10 Video Games Broken Beyond Belief While Speedrunning
4. Skyrim
Considering how buggy Bethesda games are, it's not a shock to learn that there are plenty of ways to manipulate and break them for the sake of speedrunning, and that's exactly what's happened to Skyrim, with a 2019 run - through the main questline only - clocking in at a staggering 23 minutes and 45 seconds.
If you've somehow never played Skyrim, it contains well over 100 hours of content, and an average playthrough of the main story can take anywhere from 30 to 40 hours. So finishing it in less than 25 minutes... yeah, there's some serious glitching involved.
The most crucial exploit utilised by speedrunners in recent Skyrim runs is "Horse Tilting", which was discovered a couple of years ago. By climbing on a horse and "tilting" it off a nearby rock (2:15 in the video below), the player character is sent zooming across the world at an alarming pace, through mountains, forests, fortresses, and lakes, into areas that they normally wouldn't get to until later in the game.
As a result, this makes it possible to breeze through the main questline in record time, with horse tilting being employed on multiple occasions. Other small things (like skipping through the dialogue as fast as possible) will help of course, but this trick really opened Skyrim up to the crazy speedrun times we've seen over the last couple of years.