I think this might be my favorite Quake speedrun video of all time. There's stuff they are doing in this that's just not being done anymore (because quicker strats have replaced it) but this is the absolute pinnacle of style! It's 2024 and there's quicker speedruns now but my god this is special. For example: 0:26 jumping straight into the acid with no protection. 0:39 the speed of this kill with the nailgun and the one straight after with the single shotgun. 1:31 Just running though here killing monsters for the sake of it, there is no reason to start running that deep back into the map but he does anyway just to kill as many monsters as possible, when he could have just waited around. 2:11 This is the best/smoothest I have ever seen this done. 2:17 Then this. I could go through the whole video but can't be bothered. Everything I just pointed out is not the norm in most speedruns. The above examples look amazing. Maybe not the fastest ever (this is from 2020 and now it's 2024 with records being broken all over the place) but for style, this is just insane. The rest just carries on the same way. Is it even plausible that a slower run like this can still be "better" because of the way it looks? Yes it can be.
0:52 I'm not sure if possible, but maybe you can jump to the RL and then boost of the wall to get back to middle faster, without having to drop into the water.