaningless. The logic that allows exploiting things like quickload bugs and wall clipping is no different to the logic that allows using console commands.
I have a conversation with the guy next to me at work every now and then, where I comment I’d love to see how far performance enhancing could take things.
Could the 100m sprint be done in under 9 seconds for example, if you did EVERYTHING possible to increase your speed? Just as a comparitive exercise, how much would it help if steroids, blood doping, etc were all OK.
In swimming, we kind of got an idea with the swimsuits that shaved massive times (relatively speaking) off the records, and its only now, some 7 years later, that people are improving to the same point.
This is along those lines. Let them do it, just to see whats possible. For the common gamer, the exploits arent relevant, and in some corner of the net there would be a record for exploit free runs – that sight has a glitchless record FYI, amongst others.
Its interesting though that we never see those records in these stories. Its always any percentage runs,
I can do it even faster. Grant final quest, mark final quest complete. Finished in about 10 seconds. There’s no conceptual difference between using console commands and using exploits.
Yeah, and you can drive 100m faster in a car too, but thats not what I’m talking about either. Just within the basic situation, how far can you go with EVERYTHING in your favor?
If you think thats still cheating, thats fine too. They do have separate records for these things and you dont need to recognise or respect records that exploit like this. With my 100m example, I’d still want the current system to be the relevant one as well.
I get why it ticks some people off, and I’m not trying to sell these records as something totally legit, just that its an interesting look into maximising as much as you can. Like the sub-5 minute Super Mario (3?) story last week, where they’re shaving milliseconds off the record, its an interesting challenge.
I just don’t see the distinction. If a car is available to you and the basis of the race is to take advantage of everything (ie. nothing is illegal), why wouldn’t you jump in the car and win the race that way? Even if the rule was ‘no external tools’ (eg. no memory hacks, etc) then console commands would still be legal because they’re provided by the game.
The line on what’s allowed and what isn’t has to be drawn somewhere of course, I just think console commands and wall exploits and quickload glitches are on the same ‘ethical’ level – you either allow them both or you disallow them both.
I should be clear that it doesn’t tick me off, I just think the result is meaningless. I used to do speed runs of some games ages ago (Doom races led into speed leveling in WoW led into others) and I’ve always had a strong disregard for contests where memorising a sequence of bugs and exploiting them is the bulk of it, rather than making use of actual skill.
Hard one to define, but the any percentage records are done purely within the confines of the game, without resorting to that level. Its a fine line, I get that, but these are on one side of the line, while console commands are on the other.
Mainly because of what you say. It reduces the effort down to whoever can type the fastest, and hence makes it completely irrelevant. This still has some relevancy as they find ways to maximise those flaws. There ARE rules to these things, its not an anything goes scenario.
Its setting limits to what advantages you can use, namely down to the direct actions you can take to move forward. The 100m example would set the limit down to having to do it under your own power.
Its a grey area, on the darker end of the scale, and all I’m saying is that I like to see how far it can be taken within THAT limitation.
In one of the more popular race records, Super Mario Bros, playing the game normally lets you bypass a whole chunk of the game, legitimately, quite early on. There are also areas where you can run along the top of the screen to bypass most of a level.
Depending on your point of view, thats either cheating, or following a legitimate path the designers didnt think through.
But you can do both without any of the glitching usually used, so where does it stand to take advantage of those shortcuts? In one sense, they are no different to shortcutting in other ways.
You’ve reminded me of a scene from one of the Red Dwarf novels. If memory serves (been a few decades) the characters were discussing how genetic engineering was allowed in sports and how it ran rampant, annihilating “normal” sports with its constant one-upmanship enticing the fans. It hit its peak when a soccer team debuted its new goalie, who was literally a giant rectangular slab of flesh that filled the entire goal. That basically broke sports forever.