10 Secret Video Game Shortcuts You DEFINITELY Missed

Once again, we return to the Soulsborne speedrunning community for our next shortcut. While you may not have missed the massive door at the Shrine of Winter that you return to late game. Once it is opened, you can continue to Dark Souls 2's end game proper.

The prompt that appears tells you that you need four great souls (read: beat the game's main bosses), or an extortionately huge number of regular souls (the game's expendable currency) to unlock it. That is, an amount to the tune of one million souls.

This obviously seems a monumental task, so Dark Souls 2 speedrunners would normally find a multitude of different glitches to get them to each Lord Soul quicker. Until, of course, someone figured out a shortcut. The ugly fellow pictured above is a boss called The Rotten, who bestows a fairly substantial number of souls when defeated.

In Dark Souls 2, you can use an item called a "bonfire aesthetic" to reset all of the enemies in the area and make them harder. This entails them dropping more souls, as they are more difficult to defeat. One canny speedrunner figured out that it is actually an awful lot quicker to use these items to respawn and kill the gruesome Rotten four times in a row than to defeat the other bosses.

With practice and a thrusting weapon The Rotten becomes relatively trivial, allowing you to skip to endgame fairly early on.