The terms "tear it to pieces", "ripped it to shreds", "destroyed" seem so emotive. It seems like these people loved the game enough to try and beat it in creative new ways and that seems really awesome. Minecraft thrived on similar hackery in the early days too.
"Totally joking with that post. I have no hard feelings. I really thought it was awesome how much some members of your community took to the game and made it so much better based on your feedback and play style."
These are pretty common terms in a speedrunning context and I do not believe they were meant by the author to be emotionally charged. Because speedruns often take advantage of game-breaking glitches, the extent to which the game has been literally broken is usually described with destructive terms like these. Smashing records, destroying games, obliterating levels, etc.
It makes a bit more sense if you imagine the developer's intended way to play the game being a glass bridge across a chasm, and speedrunners literally shatter the bridge and glue the pieces into a ramp that they jump a dirtbike off.
Source: I've been speedrunning for 7 years and my full-time job is in the speedrunning community
This is one of the worst parts of the speedrunning community, imo. The constant, "This team can't program" or "bad devs" or "LOL their QA department was asleep" commentary undermines what's potentially a very awesome relationship runners could have with devs.
I've never understood this need to take pot shots at the devs while running, but it happens all the time during events like GDQ. Even when the developers are on the line chatting while the game is being played (which just seems straight up rude.) It also ignores all the complexity involved in making and shipping a game, which is definitely non-trivial.
It really has nothing to do with this. If the quotes you mentioned are real then I'm ashamed members of the community would speak like that towards developers. But the terminology of "destroying" a game has nothing to do with badtalking developers. This is purely about understanding a game so well that you can undermine it. See also: "tearing up the dance floor".
They're two different things; you're absolutely right that "destroyed" in this context is not meant as a slight, but your parent is also right that there is a nasty tendency in the speedrunning community to actively suggest that game developers are bad at making games.
This is not the speedrunner community, this is everybody.
Whenever this gets under my skin, I simply remember the classic: "I could place chunks of fat in a bathtub and call it art!" "Maybe, but you did not, Beuys did."
I think the community would be more positive if the same issues did not always crop up.
Several early 3D games increased player moment speed when holding strafe and forward at the same time. (Doom, EQ, etc.) That’s just incompetence and really should be described as such.
Now some games may have intentionally copied common bugs for style reasons etc, but more often titles are just rushed out with many known bugs and or vastly insufficient QA.
Yes, that's a common issue (though typically you had to push against a wall), and it's an issue that still occurs in games today.
It's also one that doesn't impact core gameplay for most people. Heck, a lot of players will feel quite clever for discovering and using abilities like that in a game.
Fixing bugs like that require not fixing other bugs. They may have been aware of the issue and chose to fix other, more pressing bugs first. I'd strongly hesitate before labeling someone incompetent because their linear algebra didn't quite do vector math correctly in every case.
I'm also surprised to hear you describe the devs of Doom as 'incompetent', given their widespread praise in the engineering community, specifically for their code.
> Now some games may have intentionally copied common bugs for style reasons etc, but more often titles are just rushed out with many known bugs and or vastly insufficient QA.
So in some ways, those bugs become a part of the culture. That's an interesting avenue to explore, but it's an aside from my point that insulting the devs (who probably aren't the ones making decisions about QA or release schedules) undermines a relationship speedrunners could have with the developer community.
Unfortunately, QA costs money. Developers cost lots of money. Finding, root causing, and fixing bugs therefore costs lots and lots of money. You cannot just fix bugs forever, at some point you need to evaluate the current amount of money you've spent making the game and compare that to what you think you'll be able to make back on it. Does fixing that bug end up costing you more than you'll make back? Who knows, but it's a very real, complex prioritization problem that I don't think you are giving enough value or depth.
Doom was a rather groundbreaking game so it’s often given a pass for many issues. However, a famous failure like the tacoma narrows bridge collapse is less likely to be repeated in other fields. The 20th game with the same failure really is best described as incompetence. Especially if it will often be discovered within 10 seconds of playing the game and it’s not a complex fix.
> However, a famous failure like the tacoma narrows bridge collapse is less likely to be repeated in other fields.
But, if we're comparing failure modes, can you at least agree that there's a pretty significant difference between:
* The tacoma narrows bridge, where there entire bridge was totally destroyed narrowly avoiding loss of life, AND
* A bug in a video game that impacts the movement speed in a not-negative way for 90% of the players?
Like, if the strafe-bug was destroy millions of dollars in infrastructure and killing people I'd be on your side. But who cares if the 20th game has the same bug that doesn't affect most players in any way?
I agree it'd be better if games had no bugs, but if I had to choose between a game being 1% more fun, or a game not-having the strafe-bug I take the game that's 1% more fun every-time.
There's a nearly infinite set of tasks that sit in front of game-devs. The first thing you learn is that everything is an opportunity cost.
Sure structure collapse is a vastly larger downside, but also vastly harder to detect and fix.
Nobody’s life is at stake in these games, but the gaming industry is both gigantic and competitive. So, a hypothetical 1% difference is enjoyment really can translate into 10’s of millions of dollars. Now, I don’t think this specific bug means a 1% drop, but it also does not take significant resources to fix.
Also, it’s not just about immersion this has real impact on game balance. Can players run away from enemy X often makes a huge difference in terms of fun. Balance assuming people are running sideways and people get stuck playing that way, balance assuming normal running and tension feels fake because they can easily escape.
Collectively obvious game bugs have killed off several game companies and represent billions in lost sales. As an industry that’s clearly extremely important even if we are just talking about entertainment.
> it also does not take significant resources to fix
This is where you are wrong. Even small fixes can destabilize builds. Every change needs code review, testing, a build, release (and possibly release notes). You need to schedule time to work on it, which means prioritization meetings and advocating why this bug should be fixed and not the other large pile of bugs.
Maybe you need to update some unit tests or automated feature tests. Maybe stop by the level designer's desk to make sure there weren't any baked in assumptions about player movement and space. Probably a good idea to chat with a gameplay designer as well to make sure it wasn't intentional (and also to validate that the fix doesn't actually make the game less fun.)
Wouldn't hurt to go to a playtest and mention that it's been changed, see if anyone on the team notices.
Actually, come to think of it, maybe you could put your fix behind a console command! Then you could quickly flip back and forth and see what you like better. But that also means adding a little more code and probably a little more documentation.
Sure, on the face of it you've just changed one arithmetic function. But there is a ton of hidden work and complexity that surrounds that.
As someone who made games for a living, there's a huge amount of unseen work that goes into even small changes. Players consistently underestimate the complexity of even minor fixes.
This this is not some obscure off by one error. You see it in basic game building tutorials. Hell, I will admit to making this mistake on an early game, but only once.
Not making the mistake in the first place should generally prevent the issue even if it was never fixed in any game ever. I am calling it incompetence specifically because it’s the kind of mistake you make when you don’t know what you’re doing.
PS: If detecting and fixing an issue like this is a significant issue for your team, that’s a much larger issue you need to deal with.
I imagine the reason you keep getting asked about the impact of a given bug is because fixing bugs is always (and should always be, given limited time) a value proposition where the time spent fixing has to be weighed against the improvement for the average player.
Even if that were true, fixing the kind of irrelevant bugs you describe would do far more damage to the games industry due to the cost of development (and I’m being generous here because I don’t even believe your claim that running sideways against a wall has ever caused a game studio to go bust let alone cost billions in lost sales).
You seem to believe this notion that it is possible to write bug free code. Which suggests to me you’ve never written anything serious because you’re comments are textbook examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I am describing buggy games as costing billions, rather than suggesting this is the only bug that ever occurred. There are many expensive examples where excessive bugs tanked sales.
The kind of bugs that hamper game sales aren’t the kind of bugs that speed runners exploit - which is what you were originally arguing about.
Sure, some games are released buggy. But even there, blaming the developers just demonstrates how little you experience you actually have with professional software development. You think developers are really that stupid that they don’t know when their own games suck? Usually bad games get released because of financial and/or time restrictions rather than a lack of pride from developers. And often bugs will just be placed on a snag list and prioritised in order of estimated time to fix vs the severity of the bug. Which means many of the bugs you described would just never be financially beneficial to patch.
You keep talking about the monetary impact of bugs while ignoring the fact that software development is a business and thus saving will always be cut where needed. Having your development time prolonged by 12 months to fix bugs most people won’t even see is perhaps the single most expensive and unnecessary way to drive your development.
Frankly I’m astonished anyone would believe development happens the way you idealise, let alone dare to call other engineers incompetent for not writing perfect software.
It’s not a net savings if it’s costing vastly more money in sales. The tradeoff is not always obvious, and some bugs are beloved by fans, but my point is bugs have real costs. Further, excessive bugs always tank sales.
Errors with collision detection are one of the most common speed running exploits and in excess can make games unplayable. Broken quest chains are similarly exploitable, but in excess result in an unplayable mess.
Anyway, cost is really not the driver for most of these issues it’s poorly scoping what can actually be finished in a given time and budget. I have no idea what your background is in game dev, but it sounds like you don’t understand the overall development process.
> It’s not a net savings if it’s costing vastly more money in sales
I’d already addressed that when I said the kind of bugs you’re complaining about wouldn’t have an effect on sales.
> Anyway, cost is really not the driver for most of these issues it’s poorly scoping what can actually be finished in a given time and budget
That is exactly what I’d just said except you’ve overlooked that development time is still an expense.
> I have no idea what your background is in game dev, but it sounds like you don’t understand the overall development process.
Not my current role but my previous job was a lead developer. So I was not only hands on but I also had to manage workflows and budgets. Basically all the stuff you’ve just claimed I don’t understand ;)
Comparing a minor bug with player speed calculations in an edge case scenario with the total collapse of a bridge. They are on totally different scales. One cost lives. The other is a minor inconvenience at worst. When bugs are found you triage them, and if the expected cost to fix is greater than the expected benefit gained, you don't fix it. The benefit gained from fixing an edge case movement bug like this is minimal, so it will often be left unfixed. This isn't incompetence, it's just prioritisation.
Is it really incompetence if a tricky to pull of bug that doesn’t affect gameplay unless you specifically and deliberately use it to affect game play exists unpatched?
It’s like blaming knife manufacturers that they’re incompetent because you accidentally slice your finger while cutting vegetables. Except the kind of gameplay bugs you’re describing aren’t security vulnerabilities and can’t be used to cheat in multiplayer games (outside of speed running where these kinds of cheats are often allowed). At some point you have to accept responsibility for your own actions; you guys are deliberately trying to break games to get faster speeds so it’s hardly a surprise that you’ll find ways to break games.
What you describe is a natural consequence of adding the side-to-side velocity to the forward-and-back velocity. It is simple to implement, fast to run, and would be completely correct with something like a spaceship, where velocity components would naturally sum up like that.
The constraint it doesn't capture is that humans usually run about the same speed in any direction. To capture that constraint, you either normalize the xz components and multiply by speed or do some extra logic when perpendicular directions are input. Either way, it's slower, more complicated, and harder to get right. If it doesn't break the game, why bother?
How fast players can move is one of the core aspects of game design. So, it does break gameplay balance.
Compared to building even a 2d side scroller let alone 3D worlds it’s not meaningfully more complex or slower.
PS: For a spaceship to move like that it would need equally huge engines on all sides. A design like the space shuttle with big engines on one sides and little ones for rotation seems much more logical outside of possibility low speed zero g docking.
No, it alters gameplay balance, but it doesn’t break it any more than shooting your film at 24 FPS breaks the cinematic experience. At this point, it has such a storied history in video games that “fixing” the problem may make the game less fun to many people, despite being more accurate.
That is one way to see it, another is to add extra depth to gameplay by introducing secret areas only accessible through gaps that you can only cross if you move diagonally.
Designers often acknowledged these bugs, especially in older games. The classic Tomb Raider games, for example, has several secrets only accessible through outright breaking the engine. One very obvious example is in TR1 a health pickup is only accessible if you keep jumping upwards at a corner of a pillar which causes Lara to move forward a single unit and eventually, due to some collision bug, she teleports at the top of the pillar which is otherwise inaccessible... and the only reason you could know about this health pickup is because due to the painter's algorithm used to draw the level, sometimes under some angles the pickup is drawn in front of the pillar even though it should be invisible.
Also strafe-jumping has been a common tactic in FPS games (especially multiplayer games) to the point where games reimplement it in engines that otherwise work 'properly'.
There are a number of websites where speedrunners gather, share resources and tips, and validate their runs. (There's significant prestige in being the world record holder for a game/category.)
Additionally, there are constant charity events that are moving millions of dollars annually. For example, a week long event just closed that raised 3 million US dollars for Doctors Without Borders. Those events need staff full time to support their mission, plan for future events, etc.
We may only be hearing about this story because this kind of language increased its chance of being shared.
[I don’t think the developer resented the speed runners. He sounded flattered and amazed to me. But it’s sometimes hard to judge tone of voice from just text.]
The lack of funding for traditional marketing is one of the greatest challenge for an indie developer. If they can come up with a (legal) way for getting attention, all the more power to them.
Why though, what does it add to the discussion? Why does it matter if a tiny indie developer gets a bit of exposure to his tiny little game? "It's just an ad" sounds needlessly cynical and dismissive.
This is fine for this guy, but not repeatable. When it's one guy its a fun story - a performance piece almost. When it's repeated, staged or even just fabricated then you have the beginnings of a new form of clickbait.
Yeah, especially considering Summer Games Done Quick just ended, it seems like a weird take on things. An entire week dedicated to speedrunning the love of the various franchises that were on display.
To see people speedrunning as a negative is just...odd. People played it, and not only that, put the time and effort in to explore it and share with friends. What's the problem? How is spending literal hours collecting secrets and brute-forcing new tech "destroying" the game? Someone's clearly never run a game of D&D before, because I'd be ecstatic if people took literally anything I created and expanding it into a new form I couldn't have gotten on my own.
Imagine, instead of complaining about the exposure, the game's creator used the feedback for another level (LEAVING the exploits in) and leaning on them as intended tech instead of seeing it as some "look how they massacred my boy" pity party. Crazy, doesn't even have to rewrite any engine code, just design a new level that emphasizes the new tech for these speedrunners.
Average Joes can still play the "normal" version to practice, then ramp up to the new one. Why piss on a community that's shining a light on and celebrating your work? Author even ends with "It was difficult to watch them do this to my game but I learned to love watching them" - so is it just a clickbait title? Have I been played? Should I have listened to DJ Khaled?
> but I learned to love watching them. Their skill truly amazes me.
I got the impression that the game's author is seriously happy about all this. The timing of the article before a speedrunning event looks like it is intended for maximal publicity.
I'm not sure where you got the impression you did about the content of the article?
Exactly. I think this is probably the best thing that can happen to your first game: for a community to discover it and love it enough to put in this amount of work to beat it.
People will speed run anything! I run a little solitaire site that has leaderboards and the Frecell games are dominated by faster than 10 second completion times. People complained in the forums about the times and how they must be by cheaters, and then the fast people started posting videos of themselves beating the games in seconds. They're truly impressive:
I dated a girl in college ca. 2003 because we connected when she showed me she could "speedrun" freecell on my PDA. Not like these videos, but not far off either. Just thought I'd share that.
How does this work, are the people able to really solve the game this fast or are they memorizing sequences? Is it possible to see the game before the click starts?
Memorising sequences is not the right way to look at it - it's simply a result of practice (or playing it too much): More like muscle memory where you see and act without consciously thinking about it. Watch speed solving Rubik's cubes to see how they do it on an instinctive level.
With Freecell, once you know what you're doing you know at a glance what your options are: how deep a stack you can move and which cards are key to clearing out and in which order.
As well as playing way too much Freecell back in the 90s I played Minesweeper to death. Probably a better example of how you can progress from needing to consciously work out where you could safely click, to knowing at a glance, to being able to click the one cell that would open up the area. If you were actually flagging bombs you were going too slow.
One of the things I bemoan is that game developers have embraced speedrun-type players in that it has influenced their game design which is evident in the most recent games: almost every game that is sold as a "hardcore" game involves essentially the ability to memorize and perform, skills which are okay but I don't particularly really enjoy. I painfully miss twitch games like quake that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately, you instead had to react and improvise quickly and think on your feet.[0] It's a different set of skills that seems to have fallen out of favor as of late.
[0] To be clear, I'm talking about multiplayer as it's unpredictable.
I think it's always been like that in any game with predesigned layouts and enemy placement. I was still a kid (in the 1980s) when I figured out I was playing a fundamentally different game from the kids who really loved video games. I was thinking, "I need to get faster at making decisions and timing my actions so I can respond to what's on the next screen," and they were thinking, "Okay, the next screen has two goblins closing from the upper right corner and one goblin closing from the middle and a fireball from top to bottom after four seconds, and the exit door starts closed and opens or closes every three seconds, so I'll kill the closest goblin while I wait for the fireball and then hit the exit the third time it opens...."
I remember feeling guilty when I remembered what was on the next screen, because it felt like cheating. It kind of broke my heart when I realized that was the best way to get good and it was pointlessly stubborn for me to resist a technique that games were designed to cater to.
It's not just games, it's life. But to take a non-video game, e.g. in hockey the better goalies aren't better because they have awesome reflexes or quick thinking, but primarily because they're better at predicting where the puck is going to be and positioning themselves accordingly. Same thing with gamers knowing "what's ahead", or "what's ahead with probability". Very few things are so random that "more accurately predicting the future" isn't the dominating strategy, with execution of the moment, while important, not being the primary factor.
Well, now you're talking like me. People don't get it, but I try my darnedest to beat a boss/level in single player mode[0] on the first or as few tries as possible so I don't learn it too much, because it 1) breaks the illusion that it's a game (it hurts the "experience" for me if the superhero gets a second or third chance) and 2) I like being pushed to respond quickly rather than replaying a script, and I consider it an accomplishment to beat a screen of a platformer for example on the first try.
Another set of games my girlfriend recently turned me on to are rhythm games, particularly VOEZ[1]. Again, as I don't think I said in the first comment but said elsewhere, it's not like I don't like the "classical music" style and I'm all "jazz music," but my "jazz" style is definitely my default mode. If you asked me afterwards to remember the notes, I would be able to tell you the gist but I certainly don't remember details, a lot of it is focusing when it gets complicated and responding on beat. And, as I said above, my absolute favorite is playing a song for the first time and trying to get a good score, because I really have no idea what's coming and it pushes my "respond quickly" buttons.
[0] not that you don't learn quickly/during the fight without dying, and as many games often are, there is an obvious hint of what to hit, the rhythm to a boss, etc.
This is the exact reason I don't like most platformers. I never realized it before, but that must be why I gravitate toward procedural games, multiplayer, and rogue-likes.
I totally relate to that guilty feeling. I like having to think on my feet, and never saw the point in memorizing a sequence of controls. It's like it ceases to be a game at that point!
Same thing with fighting games. I liked to play Mortal Kobmbat as a kid, and I always approached it as a game where you anticipate, react, and adapt to your opponent. When I got further into the “MK culture” and met much better players, one of them explained to me: “You’re going about it all wrong. Fighting games like MK and SF are about memorization and executing patterns, not about strategy.” The best players basically memorized the combos and could pull them off them consistently. Indeed, future fighting games made these combos explicitly part of the game mechanics. Just for fun I tried one of the latest Tekkens, and the entire game is memorization of button sequences and playback. Yawn
Well, the combos are a part of the game, and to be a top player you need to know how to execute your characters combos. But for real competition, (at least for SF, and smash bros, never watched competitive MK), it really comes down into anticipating, reacting, and adapting to your opponent. You need to know what options your opponent has available to them, what are they likely to do, and how to properly react. You do need to memorize the timings of attacks, but the game becomes sort of a fast paced unbalanced rock papers scissors. David Sirlin wrote lots of articles and even a book about competitive gaming in general, specially fighting games, explaining concepts like this.
It's just that some games have this strange curve in the learning curve, for instance Starcraft, where beginners think the game is all about strategy. But as you learn to play, you find out that it's more about macro, cause having more units normally beats any strategy. But then if both players have top notch macro, they have to begin doing tradeoffs in what they build, maybe cut some units to get a technology faster, or be greedier but more vulnerable for a while for a later payoff. In other words, the game becomes about strategy.
My wife and I play two player house of the dead now and then. She memorizes levels, I skillshot. It's potent in combination. She gets the zombies I forget, and I get the ones she misses. Since it's always the same, it also doesn't get her too jumpy with anxiety. (We've gotten to the final boss on both saturn HOTD 1, and DC HOTD 2, never beaten the games though...)
Off topic, but are you still playing Dreamcast HOTD 2? Did you keep a CR tube TV around for it? I still have a DC, HOTD2 and the lightguns, but they don't work with modern LCD TVs.
I think you learned the wrong lesson. You shouldn't spoil your own fun because a bunch of savants can't see the forest for the trees. The secret of gaming is that the objective isn't to get the highest score / lowest time, it's to have fun playing.
Very nicely put. When I'm forced to use detailed knowledge from previous tries I always feel like back in civ 1 saving and loading until a trireme defended a city against a legion.
This is part of why I enjoy procedurally-generated games like Minecraft: you can learn how to do things in the game, but you can never memorize the game because it's different in every world.
Challenge style modpacks tend to really bring this out.
My completion of Age of Engineering is this small countryside feeling open air base, Direwolf20 (famous YouTube Minecraft player) beat it with a space station. The only obvious commonalty is we both have huge floating energy spheres from Draconic Evolution which looks kinda out of place next to a greenhouse compared to inside a space station. "There's more than one way to do it" is a driving ethos in most of these packs.
For speedrunners though any sources of randomness are mostly just annoying. If it's 50 seconds faster to start on a hill, and your personal best is 40 seconds slower than the world record, you're not going to play runs where you didn't start on a hill. You're just going to reload.
This sounds like sightreading vs memorizing songs (musically or DDR-ish). There are some games where I just can't get past certain parts, because it's too fast to sightread, and I can't memorize the sequence (the Battlef*ing toads speeder level is a good example, especially with two people), but there are others that are hard to finish if I miss something, because I've played it so much I've lost the ability to sight read it (Contra and Life Force, mostly)
The couple times I've achieved "good enough to consistently piss people off" abilities in FPS games, it's mostly been through knowing levels very well, to include patterns of movement. Probably there's another level above that once you're in "pro" tier where improvisation becomes a big deal again, but "very good for an amateur" status is mostly memorization, in my experience.
I've seen the same thing in people I know who can pwn me at things like COD. It's 95+% knowing where to look and where to have your gun pointed no matter which part of the map you're on, so you can shoot before the pure-reflexes n00b even knows you're there.
Speaking of playing entirely different games, I found I could piss plenty of people off in COD just by using the tactics that worked best at my level of play (which was way below "very good for an amateur;" I was often sipping a beer while I played.) There are a lot of people out there who don't like being reminded that they aren't pros and can be beaten with tactics that don't work against pros. And I don't mean camping or grenade spamming, I mean stuff like using a shotgun on a map with lots of narrow hallways. I take it from the epithets people used to scream at me that pros don't use shotguns as their primary. It was like playing beer league softball and having people scream homophobic things at me about what does and doesn't work in major league baseball.
In TF2 this is where as a pyro I started firing flares at fully cloaked spies (who are inaudible and invisible) and they would burst into flame and become visible, because I’d learned to predict their positions and timings to a degree that exceeded their variability. Something something “know your enemy” applies, even when you have no ‘current’ information at all.
I loved playing TF2 as a pyro. I used a similar technique of running around randomly jetting flames in certain places to find cloaked spies, but also flaming team-mates (as the flames wouldn't hurt them) to reveal spies in disguise.
CSGO is a fantastic example where someone with poor aiming skills but good gamesense (holding angles, using echo-location where you move your view to triangulate opponents based on how the sound moves and what type of footstep sounds are generated, timings, grenade throws, etc) can wreck opponents with poor gamesense and better aiming skills.
I have gotten reported for walling but people just need to realize how much damn noise they make.
A sound card w/ decent surround sound features (Creative <3), noise cancelling headphones, and good map awareness & position play gave me a far higher KDA in CS 1.6 and Source than practicing with the AWP til my eyes and fingertips bled.
The Shift key became infinitely more useful once my ears acclimated to the setup change.
In many ways it's not so different than billiards/snooker/pool. Being a good shot-maker helps but just about all the consistently performing pros focus first and foremost on position-play and thinking several shots ahead.
I find that open back headphones are better for this if you are in a relatively controlled environment without too much background noise. I can hear basically everything on the map with my sennheisers even compared to my friends who have the same closed backs pros use in tournaments (which they only do because they need full noise isolation for the competition).
I mean, to some extent maybe, but CS is still extremely reliant on twitch mechanics and reaction speed. To put it in perspective: I've put 650 hours into Rocket League and have hit the 99th percentile. I put 2000+ hours into League back in the day and hit the 99.9th percentile. I've put 1300 hours into CSGO (and probably hundreds more watching pro matches) and am still at the 50th percentile.
I'd say in most of my games I've got more playtime, trying various strategies, and learning from mistakes, than the other 9 people in the game put together. But at some point it all just comes down to who wins a trade, and I very rarely win them. Game's still fun though, somehow.
Yeh in MOBAs it is totally this. Less reacting in 150ms to a visual queue. More I have been in this situation 100 times and expect character X to do Y right now. That’s why there is a whole psychology around moving in unpredictable manners at a certain level. Similar to the whole master swordsman fearing a novice more than another master.
Same thing with poker. Someone who doesn't understand betting strategy and odds is more dangerous. It takes the game closer to the underlying luck line, because you can't effectively communicate with the other player in the normal ways. And that's a scary proposition, because you're relying on decision making to create an edge... The luck layer is the same for everyone.
It is not the same in poker, because there is a very defined strategy for playing against people who don't understand strategy - and that is to play a tighter range and better hands.
It obviously doesn't eliminate luck; but the person who doesn't understand strategy isn't going to do well either.
I feel like you think you're disagreeing with me, when in fact you are supporting my point. The game goes closer to the luck baseline, and you beat the luck baseline by playing tighter.
Also, that's all well and good for heads up play, but if you're at a full table, playing tighter for one person at the table is just going to see you winning a lot of nothing. (Players paying attention will just skip hands where you bite.)
What makes you a master is the ability to predict everything before it happens fast and automatically.
A master swordman does not fear novices precisely because they know their movements before they do. They look at (imperceptible for amateurs) body language hints and know exactly what you are going to do before you do it.
In reality there are physics constraints. Before you do a movement, you need to put weight in some part of the body, tense a muscle....e.g it is impossible to jump without a specific movement of going down and preloading.
Not only that , they know exactly what is the best response to it to neutralize whatever comes to them.
>"But don't you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardness and stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do: and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot."
I played SSBB (Super Smash Bros. Brawl) competitively. I'd occasionally drop games to the worst players because they would choose one of several of the worst possible options available to them at any given time. I keep expecting them to react the "proper" way and so it would throw off my reads. Thankfully sets are best of 3.
SSBB is a game entirely based on reads due to the characteristic lack of combos and "neutral position" being popular since there aren't many scenarios where you can build momentum in a favored position (unlike the more popular SSBM (Super Smash Bros. Melee) which has combos that allow you to create favored positions to keep momentum.
Similarly, I've observed that opponents who are too bad can really annoy players of both gambling and parlour-style card games. Their ideal opponent plays "correctly", but poorly.
Tangentially related: "How Rangchu Did The Impossible With One of Tekken's Worst Characters" [0]. This guy beat the greatest Tekken players in the world with panda, which had previously been considered one of the weakest characters in the game.
I’ve always thought that multiplayer games could be improved by essentially giving every player a bot “layer” their actions are relayed through; a bot which perfectly does everything that can be done through rote memorization (pathing, rough aiming based on prediction with incomplete knowledge), leaving the players to compete solely on the things humans are uniquely good at.
(I’m not suggesting aimbots, mind you; the bot layer wouldn’t have more complete information to base its decisions on than the player does.)
I think this is part of why I love games that have a constant stream of user-made levels. Many of my favorite experiences in Halo are when I'm playing a match on a Forge (user-created) level that no one in the match has seen before and I'm trying to adapt to it faster than the enemies. Super Mario Maker (which just had a release on the Switch!) is similarly good since it gives you a constant stream of new levels.
I don't want to pretend quake or other games I like don't have that, for example dueling in quake required memorization of maps and such, it's closer to a spectrum (or a linear combination of the skills) but the speedrun type of games, especially skill platformers like Celeste for example really lean heavily on the other aspect of play. Others have pointed out other games like fortnite have this more improvision emphasis which I didn't know because I haven't played it, so may be it isn't as bad as I feel it is as of late, I might just not be playing the right games.
I used to play CS in the dorms, and my roommate had a friend who attended the competing flagship school. Guy was pretty damn good, and playing against him kinda leveled me up. Started learning where people tend to hide, what cover can be shot through, etc. In retrospect I shouldn't really have been surprised that he was cheating.
> I painfully miss twitch games like quake that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately, you instead had to react and improvise quickly and think on your feet.[0] It's a different set of skills that seems to have fallen out of favor as of late.
What? Two of the top four~ most played games on earth right now are battle royales.
Despite the press of the young player-base, Fortnite fills what you describe for me. The building mechanic creates so much opportunity for think-fast, improvise, and outsmart your opponent moments. Plus, playing solo means you don't have to interact with anyone if you don't want to.
Apex Legends is good for improvisational gameplay that doesn't involve memorising building patterns. Also it's free!
The tactical opportunities in a fight that are available to a team with a gibraltar and pathfinder vs a gibraltar and pathfinder.. huge. Where does the shield go? Is claiming the high ground worth exposing yourself to the airstrike?
If you just moved around using the obvious controls then you would generally get destroyed by opponents who had mastered that unintuitive way to move fast.
I don't know .. often different people or different skill levels will solve hard games differently.
I love Hollow Knight to bits.
It is one of these "hard but fair" games.
My first playthrough 1 year or 2 ago has seen me die a lot of times.
And it was indeed because I needed to learn how each boss (there are so many of them .. maybe 30 or 40 ?? ) moves and react accordingly. I quickly started to see it as a dance or a dialogue with the boss though. You have a limited but versatile skill set at your disposal, so for each boss, I had to think about how to adequately counter a move.
The end result is a beautiful dance of action and counter reactions.
I had a second play through a couple of months ago. Since then, the devs have made the game change A LOT. Some bosses had their entire move set rewritten. New areas were added, etc.
So I was not playing on memory.
I had still acquired a wealth of knowledge on how to control that little bug, even with its limited initial toolset.
So I beat most of the game without dying just by reacting quickly to whatever it threw at me, it was an awesome experience.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not all jazz and no classical music. I love Hollow Knight actually, it's easily to me one of the best games I've played in years. I do admit it depends, I do tend to lean more on the jazz parts of my brain, even with games like Hollow Knight, especially during boss battles.
I think you're on to something that bothers me a little too. Games like Celeste are certainly playable as an ordinary gamer who doesn't want to practice and memorize precise inputs, but it's a popular game to speedrun because the collision detection in the game is complete trash. You can jump straight through some obstacles, get additional dashes, etc. that the developers didn't originally intend.
There's something un-fun to me that is hard to explain about all this. I don't like spending hours retrying a single challenge when I know there's a super precise series of inputs elite players or a TAS could use to get through in 5 seconds. I realize that's a very subjective thing and this is still fun to some players.
I've moved to playing mostly puzzle games like The Witness, puzzle platformers like Braid, and challenging "simple" platformers like VVVVVV. What I like about VVVVVV is that the inputs are incredibly easy to learn. You will die a lot, and there are people who can make it through the whole game in deathless mode, but I'm okay with that because it just means I need to get better at the game, not get better at memorizing a precise series of inputs and strategies.
The thing about Celeste is that it's essentially two games in one. The first game is when you play it with only the abilities explicitly taught by the game up to that point (for most of the game, just jump, climb, and dash), and the second is when you go back and replay it from the beginning, having learned about wallbounces and hyper dashes and such. The level layouts of the "second game" are all identical to the first, of course, but the traversal becomes completely different with the mobility allowed by these newly-learned moves. (More recently, you could argue a third game has developed around un-taught and unintended tech like ultra dashes and demodashes, but you get the idea.)
But at least for me, the existence of this second game (and third) does not in any way detract from the quality or enjoyability of the first one. The speedrunners are basically playing a different game, and unlike most other video games, in Celeste this is by design.
I guess I don't understand how it takes away from the casual experience when challenges in a game can be skipped through strategies that you would never even think of in a casual playthrough. Does the existence of a 17:01 world record for Ocarina of Time Any% that skips 95% of the game via a wrong warp make the game not worth playing casually?
It's seems odd to be bothered by knowing someone out there is tremendously better at a game than you are. Whenever I play tennis, I'm aware that my skills are laughably bad compared to even a mediocre pro, but who cares?
> You can jump straight through some obstacles, get additional dashes, etc. that the developers didn't originally intend.
Most of these techniques were intended; the game was designed to have them in. The game actually teaches you most of this tech extremely late in the game. It's a replay-ability thing. There's an extremely good talk at GDC a few years back about Celeste level design, incidentally...
There have been a few situations where runners did find an actual glitch, and the devs patched them out, because they weren't intended. There have also been one or two where they've left it in, because it's healthy for the running community overall.
I haven't played much VVVVVVV, but isn't it basically the same as celeste? Or is it Celeste's lack of randomness that makes it worse for you; I thought VVVVVV didn't have any randomness either, but it's been a few years.
> Most of these techniques were intended; the game was designed to have them in.
As another reply reminded me, I'm thinking of stuff like demodashes that definitely weren't intended. In any case, the comment I'm replying to is also criticizing design styles that benefit speedrunners over the average player, so my comment is kind of a reaction to that.
> I haven't played much VVVVVVV, but isn't it basically the same as celeste?
The difference with VVVVVV is that the controls are simple, instead of having runner-friendly combos that get extremely long or involve glitches. The game is played with arrow keys: up / down flip the direction of gravity, and left / right move the player character at a constant speed to the left or right. That's all there is to the controls. Similarly, Super Hexagon has exactly two inputs: left and right, which move an arrow around in a circle.
In contrast, games like Celeste put an enormous amount of complexity behind input combos. The air dash mechanic alone took me hours to learn with any precision. The complaint I have (and maybe the parent comment too) is that as a casual player it's hard to shake the feeling that these games were designed for someone who has a lot more time to train finger memory on a bunch of precise input combinations than you do.
So it's not the existence of speedrunning that bothers me (I watch a bunch of GDQ, actually), it's the experience of playing games that are easy to exploit and "beat" if you have time to practice frame-perfect inputs, but aren't so rewarding casually. As I said in my comment you replied to, I realize this is all very subjective and probably won't bother most people (and I actually, I like Celeste quite a lot). But it's also the reason I find games like Smash very frustrating as a casual.
Input combos? I'd definitely call things like extended hypers and wallbounces input combos, but for the basic air dash, I guess I don't consider pressing 2 buttons at the same time (dash + direction) to be worthy of calling a "combo". By that standard, jumping left/right or climbing up/down are also input combos.
On the other hand, though, I've seen friends of mine who are less experienced with video game controls struggle with all of the above actions. I could watch my friend manipulate the controller and see that she was only able to handle one button input at a time, so for example in order to jump right, she had to break it down into the discrete actions of: hold down the right button, hold down the jump button, release the jump button, release the right button, with maybe half a second to a full second in between each action. So for this friend, pressing any two buttons at the same time clearly was an "input combo" that was a challenge to execute.
The interesting thing to me is that in my mind, the basic controls of Celeste feel very simple: it's "only" run, jump climb, dash (until 7B and 8C teach you wallbounces and hypers). But all of those basic actions have so many subtleties. For example, jumps can also be wall jumps, and there are even two kinds of wall jumps: straight up the wall if you hold climb, which consumes climbing stamina, or away from the wall if you don't hold climb, which doesn't consume stamina (not counting the other wall jump type, neutral wall jumps, since those aren't taught or required to complete the game). Somehow all of this complexity felt very intuitive to me, even at the beginning when I still hadn't learned to execute it all consistently. So I never felt during my first playthrough that Celeste was somehow catering to speedrunners at the expense of the casual experience. In fact, my impression was that Celeste does a very good job of providing the smoothest possible ramp up from casual play to speedrunning.
Anyway, if there's a point to this meandering comment, it's that variation in the way that people perceive the complexity of video game controls is very interesting. The same friend I mentioned above, who had trouble stringing together two inputs in Celeste, can give me a run for my money in Mario Kart, managing steering, mini turbos, and using items all at once.
Gotcha, thanks! Yeah, I was thinking you were talking about stuff like wall bounces and extended hypers; most people that don’t get to the C sides assume they’re unintentional. My bad!
I find Smash difficult too. Wave dash in Celeste? I’ll do it all day. In smash? Dunno, just doesn’t work. Humans are funny :)
Why does the existence of speedrunners playing differently ruin the fun for you? Why sabotage yourself by setting unfun time limit challenges for yourself?
I will never be a chess grandmaster. That doesn't make chess unfun.
You'd probably like DUSK, which is on sale right now on Steam (not that it was outrageously priced to begin with) and looks and feels like a classic twitch FPS (the devs also have another game called Amid Evil, which seems to do away with the 90's FPS aesthetic and go with a more magical setting, but otherwise keeps the same sort of gameplay). I haven't tried DUSK's multiplayer yet, but the singleplayer modes are great.
I play a lot of Paradox games these days and they are exactly the opposite of games meant to be speedrun. They are meant to be played at exactly your own pace and are much more skill (strategy) based than memorizing specific sequences of actions.
I think what you say is probably true of most platformers and other games like Sekiro (a successor to dark souls which was one of the original non-platformer games like this) but definitely not all games.
> I play a lot of Paradox games these days and they are exactly the opposite of games meant to be speedrun. They are meant to be played at exactly your own pace and are much more skill (strategy) based than memorizing specific sequences of actions.
It depends on the exact context and goal. To an extent, I would consider "map painting" the equivalent of a speedrun. It's usually measured in elapsed game time rather than play time, but there's a similar effect.
Especially with some of the more difficult OPMs, there can certainly be an element of memorization and optimizing starts. This falls off as the game goes further, but it definitely can be present. I recall some years back reading an EU3 byzantine guide that described many of the nations as being every bit as much puzzle game as strategy, where figuring out the tricks and traps of the opening years can mean the difference between a thriving growth and early defeat.
Not that anyone ever has to play the games that way, but that's true of everything that gets put through a traditional speedrun as well.
I guess I don't consider it the same, unless we are considering speedrunning == mastery. I really appreciate those games for the sense of mastery you can get while also playing at your own pace. You don't need to memorize things like how to start as a difficult OPM once you have enough experience in the game, unless you need full optimality.
I would suspect that it is harder to train reaction time than 'memorization' type skills. If this is the case, and gamers tend to gravitate towards games they are good at/getting better at, we would expect there is a lower demand capacity for reaction games than memorization games, because a smaller proportion of the population is capable of 'playing well'.
that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately
What recent games are you thinking of?
Competitive Quake players knew the maps down to the pixel, along with the location and respawn times of every resource. Lots of modern 'hardcore' platformers have randomization and don't depend on pure memorization.
My favorite game to watch speed runs of is still Getting Over It. The game is notoriously frustrating, with many players spending multiple painstaking hours climbing up small sections of the level, only to make a critical mistake, fall back down, and have to start all over again.
Then you have people like this, who've gotten so good at the game that they're able to beat the entire thing in 1 minute 17 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnzTObVRwF0
My current favorite (to watch) is Celeste. The humans are amazing, but the TAS is just out of this world. It just looks so damned cool as it blows through the levels.
So true. And for people to understand just how hard it is, on the flip side, I LOVE Dunkey's reaction video playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qGCleYV4cw hahah It's absolutely hilarious to watch.
I used to work nights doing production support (lots of downtime). To beat 88-4 [1], I exported the level, re-edited it to have 4 starting points (each a quarter of the way through [0/4, 1/4, 2/4, 3/4]). Then I practiced each of those in turn until I could beat them. After I could be each with about an 80% success rate, I tried the whole level again.
There are probably only 5 hard "gates" in 88-4. That is, 5 places where you are likely to fail (say a 15% success rate before extensive practice). The success rate after 5 gates is unexpectedly, phenomenally low: 0.008% (0.15^5). If you practice and get your individual success rate up to 80%, then the overall challenge is a doable 32.7% overall. I think my success rate was more like 40% on three gates, though, because even after practicing I think I tried about 30 times.
I still think about gates like this. I think Yatzee explained this in a Zero Punctuation episode, but I don't remember which one.
I have, some (I mainly bought it as a reward for the time I spent on the original; same for Spelunky and Cave Story+) Nowhere near as much as the original. I think the time I spent on the original was a function of boredom.
Great ad - engaging, entertaining content that doubles up as exposure for the product. The best kind of ad that is actually useful. (This post is appreciating it, not knocking it for that.)
I'm not familiar with the scene. Are the speedrunners mostly kids with lots of free time? This hobby must be time consuming.
Or are there also hardcore older gamers among them, who started playing in the 80s, 90s and they have jobs, families and still spend their free time spedrunning games?
It's a mixed bag. The speedrunning community is pretty diverse in terms of age, though it does skew younger (not a lot of boomers) and tends to be males from upper income countries, though there are MANY exceptions.
A good person to watch for overviews of the speedrunning community is SummoningSalt on Youtube.
Here is a good video on the speedrunning of 1987's "Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!" on the NES while blindfolded, an incredible feat for humans regardless of the medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZT6JEOC3D8
Here is a good video on the speedrunning of 1999's 'PokeMon Snap' for the N64, a game thought impossible to speedrun early on. Nonetheless, it has been speedran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYcWQP1tWfQ
In general, the community is non-normal and seems a bit, well, pointless, to a lot of others. But it's something that a lot of people enjoy doing to some degree or another and like everything else on the internet there is a thriving fanbase.
I'd say it's a little of both. On a game like 007 GoldenEye (N64), people have been speedrunning the game for almost 20 years, and are now in their early or late thirties. But there are still younger people that are getting to the game just now and getting new World Record runs. And this is just one game as an example, every game is different.
I think most of the popular / good speedrunners are Twitch livestreamers who make enough from donations / ads / sponsorships to do it full-time. You can see some Twitch stats here: https://twitchadvertising.tv/audience/ (although of course not every Twitch streamer is a speedrunner).
There are definitely hardcore adult gamers in the speedrunning community, who have day jobs and families. I'm friends with a world-record-holding speedrunner, and he treats it like any other hobby. He enjoys spending his free time practicing, and will attend speedrunning events for fun.
Speedrunners are playing the game manually, and sharing the tricks they find for how to exploit game mechanics to speed things up.
There exist something called TAS (tool-assisted speedrun) where you use an emulator with save states and either slow motion or the ability to advance frame-by-frame in order to construct the "ideal" run, but runs constructed these ways generally aren't actually playable by hand because they rely too much on frame-exact timing.
There’s different varieties of speed running. Some people do it entirely manually, others do Tool Assisted Speedruns (often abbreviated to TAS) where a program provides all the input, allowing frame perfect moves which humans are incapable of. There’s also a slowly growing trend of letting machine learning algorithms loose on games like Mario - that stuff to my knowledge is still at the stage of trying to get an AI to even be able to finish the game at all, but I’m sure with some time and effort we’ll start seeing techniques no one has even thought to try.
Speedrunning is primarily done manually. Some players use fuzzers for discovering tech, but TAS is a separate genre of speedrun and generally more of a novelty than anything.
Even if some people can beat it in 1 minute, it is still extremely hard for a lot of people, and provides a lot of enjoyment. And those speedrunners who beat it in a minute probably spent dozens of hours finding those exploits.
A couple of years ago, I played Hollow Knight on PC. I probably spent 60 hours getting to the final ending and finding the majority of the secrets. I enjoyed it immensely for a month or two. Sure there are speed runners who can beat it in under an hour, but that doesn't diminish the many hours of enjoyment I got from it.
If you haven't, I would recommend watching Summoning Salt's World Record Progression videos, each of which takes a game and talks about the series of exploits that allowed the world record speedruns to exist.
I'm guessing based on the overlay that this was a tool assisted speedrun (TAS)? If so, I wouldn't fret if I were the author. These players are able to exploit collision glitches and timings that are almost impossible for a human player!
When I was young I played video games like they were an open world full of mysteries I was uncovering by myself, as the first and only explorer.
Then I realized all the little things I was discovering were actually known by everybody else. Specially, they were made by someone else.
As I grew old I kept thinking about how to make a game that would have secrets no one knew, not even the game maker. But that's impossible, not even Dwarf Fortress or similar very complex games where you can do basically almost anything are like that.
Every game is just a treasure hunt made by some adult for kids to play -- and that is very depressing.
Speedruns and other exploitative/unintended aspects of a game basically solve that issue. There is no way that the developers of Super Mario World would have ever guessed that someone would beat the game in minutes by reprogramming it at runtime via glitches. The same goes for "0.5 A presses" and other absurd ways to play games.
