Skyrim completed in just two hours by QA tester

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It’s now less than a month until the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim bursts forth in all its role-playing goodness onto PCs, Xbox and PS3 consoles across the land.

Skyrim is about to go gold – to all intents and purposes it’s finished – and there’s a tradition at Bethesda when it comes to their games.

When a title is nearly complete, a speed run competition is begun. This is a challenge to complete the main quest as quickly as possible and finish the game – without cheating, and obviously without bothering with any side quests.

Bethesda select the best developer at playing the game, and he or she goes up against the best QA tester.

In this case, the QA champion was Sam Bernstein and representing Bethesda was Jeff Browne. The same two who faced each other in the Fallout 3 speed run a few years back.

Jeff managed a very quick time of 2 hours 16 minutes and 30 seconds, but incredibly, Sam just pipped him by 20 seconds.

What was even more remarkable is that they both took very different paths through the game, yet ended up with practically identical times.

You shouldn’t worry on the longevity stakes, of course, as Skyrim will have tons of side quests, exploration and other activities which the normal player will partake of, to make for considerably more entertainment than two hours worth.

Plus these players knew every shortcut and in-and-out of the game to be able to whip through the central quest in rapid-fire time.

This is actually good news in longevity terms – remember how long Oblivion was? Well both Oblivion and Fallout 3′s speed runs took 1 hour 15 minutes to complete, so Skyrim would seem to be coming on for twice the length on just the main quest alone.

We’re betting you don’t need reminding, but the fifth Elder Scrolls game goes on sale on November 11th.

Tags: Bethesda, Skyrim