Rage 2, Bethesda’s new post-apocalyptic shooter, takes place in a big, open world full of enemy outposts to clear and quests to grind through. That hasn’t stopped one speedrunner from already beating it in under two hours.
Over the weekend, speedrunner CreeperHntr set the Any% world record for Rage 2 with a time of 1:53:26 after days of trying to work out an ideal route through the game and the best way to take advantage of the various out of bounds glitches players have found since the game came out on May 14. For all of its problems, Rage 2 has some precise and elegant shooting, which comes through beautifully in CreeperHntr’s run.
CreeperHntr’s current route focuses on trying to the get the game’s rocket launcher as quickly as possible, since it stuns bosses and thus shaves lots of time and difficulty, and boosting all of the game’s three characters to level five along the way to unlock their secondary quests, which are required to finish the game.
Out-of-bounds glitches are also key. Currently two have been discovered that help cut down on time. The first skips much of the labyrinthine Genetic Research Station in the Double Cross mission.
The other, in the Beneath the Surface mission, requires climbing up into the area’s rafters and into a closed-off section of the map that immediately breaks the game and allows players to quickly bypass even more of Rage 2.
The run also partly relies on Rage 2’s arsenal of special abilities and performance-boosting perks. Upgrades to reload speed and movement speed, both while sprinting and aiming down the sights, help CreeperHntr get through the game more quickly. Abilities like Rush, which lets you blink forward several feet, and Grav Jump, a double jump that makes it possible to platform out of bounds, are also key.
CreeperHntr mostly speedruns first-person action games like Prey, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and Dishonored 2. They also currently hold the world record for the legacy rules category in 2016’s Doom. Since Rage 2 has a lot in common with the most recent Doom, as Id Software was involved in creating both, it’s a natural fit for the speedrunner.
“I’d say that the gunplay is what really makes it fun,” CreeperHntr told Kotaku in an email. “It feels like an open-world version of Doom.” That open-world aspect means there’s still plenty of ways to improve on CreeperHntr’s initial world record. CreepHntr said that other players are working on ways to skip the game’s lengthy tutorials, while simply perfecting the current route would lead to a time of close to 1:40.
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