Hitless runner HeyBlasty finally bagged one of his white whales, a no-damage run of Borderlands 2, after more than 800 hours of routing, practice, and attempts. Astonishingly, the world-first feat was actually nabbed just hours earlier by another runner, darksmoke11, who was inspired by HeyBlasty and had spoken to him about strategies. In an interview with GamesRadar+, HeyBlasty reckons this is the hardest game he's ever done hitless – the pinnacle of a list of 112 games that includes the likes of Dark Souls, Skyrim, and Celeste.
My assumption going into our interview was that Borderlands 2, as an FPS with a lot of unpredictable and hitscan damage sources, would be a nightmare to do hitless, and much harder than outwardly difficult games like Dark Souls where damage is more clearly communicated. But HeyBlasty says the real killer is just how long the game is, and his decision to stream his final clears uninterrupted only ratcheted up the pressure.
"That's something that a lot of people will think," he says of the difficulty. "And I'd say that is true just because the run is very long. But if I were to slice – for example, a run of Dark Souls 3 is like two hours, an hour and a half. If I were to slice an hour and a half of any part of Borderlands 2, there's not a single slice that would be harder than Dark Souls. And that's the way the game is routed. If you look at it from a casual perspective, a first-person shooter is not a game you can do hitless or damageless at all, but the way we do Borderlands makes it very doable."
Long ago inspired by hitless godfather Happy Hob and legendary runner Otzdarva, then later encouraged by the Borderlands findings of YouTuber Miq, HeyBlasty started to dig into the Borderlands 2 AI to see how combat could be avoided entirely. It turned out that many enemies won't even notice you if you don't shoot first. This became core to the run, with turtle strats, turret strats, and some clutch grenades bridging the gaps where fights became inevitable.
"The majority of the challenge is basically, where do I position in a way that enemies don't realize that I exist?" he explains. "And then from there, throw turret. And even then it was still much more complicated than that. For example, let's say four enemies come out. If you kill all those four enemies, then, for some reason, there's like a trigger where, if you're inside there, they notice you exist, and that expands after killing those four and then it's like, well, where I was positioned, I'm no longer safe, I have to move. Throwing turret and killing was not the only way, I had to find other ways."
The most troublesome sections of the run included chapter seven, chapter 14, the Angel boss fight, the BNK3R boss fight, and the final boss (which nearly tagged HeyBlasty, almost ruining the near-complete run). The BNK3R was especially difficult and left HeyBlasty stumped multiple times, once again fearing that the run wasn't possible. "There's no way I'm going to surpass this," he recalls. "The fact that I was able to, every single time, was super magical. It was a big puzzle." This tinkering led HeyBlasty to platforming skips, safe-spotting, old-fashioned FPS head-glitching, and a lot of corrosive damage.
This is the nature of a hitless run in a game like this. Skill expression can only take you so far. If you ever let yourself fall into a bad position, there may be no way out. In games like Dark Souls, skillful play can generally overcome more walls and prevent damage. But nobody on Earth is skilled enough to avoid all the damage in Borderlands 2 if you play the game normally. You can only git so gud.
"Dark Souls and all the other games where there's a lot of decision making and a lot of skill involvement, you know, memorizing attacks and patterns and all that stuff," HeyBlasty reasons. "This game, the difficulty of this game, it comes down to routing. More than actually doing the run itself, it's just a very big puzzle. How do you go from point A to point B without taking damage?"
"If we consider everything, like routing and doing the run, I'd say Borderlands 2 is the hardest I have ever done," he concludes. "But if we talk about just running alone, I'd say Borderlands 2 is close to the top just because of how long it is. But I would say Super Metroid or Celeste will probably take that spot, or maybe Remnant 1 and 2, one of those. One of those four games will probably take that spot."
You can view archived streams of HeyBlasty's hitless runs on his Twitch profile and YouTube channel.
After 15 years, it's easy to forget how Borderlands changed the industry.
