Awesome Games Done Quick, often referred to as AGDQ, is now underway and this week is full of yet another set of exciting speedruns to look forward to. AGDQ 2021 is another online event due to COVID-19 concerns, but that certainly hasn’t stopped the speedruns from being entertaining as ever.
Just today, we got to see Nucular do a speedrun of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in the glitchless main quest category. While some might prefer seeing a glitched speedrun of Skyrim where the runner just glitches out of bounds and makes a beeline for areas they’re not supposed to access yet to beat the game quicker, this glitchless run has been endlessly entertaining as well.
Pretty much everything that could go wrong in the speedrun does end up going wrong, including poor AI RNG that would force Nucular to spend more time in a combat encounter than necessary, as well as the game straight up freezing and crashing at the most inopportune times.
Even in a glitchless category, there are still plenty of hilarious tricks that serve as a great reminder of how janky the game was, and still is today. Things like getting the horse to speed up steep hills at an angle, or deliberately pushing NPCs around and shouting at them in the middle of a conversation continue to be entertaining even if it does break the immersion for the sake of going fast.
AGDQ 2021 will continue till the end of the week, and you can check out the runs over at their Twitch channel.