Speedrunners—on your marks

[Brian Boru]

Many of you will be aware there's a community of speedrunners in gaming—players whose goal is to finish a game in the shortest time possible.

Anyone here given it a shot?

I'm the opposite—so a Slowcrawler I guess—so I have no tales of blitzing to regale you with. The nearest is probably getting 3 stars on Expert level in the 4 Royal Envoy games I replay annually—you earn stars based on your time to finish each level. But mostly I'm a smell the roses player, enjoying the world and environment and generally futzing around an open world.

7 amazing PC speedruns from AGDQ 2018

See Skyrim, Resident Evil 7, Hollow Knight and more get demolished.

www.pcgamer.com

The Hitman 3 Dubai speedrun record? 9 seconds

Nine seconds. Nine!

www.pcgamer.com

Home - Speedrun.com

Speedrun.com is the premier resource for speedrunning information, with a community-driven leaderboard, extensive database of games and categories, and active forums for discussion and support.

www.speedrun.com

 

[ZedClampet]

The closest I ever come to speed running is in RE games where you can unlock special weapons by finishing the game in under x amount of time. I usually take that as a chance to do a second playthrough. RE7 was really stressful. I had to have finished that in seconds below the 4 hour limit.

I guess you could say I play fast in repetitive games, like Warframe, but that's an entirely different sort of thing. When you are expected to do the same mission over 100 times, everyone tries to go fast.

Other than that, I approach games pretty casually. Every now and then I'll time myself on something, like how fast I can restore a car in CMS, but I usually play slowly in most singleplayer games.

All that said, I do occasionally enjoy watching other people speed run games that I've finished.

 

[Frag Maniac]

I don't generally attempt speedruns, but if I do try to complete a level in a game fast, I do it in bounds, not with the common physics exploits speedrunners use to go off map. I HAVE watched a lot of excellent speedruns though, but I only like the ones that include getting through the whole game, without skipping anything. I have to say the ones I've been most amazed by are the Doom Eternal Speedruns by DraQu and Zero Master. These are guys that do 100% speedruns, and they have incredible reflexes and precision. I really have no interest in the so called "Any%" speedruns, where anything goes.

As for Hitman 3, IOI ruined the franchise with this new "ways to kill" formula, where you have to play a handful of levels over and over to get your content. They also seem to have made them intentionally easy to exploit the AI (shooting at walls or ceilings will make all the guards go crazy and investigate as you slip by). That's not my idea of good game design, it's merely gimmickry to attract feel-good players, you know, the kind that will stoop to anything for bragging rights.

 

[Pifanjr]

I really have no interest in the so called "Any%" speedruns, where anything goes.

Any% speedruns are the only ones I really care about. It's absolutely fascinating to me in how many ways a game can be broken to get to the end faster. Though my favourite story is when the universe itself glitched Mario 64 to allow for a faster speedrun:

Cosmic Ray Flips Bit, Assists Mario 64 Speedrunner

We’ve all heard about cosmic rays flipping bits here and there, but by and large, it occurs rarely enough that we don’t worry too much about it on a day-to-day basis. However, it seems …

hackaday.com

 

[mainer]

No, I just don't have that in me, like yourself, I'm more of a slowcrawler, and on top of that I tend to be more of a "completionist" when it comes to most games I play. Not by getting all Steam achievements, but by trying to complete all quests & side quests, exploring everywhere, and if there's a decent crafting system I'll spend hours & hours doing that. Even playing an ARPG like D2 Resurrected or Grim Dawn, I'm not a fast player. I guess I just don't have that drive to see how fast I can complete a game.

 

[OsaX Nymloth]

The closest to speedrunning I ever was? Probably last week. Internal testing. Had a "run" with fellow devs who can finish the level faster. I lost.

Then demo released.
My best time? Around 1m38s, solid XX seconds behind our best time.
Community made faster speedruns within MINUTES from releasing demo.

Yup. I am not cut for this speedrunning.

Sometimes I will check on speedruns for particular game (especially after finishing new one) out of pure curiosity. And speedruns for games I played a ton of. I am still processing the physics glitch in Infinity Engines games I never knew existed. I mean, I played thousands of hours in those games. And I had no idea there's such a glitch.

 

[Colif]

I spent a year beating Super Metroid, Speed runners do it in an hour and in reverse/random boss order.
There is some rpg you can finish in 10 minutes as the end game boss is really close to a town and you just kite him into town guard distance and they do the rest. I wish I knew what game it was as I would link it here.
Zelda: Toot can be finished in less than 20 minutes, Most modern Doom games can be finished without being in the map for most. Portal speedruns are just nuts.

Glitchless or glitched?

Sometimes I just like to watch people beat games and stay inside the borders of game world.

People Speedrun Journey, why? its a 90 minute long game already. People speedrun getting banned from websites. Some people are just nuts.

I will never do this for instance

 

[Zloth]

Sorta. City of Heroes had a feature called Flashbacks that let you re-play old missions and missions you missed. It would down-scale your character so it was still a challenge. It even tossed up a nice Sepia effect as you popped in to the mission:

At the end, it told you how long it to you to go through. Oh ho! We can race! I started zipping through them, recording times with screenshots, but nobody else was interested. Oh well.

 

[Frag Maniac]

Any% speedruns are the only ones I really care about. It's absolutely fascinating to me in how many ways a game can be broken to get to the end faster.

I don't think it's all that fascinating, especially when you consider how games are slapped together anymore as far as the technical stuff, just to give us eye candy. It's very evident when you see top name devs watching speedrunners break past the intended play areas of their games, only to realize they did not play test them very well. It's like a DOH!, Homer Simpson moment.

What's fascinating to me is the sheer skill it takes to get through combat areas as swiftly and precisely as those whom do 100% runs, and then on top of that to imagine what it must be like to keep totally focused with your head on a swivel for 2 hours straight or more, and even beyond that to do it in Doom Eternal on Ultra Nightmare where it's so easy to make one little mistake and die and have to start the game over. I value that far more than working a scroll wheel while you shimmy up an incline to make an out of map jump, just no comparison.

 

[Pifanjr]

There is some rpg you can finish in 10 minutes as the end game boss is really close to a town and you just kite him into town guard distance and they do the rest. I wish I knew what game it was as I would link it here.

Here you go:

View: https://youtu.be/5NeR-bT3uv0

What's fascinating to me is the sheer skill it takes to get through combat areas as swiftly and precisely as those whom do 100% runs, and then on top of that to imagine what it must be like to keep totally focused with your head on a swivel for 2 hours straight or more, and even beyond that to do it in Doom Eternal on Ultra Nightmare where it's so easy to make one little mistake and die and have to start the game over. I value that far more than working a scroll wheel while you shimmy up an incline to make an out of map jump, just no comparison.

Ah, I should mention I do not care about watching speedruns, I only like reading about them. And skill doesn't make for as interesting of a read as the process of finding game breaking glitches. Like how they figured out how to execute specific code in Zelda: Ocarina of Time by doing specific actions to overwrite specific memory blocks to trigger the end credits. That stuff is just fascinating to me.

 

[Frindis]

Not yet, but I'm thinking of speedrunning Mushihime-sama Futar. Seems like a pretty easy game on hardest difficulty when you have sausage fingers and the attention spam of a goldfish.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d76YdrGawE

 

[Colif]

Fun fact, I was wanting to buy Two worlds two before it was released, but it wasn't as good as expected or wasn't released on console I had. Dodged a bullet.

 

[Pifanjr]

Fun fact, I was wanting to buy Two worlds two before it was released, but it wasn't as good as expected or wasn't released on console I had. Dodged a bullet.

I played Two Worlds II. For all of its problems (including a broken save that made me stop playing) it did have the most interesting magic system I've played with.

 

[Frag Maniac]

Ah, I should mention I do not care about watching speedruns, I only like reading about them. And skill doesn't make for as interesting of a read as the process of finding game breaking glitches. Like how they figured out how to execute specific code in Zelda: Ocarina of Time by doing specific actions to overwrite specific memory blocks to trigger the end credits. That stuff is just fascinating to me.

Personally I always thought speedruns were for watching, not reading about. However I still don't see how exploiting one of many common overlooked flaws in games comes anywhere close to a skilled 100% run, but to each their own I guess.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Personally I always thought speedruns were for watching, not reading about. However I still don't see how exploiting one of many common overlooked flaws in games comes anywhere close to a skilled 100% run, but to each their own I guess.

I'm not a huge follower of speed running, but in a lot of the runs I've watched the people doing any% runs are equally as skilled as the same people doing glitchless. They still need to execute perfectly on the parts of the game you cant glitch through.

For example someone like Distortion2 who runs souls games among others. The guy is just awesome at games, and runs world records both glitchless and any%, sometimes in games that have been very recently released. I wouldn't say someone like Happy Hob or Squillakilla who do glitchless 0 hit run marathons are better at games, its just a different skill set.

 

[Brian Boru]

you have sausage fingers and the attention spam of a goldfish

Hey, we could be brothers! Altho I don't spam attention that much

So, is your avatar noble King Rigel?

 

[Frag Maniac]

I'm not a huge follower of speed running, but in a lot of the runs I've watched the people doing any% runs are equally as skilled as the same people doing glitchless. They still need to execute perfectly on the parts of the game you cant glitch through.

For example someone like Distortion2 who runs souls games among others. The guy is just awesome at games, and runs world records both glitchless and any%, sometimes in games that have been very recently released. I wouldn't say someone like Happy Hob or Squillakilla who do glitchless 0 hit run marathons are better at games, its just a different skill set.

Yeah I'm well aware there are those whom do both. Seems like an odd thing to mix to me though, and we ARE still talking more 100% type skills, not Any%, when battle areas are fought through, so I don't see any point being made. What I mean is 100% means all battles MUST be fought and won, it's not an option as are many battles in Any%.

So I'm also saying it's not just the skill level a player can muster with a battle here and there, it's whether they can continuously muster those skills through a whole game, and often without dying on some of today's hardest modes. Still don't see much comparison, 100% is clearly a harder thing to do. I respect those whom tough it out and refuse to use exploits.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Yeah I'm well aware there are those whom do both. Seems like an odd thing to mix to me though, and we ARE still talking more 100% type skills, not Any%, when battle areas are fought through, so I don't see any point being made. What I mean is 100% means all battles MUST be fought and won, it's not an option as are many battles in Any%.

So I'm also saying it's not just the skill level a player can muster with a battle here and there, it's whether they can continuously muster those skills through a whole game, and often without dying on some of today's hardest modes. Still don't see much comparison, 100% is clearly a harder thing to do. I respect those whom tough it out and refuse to use exploits.

The guys who are often looking into the game code to find places where the engine is broken so that they can exploit it to get out of bounds, etc is a skill in itself. I think those guys also build a community and have fun around breaking specific games in order to get faster and faster runs. Maybe its not as impressive to watch as glitchless nigtmare runs of Doom for us laymen, but maybe that's because we cant always see the whole picture.

No doubt I also love to watch people run glitchless and burn through games that I struggled to even beat in the first place. I just think there is still value in both.

 

[Frag Maniac]

The guys who are often looking into the game code to find places where the engine is broken so that they can exploit it to get out of bounds, etc is a skill in itself.

True, but one of coding, not gaming, BIG difference. It also reminds me of the so called "script kiddies" that find out how to exploit code of online games and play the chicken sh*t way cheating. It's ruined some online games I used to play, so it strikes a sour note with me.