I find it honestly extremely amusing to see people speedrun Soulsborne games
They got so good at it that they can confidently ditch large amounts of great gear just because they don’t have the time to equip it while running to the end and they can beat bosses without a single hit on themselves
"Take this. It's dangerous to go alone."
"A sword? Nah. That's only going to weigh me down."
I think for a lot of games, using glitches and bugs and the like is part of the speedrunning process. I was a bit surprised at it when I was watching some Dark Souls speedruns a while ago and people were bringing it up in the chat and everything and the speedrunner basically stated that using map bugs and the like was the standard for speedruns.
Yeah. Glitches are common, but speedrunners have these really weird hangups as to what counts as fair play. Karl Jobst has another video where a 55-year-old Goldeneye player claimed that if you look at the ground, you go faster.* And it works. It works because Goldeneye seriously taxes the Nintendo 64's hardware, and if you look down, the console doesn't have to render so many polygons, so each individual frame is rendered faster. You save about one second for each minute of gameplay.
And the Goldeneye speedrunning community lost its shit. Speedrunners will do anything,
anything to go faster, but looking at the ground? Some things cross the line!
Or maybe these guys were already burned out on the game, and utterly butthurt that a newbie blew them out of the water.
But yeah. Glitches are common. I remember Reach speedruns where people would use forklifts and Warthogs to no-clip through doors. But some things cross the line.
Congratulations. By inputting arbitrary commands, you've forced a bit of code into the right memory locations which tells the game to jump to the end credits.
Same here. You've reached the end credits without doing any quests or defeating Ganon. Does that really count as playing the game? Don't get me wrong, it's a masterful demonstration requiring an intimate knowledge of glitches and how they affect the game, but something is missing.
*Apparently, this guy was
very literal-minded, and interpreted a game manual saying "Hold your nose to the grindstone and haul ass" as "Look at the ground and you go faster."
Map bugs were used in Doom as well despite how simple and ironclad the coding and map design in that game is... yet on two different levels players found bugs which helped trim up long standing records and are considered legit speedruns as well apparently.
Frankly, I think the more simple the game, the more potential there is for glitches. Simple physics, simple level geometry, simple mathematics, but these simple rules create emergent complexity that can be exploited.
Or maybe more complicated AAA games have more rigorous playtesting and programming to make sure they can't be broken.
All I know that I know from experience that if you get out of the level geometry of Halo: Reach or Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the only place you're going is
down.