Personally, I’m not really that into Fallout speedruns (or Elder Scrolls for that matter), as they usually just involve clipping your character out of bounds and doing all sorts of weird tricks to give them unnaturally fast movement speed. Tomatoanus ran all the main Fallout games at AGDQ 2020, and it features all of those same complaints I just listed, but it’s still probably going to be one of the very best runs you’ll see this week.
The Fallout Anthology run starts off fairly straightforward; the first two games can be cleared very quickly at this point, but it’s from Fallout 3 onward where things start to get really fun.
Here, Tomato starts explaining the various speed techs that come with speedrunning Fallout games, including a cool trick with bullet-by-bullet reload animations that you can manipulate to give you super speed in Fallout New Vegas. This is critical, as you’ll want to discover as many locations as possible in the open world so you can fast travel to them quickly later on.
And then, once you reach Fallout 4, things get even crazier with the way you’re just able to zip around the world so fast.
Aside from all the cool tricks, though, what really made this speedrun stand out was, of course, the runner himself. Tomato does a great job of explaining each and every trick and technique that he’s using to save time, including an entertaining five-minute segment where he busts out a prop to explain how out of bounds clipping works in Fallout 4. It’s an incredibly in-depth explanation about clipping, how the game teleports you back to your original position once you’ve fallen too far, and it’s an easy to follow segment even for speedrunning newcomers or players who aren’t familiar with the game.
Towards the end of Fallout 4, the run does become a bit of a beautiful disaster as things fall apart, and Tomato is forced to do some live routing to try to complete the game. It’s full of fun teaching moments (emergency Radaway locations, for instance), and the run’s made even more entertaining by the fact that his Fallout 4 Pip-Boy has the Taylor Swift skin mod on it, which honestly makes the whole thing even more fabulous. Gotta go Swift.
AGDQ 2020 will be running all week, and you can check out the runs on Twitch.
