The Zelda series has always had a dedicated community of speedrunners and later this week on 12th May they’ll be returning for Tears of the Kingdom.
IGN recently spoke to Breath of the Wild speedrunners ‘Player 5’ and Tom “Tallest Thomas” Rasmussen – asking them how they feel about starting over in Tears of the Kingdom and to get an insight into what they’re expecting in the early days of the sequel.
Both speedrunners are generally looking forward to a fresh start with the new game-changing mechanics made up of Fuse, Ascend and Recall, as well as the Ultrahand abilities:
Player 5: “I’m hoping that none of [Breath of the Wild’s speedrunning techniques] get carried over so that we have kind of a brand new set of techniques to use… Because I can just play Breath of the Wild if I want to use those glitches… Getting to figure stuff out at the early stages of the game should be fun, before there’s an established route.”
Tallest Thomas: “I’m not actually discouraged by the fact that mechanics are changing. It’s gonna be weird, it’s gonna be an adjustment, but it’s definitely going to be something very fresh and very cool to use. I love helping develop strats and learning setups… That’s one of my favorite things about speedrunning… So I am super excited for the whole new, ‘Let’s explore and discover everything’ of Tears of the Kingdom.”
The same speedrunners also mention how new discoveries in Tears of the Kingdom could potentially progress speedrunning in existing Zelda titles – a bit like what happened when a new technique dubbed ‘Back in Time’ was discovered in Skyward Sword and then replicated in Twilight Princess.
In the end, the Breath of the Wild speedrunning community managed to narrow down runs to just minutes, after years of discoveries and glitches to speed up the entire process – so it’s probably only a matter of time before it happens in Tears of the Kingdom.
And although speedrunners are committed to rushing through the game as quickly as possible, these players insist they’ll be taking their time on their first playthrough in order to enjoy the game as much as possible.
Tallest Thomas: “When I play through Tears of the Kingdom the first time, I’m going to try to break it as minimally as possible as I’m doing my first playthrough…once that playthrough is over and I’ve beaten the storyline or whatever, then I’m gonna go ahead and start going really hard at trying to break it and beat it fast.”
