I was just wondering if anyone knew if you have to unlock the "Defeat Ganon" quest in order to finish the game? I know if you don't you could then beat the game quicker but wouldn't have the paraglider but just wondering if it is possible?

Theoretically you might not need it, but that'd depend heavily on an early plateau escape without the glider.

As it currently stands I don't think there's a route to climb up Hyrule Castle that is faster than scaling the tower and gliding in so for the foreseeable future the glider (and by extension the quest) are necessary.

Even if there is a route that takes roughly the same amount of time that does not involve the glider at least it would save time doing the first 4 shrines.

Nope not possible you need the glider to get off the plateau. plateau escape will never be a thing due to heavy testing.

Is there kill walls around plateau? I tried in a save later in the game and managed to make it down taking no damage

Yep, void floor that extends all over the map until you get the glider. Impossible to skip sadly.

That sucks. Found some well placed curves on the wall that allowed me to get down. Need to just find another way to optimise.

This does not allow Plateau Skip yet but I just wanted to leave this here. And to all people who say "plateau skip will never be a thing", stop freaking saying stupid stuff like that. How do you know there's never gonna be a glitch found which lets you be able to do just that? Wrong Warp in OoT was discovered like 20 years after the game came out, and BotW isn't even 2 weeks old.

Well, the only stupid thing here is your rant sadly, while I was saying something based on actual data and tests. We went ahead and went through the game code. We used our tools to wrongwarp into Ganon fight. Nintendo was clever this time. You can actually skip the void floor around the Plateau yes. But every useful area is outside of the "allowed" box. The game has the following logic: If you anywhere on the map that is not the within the "Plateau box" (and yes, apparently lake hylia is the only part of the actual map that's part of it) and don't have the glider, void Link and set him back to the plateau. This actually even happens in the Ganon fight. Double Protection: If u could actually reach Ganon without the Glider, the necessary loading zones are not there. I repeat: Nintendo was clever this time. Glider is bound to the King cutscene on top of ToT, void floor and the box are bound to the glider.

So the only way to skip the kill zone is to get the Glider early which would require to somehow cheat the game flags. Game code says: No, screw you, we will have every possible check you can think off to remind you you cannot get the glider yet. (If you wrong warp out of the shrine of resurrection, the loading zone to activate the tower isn't there, just as an example). So no. This is not OoT - don't except breaks like OoT. This is a game that was carefully bugtested with speedrunning in mind. This is not Nintendo first 3D game where ACE was a thing and the console was a shitfest regarding security and buffering.

I will repeat it a third time: Nintendo was clever this time. Yes, there are bugs (like Whistle Sprinting). Yes, it could be possible to trick the game more. But there won't be any huge breaks. Cause Nintendo had plenty of examples for how games get broken. And they worked with it.

@TreZc0 I wasn't talking to you since you didn't say that it will never be possible, and I wouldn't consider my comment a rant, just pointing out the reality. But thanks for the detailed comment, I didn't know that the loading zones aren't there and that you would get send back to the Plateau if you have no glider. And I also wasn't saying we should expect huge breaks like in OoT, but over the span of the next 20 years (Or just 10) the speedrun routes will definitely be quite different since obviously more tricks/glitches will be found. So the only possibility might be to SOMEHOW find a way to trigger the glider flag early or SOMEHOW even find a credits warp. Not saying that this is likely but you never know.