Ember Sword Rewards Alpha Speedrun Winners Despite Their Use Of Exploits

Bright Star Studios has announced the official winners of Ember Sword’s Ultra Deep alpha playtest speedrun challenge. Ultimately, the goal of the challenge was to push the game and its mechanics to its limits which testers certainly did, although not in the ways that the developers had intended.

Apparently, the speedrun winners were able to use various glitches and exploits to quickly complete the test dungeon. These included glitching through walls to bypass most of the dungeon and make their way to the final boss. Seeing as the dungeon only had a 1% completion rate, the winners weren’t going to pass up the shortcut. Even so, they’ll still be receiving prizes as they not only completed the dungeon in record time, but also revealed critical flaws that will need to be addressed in future builds.

“We understand and regret the - at times - poor communication and rule clearance on our behalf during this hectic weekend,” the studio admitted. “We will take measures and actions to ensure this is handled and facilitated better in the future!”

“The Game Team has decided - defaulting to the base terms of the tournament - to allow everything that made it onto the Leaderboard whether it was more finesse-or shortcut-based,” the studio added. “this was done in the spirit of recognizing our alpha state, the development and QA benefit and the sheer time and dedication that went into even being able to find these efficient shortcuts. The Game Team finds this to be the most fair to the competition at large.”

The Ultra Deep playtest represents a major milestone in the open-world MMORPG’s development as it marked the team’s first full party dungeon test. With its early access launch looming on the horizon, it also gave the team valuable data and feedback that they’ll need to get the game ready for launch in early 2024.