Ah, simpler times. I remember two-and-a-half weeks ago, when Nioh was not yet released and very few people had played it, much less finished it. Overjoyed at finally hitting credits during the process of reviewing it, I took to Twitter to celebrate.
LMAO this is in exactly 7 days what the fuck am i doing pic.twitter.com/bYlUuLE0Cw
— philip kollar (@pkollar) February 4, 2017
Given, at least a chunk of that 85 hours played — let’s generously say 10 to 15 hours — was spent with the game idling while I did other work on my computer. Still: It’s a long game that took me a long time to complete.
Not so for speedrunner Distortion2. In the video above (via Kotaku), released yesterday, he completes a run of Nioh’s story missions in a mere one hour and 36 minutes. And keep in mind that Distortion2 has whittled his run time that low in just two weeks since the game’s release; it’s likely to drop much lower yet.
Upon completion of this run, Distortion2 noted that Nioh has a lot less “RNG” (or random elements) than he initially thought.
“A lot of strats have developed, and this run’s actually really quite consistent now,” he said. “Obviously there’s a little bit of RNG here and there, but it’s a really consistent game.”
Distortion2 says his goal is to finish a run of Nioh in under 1 hour and 30 minutes, and he believes that’s within his grasp. During this world record run, he died a handful of times. Between tweaking his pathing and avoiding those deaths, he should be able to improve on this time quite a bit.
“That’s a nice time, but we are definitely going to beat it,” he said.
If you would like to read some thoughts from players who took decidedly longer to finish Nioh, check out our full review here.
