Like the Dark Souls games that came before it, Elden Ring has become a popular game with speedrunners. Funnily enough, some of the speedrunning techniques utilized in the Dark Souls trilogy also work in Elden Ring. One such skip allows you to skip door-opening animations by quitting out to the game’s title menu as soon as you start to open a door. Once you load back in, the door will already be opened. Furthermore, given that the in-game timer doesn’t count time spent in loading screens or in the game’s title menu, it’ll be as if you interacted with the door, and it opened instantly.
To perform this skip, you’ll first need to find a door. A good place to practice this skip is actually at the very beginning of the game. As soon as you start the game for the first time, you’ll be inside a chapel with a set of double doors in front of you.
Hit the action button (Y on Xbox, Triangle on PlayStation) to open the doors, and as soon as the animation starts, quit out to the title menu. Below is the sequence of buttons we used to quit out of the game as fast as possible.
- Start – To bring up the menu
- Up on the direction pad – To navigate to “System”
- A (Xbox) X (PlayStation) – To select “System”
- LB (Xbox) L1 (PlayStation) – To go to the “Quit Game” submenu
- A (Xbox) X (PlayStation) – To select “Quit Game”
- Left on the directional pad – To navigate to the “Yes” option to confirm you would like to quit your game
- A (Xbox) X (PlayStation) – To confirm you would like to quit the game
Once you quit out, the in-game timer stops. When you arrive at the title screen, load back into your save. Once you load in, the timer will resume where it left off, and the doors will be open, regardless of how early/late into the door-opening animation your character was. The game’s starting area is a good place to practice this, as it only takes a few seconds to start a new game, and you spawn only a few meters away from the game’s first set of doors.
