What do you think of games like Untrusted that require you to edit the game's code to proceed?
If a game has "metafeatures" as a gameplay element, then using those metafeatures is of course actually playing the game.
This touches the subject of those few games that likewise go "meta" (oftentimes in very fourth-wall-breaking ways) by requiring the player to, for example, reset or quit the game in order to proceed. Naturally in those instances you do exactly that, when playing the game through. Personally I still think that the use of those metafeatures ought to be limited to those instances only. (But given how rare such games are, I would be ready to make a complete concession with those particular games and allow resetting/quitting to be used any time for any purpose. Not my preference, but I suppose it wouldn't bother me too much in this particular case, I suppose.)
I understand why you would think this way, but I'll agree to disagree. Many games have ending sequences that start with 'congratulations', or 'you have saved ...' , or some such thing. To me if the game tells me congratulations then I beat the game.
Now it's me who doesn't understand. What does the actual text have anything to do with what I said?
This is turning quite ridiculous. I don't think I can explain my comparison any better than I did, yet people still just outright refuse to even admit that they understand what I'm talking about. You don't have to agree with what I'm saying, but you can at least acknowledge that you understand what I'm saying. What exactly is it that you want me to do? I can repeat my explanation, but I can't explain it any better. If you want me to repeat it I can do that, but it would be useless if you don't even have the willingness to acknowledge you understand.
This feels like some kind of weird fight, where opponents cannot give their opposition even an inch, and even an acknowledgement that they understand what the other is saying is conceding too much, and it has to be avoided at all costs. Even cursewords have already been thrown.
It's the exact thing I wished to avoid in my original post.
ACE =/= modding how many times does it need to be said. Do you need documentation to prove that you're wrong or something.
Fine, you don't understand, or refuse to understand, what I'm trying to say, even after I explained it to the best of my abilities. You are still clinging to the example rather than what I'm trying to convey with it. I suppose there's nothing more I can do to try to change that.
Did you have any other opinions about my original subject?
As for the "romhack" example you made, in that case you are no longer using the same software as everyone else. As long as you are using the same software as everyone else and are just manipulating that software using programming errors, I personally am fine with it. I don't really understand the comparison you are trying to make with this.
Why would most people not consider a modified game that just shows the end credits to be a proper completion of the game? Because the game wasn't actually played through. There was no "speedrun" at all. Sure, you got to see the end credits... but so what? The game wasn't actually played. How is that a game completion? It isn't.
In the same way, once ACE kicks in... well, the game was stopped being played as well. If the custom code now jumps to the end credits, it's essentially no different from the example above. Yes, sure, it's showing the end credits, but so what? The game was not played through. The "speedrun" ended once the ACE kicked in. The game wasn't completed. Just because the end credits are shown on screen doesn't somehow magically make the game having been completed any more than with the romhack example.
Do you understand where I'm going with this?
As I said, I think ACE is awesome in its own right, but should be considered a completely distinct category from game-completing speedruns.
Oh god. IS IT NOT?
Clearly not, given how many posts have been made defending the concept that ACE runs that jump to the end credits are legit game completions. (And the fact that ACE run submissions are officially not considered breaking the rule that says that the game must be completed.)
Then you would not approve of a segmented speedrun in which the segments are specifically intended for RNG manipulation? Even in a game where favorable RNG can save tens of minutes?
That's an interesting and difficult question. I don't have a strong opinion about it at this moment.
Perhaps not, but ACE has been called out as a worrying trend in speedruns, and people are willing to debate that.
But the reason I don't like ACE to be considered a proper completion of the game is quite different from the subject I'm talking about in this thread (ie. non-gameplay tricks being used in speedruns. After all, ACE is (usually) done purely via gameplay, so it's a different issue.)
As I said, I think ACE is awesome in its own right, but should be considered a completely distinct category from game-completing speedruns. Sure, the ACE can jump back to the game's code, but its execution was interrupted in-between, so it doesn't really matter. The run ended when the ACE began, and since the game wasn't completed during the run...
Much closer to the original subject is using the reset button in TASes. The reset button is not part of gameplay, and thus in my books isn't completing the game via gameplay either. (Yes, I know about that one game, don't nitpick about it. With that particular game you can press the reset button all day long for all I care, if it floats your boat.)
So, in short, you would like to see more speedruns of the game the developers intended to make, rather than of the programs that the programmers released.
Is that roughly approximate?
No. Glitches are fine. Unintended shortcuts are fine. Zipping through walls is fine.
It's not about what is done, but how.
Invariel wrote:
No, I didn't miss your point at all. You are conflating two separate entities, and arandomgameTASer (and I) are trying to point out that they are separate things
So perhaps you indeed don't understand what I mean, even with the help of the comparison. You are just clinging to the example, rather than understanding what I want to convey with it.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. My original post was not about ACE, but about unassisted speedruns.
Considering that this thread started as, "I, Warp, find the following speedrunning techniques distasteful," the only real place for the thread to go is to a discussion about which techniques used in speedrunning Warp finds offensive, and why other people find them to be valid. It looks like people are attacking Warp, sure, but that is because Warp is the focus of this thread.
Over the years I have learned the hard way to always be sure to make it clear when I'm expressing a personal opinion (rather than something that's a more widely accepted fact.) When one expresses strong opinions without the softening expressions (like "in my opinion", "I think", etc) one may sound a lot more arrogant than is the intent, as if everything one says is fact and everybody must accept it. Sounding too arrogant like this, even if unintentionally, has bitten me in the behind too many times, which is why I have learned to always try to express myself clearly, and separate personal opinions from facts.
Yet, it seems, no matter what I do, some people will still manage to turn it against me. Now the very fact that I make extremely clear that this is my personal opinion is somehow used as a weapon against me.
*sigh*
Can we please just discuss the subject and not turn it personal? Does this always have to turn ugly?
And, as arandomgameTASer pointed out to you, the two scenarios are not comparable at all because ACE is different than modding or cheating.
If I modded a game so that it would simply show the end credits when it's started, would you consider that a legit game completion? Would you consider it having "beat the game"?
If your answer is "no", then think about the reasons why you think it's not, and perhaps then you'll understand why I don't consider ACE runs to be legit either.
That's not what an ACE is, at all. ACE =/= modding or cheating.
You missed my point completely. Let me repeat:
Would you consider a game that was modded to simply show the end credits a legit completion of said game? (Note emphasis.) If not, then think about the reasons why not. Why would you not consider it a legit completion?
If you think about those reasons, then perhaps you'll understand why I don't consider glitching to ACE, and from there jumping to the end credits a legit completion of the game either. The reasons are very similar.
This has nothing to do with "cheating". This has to do with what we consider a legit completion of a game and what not.
Warp wrote:
What is it with this obsession of locking threads? Aren't people allowed to have discussions? Even if it's just one person against everybody else, so what?
Discussion isn't the problem. The problem is that this discussion is going nowhere because it's obvious that you're not going to change your mind, and have a skewed perspective on what exactly ACE is.
And that deserves the thread to be locked?
And by the way, I'm getting really sick of the old tired (and flawed) argument of "20 people disagree with you, therefore you must conform to their opinion".
I am allowed to have an opinion, even an unpopular one, and I do not think it to be a completely unreasonable one. I want to discuss this opinion with other people, and have different points of view expressed. I'm completely ok with people presenting disagreeing opinions, and in fact I welcome it. I want to discuss the subject. Shutting me up by locking the thread simply because I will not conform to the majority opinion makes no sense. I don't even understand why it would. If somebody doesn't want to read the thread, nobody is forcing them to. It's not like this thread takes things away from people.
For some reason you think ACE is cheating
No, I don't. What I think is that glitching to ACE ends the game, and thus it's not a proper completion anymore.
Can you remind me why you consider using emulator tools legit means of game completion?
Because they feed controller input to the game, which is running as exactly as possible compared to the actual console? All TASes could ostensibly be hardware-verified.
After all, abusing emulator bugs is not considered legit. Modifying the game code itself using the emulator is also not considered legit.
I don't really understand what you are getting at.
So the whole claim that they're NOT trying to beat the game as quickly as possible is, quite frankly, silly.
If I modded a game so that it would simply show the end credits when it's started, would you consider that a legit game completion? Would you consider it having "beat the game"?
If your answer is "no", then think about the reasons why you think it's not, and perhaps then you'll understand why I don't consider ACE runs to be legit either.
link_7777 wrote:
Since the developers had to write code for it and it had to be tested I'd say save features are a part of the game
So is the developer console in games like Half-Life 2, yet using it is banned.
Samsara wrote:
I'll be locking the thread if it starts going further south from here
What is it with this obsession of locking threads? Aren't people allowed to have discussions? Even if it's just one person against everybody else, so what? As long as the discussion remains civil (as it has), who cares? Nobody is out of line. There is an exchange of opinions, there is discussion, there is social interaction. If somebody is out of line, punish them, not everybody. Stop with this thread-locking obsession already, please. Allow people to speak their minds. (And this wasn't a plea to you in particular, but to the moderators in general.)
RGamma wrote:
I can see where you're coming from with this Warp and I tend to be open to everything, but I wouldn't necessarily characterise this trend you describe as "worrying".
To clarify, what I meant by the trend being worrying is that these techniques seem to be becoming more and more prevalent, and I fear that at some point speedrunners will just stop making (what I consider) "clean" speedruns, and just litter speedruns with all these external non-gameplay glitching techniques.
If we take HL2 as an example, we don't even have to go many years back to go to a time where HL2 speedruns were pure gameplay. There was glitch abuse aplenty, of course, but they were all triggered by gameplay (ie. just using the movement keys etc.) It was awesome. I know that I'm a very small minority in this, but nowadays it seems that all HL2 speedruns use non-gameplay techniques to glitch the game, which I find boring. It just doesn't feel right; it doesn't feel like a real speedrun, if you have to, for the lack of a better word, "cheat" the game into glitching by using external means (such as deleting a save file). I worry that, perhaps, at some point there will never be a new "clean" speedrun of HL2 anymore, which would be a shame. It would be the end of an era, and in my view the enjoyability of HL2 speedruns would have diminished, permanently.
That is what I find worrying.
I love Neverending Journey from the game Lost Odyssey. (It's composed by Nobuo Uematsu, so it isn't a surprise. But this one is particularly beautiful.)
Link to video
So very few people have ever completed games then? Except for older games where you have no save feature. But for all other games that are designed to power on and off the console, you aren't allowed to do this in order to beat the game? It's certainly, no question about it, part of the game. Why you shouldn't be allowed to do this makes no sense in my eyes...
Segmented runs are fine (as long as saving and loading is used to start the segment, not to glitch the game.)
So, to summarize, what you are looking for in a speedrun is that the game's unmodified code be running for 100% of the run. Is that correct?
That doesn't summarize all that I have said in this thread. It is, however, a generic principle to explain why I'm not very fond of considering ACE TASes legit game completions. (Again, don't get me wrong: I think ACE is awesome and impressive on its own right. It shows a huge amount of work, talent and understanding of the underlying technology. However, ACE is its own completely separate category. It's not a game completion, and thus not a speedrun. At least not a speedrun that aims to complete the game. You might consider a "speedrun" that aims to run custom code as soon as possible, but that's not what's usually meant by the term.)
Edit: To that, I ask this: what about runs which reset the game (instead of powering off or crashing the system)? Are those runs invalid in your mind?
Is resetting the game part of its gameplay?
(And yes, I know there are like three games in existence where at one point you have to reset the game to continue, by design. I'm not talking about those. These fall under the category of the exceptions I mentioned earlier. And even in those I'd say that only use reset when the game requires you to, but not anywhere else.)
You could kill the game process by force powering off your computer. In this way, this is no different than pressing the reset button on your console.
Do you consider console speedruns that abuse resetting the console as extreme?
In my books I don't consider them valid completions of the game. The game was not affected by gameplay input, but by external means. Turning off the system, resetting, killing the game from the system's task manager, hex-editing the game's savefiles... it really makes no difference. Those are not playing the game. Why some of those techniques are allowed while others are not is quite arbitrary, even though they pretty much all fall into the same category of non-gameplay abuse.
(A hypothetical question would be: What if you can make the game crash via gameplay, requiring a restart, and this can be used to make the completion faster? Well, I'd say that when the game crashes, the run has ended. The game is no longer running, so it's finished. End of run. Game was not completed. I'm willing to accept individual exceptions with good reasons, but in general I would consider it ended. Which is, incidentally, why I don't really consider ACE TASes legit completions of a game. While ACE is technically impressive, once the console starts running your own code, the game has ended, and thus the run has ended. But that's another topic altogether.)
To be fair, you did an excellent job at presenting and commenting. Sure, there were some things that were missing (as I commented in the other thread, I think it should have been made much clearer what the physical setup for each demonstration was, and that each run was indeed being run on a real unmodified console running the actual unmodified game), but besides that, the commentary felt really fluent and natural, rather than eg. forced and haphazard.
The only thing that was a bit of a pity, related to that lack of description of the setup and what's happening, is that many viewers didn't get the proper picture of what was going on, and some of them even got the wrong impression. (For example many thought that the games were modded, rather than being original. Some even thought that they were run on an emulator rather the the real thing, because it wasn't explained nor shown that it was indeed the real console. IIRC in the SMW demonstration it wasn't even mentioned at all what the game was or what console was being used. It wasn't even clear if it was a console at all, or just a PC running an emulator.)
However, as has been stated already the speedrun community is a natural democracy where the aim of the game is to get the lowest time.
There lies the core issue, though. Sure, the aim is to get the lowest time, but there are still limits to what is accepted to achieve that goal, and what isn't. It's not a question of "anything goes".
The most prominent example is that of deleting the save file from the game's menu being allowed, but opening the game's own console and writing commands there is not. Both are features supported by the game itself, but one is allowed while the other isn't. There are rules and limits imposed by the community; it's not a "anything goes" situation.
Would you find it an acceptable technique to alt-tab to Windows and use its file manager to delete the savefile? If you would not, then why do you find it acceptable that the same is done from within the game itself? "Because it's something the game itself supports" is not really a good answer because the game (eg. HL2) also supports console cheat commands, which are not allowed.
I just don't feel like it's "speedrunning" if you do things like those. It's not completing the game purely by playing it, but by messing up with its data using external means. It just doesn't feel right. There's in principle little difference to simply hex-editing a savefile using an editor.
if I am presented with a speedrun that is basically a longplay with knowledge, and a speedrun that uses actual speed techniques (glitches, strange code interactions, etc.), I am far more likely to watch the latter, because I can experience the former by playing the game myself and gain more enjoyment.
I don't have a problem with glitches. I have a problem when those glitches are triggered using external non-gameplay means (and I include things like "go to the game's menu and delete the savefile from there" in that category).
And there's also the matter of needing to find a game that's publicly available so that AGDQ doesn't get into trouble, and the host of legal issues surrounding that, and you will quickly see why dwangoAC searches for games that /can/ be played at the marathon.
Since using a popular existing (and copyrighted) game has legal issues, and using a custom game has entertainment issues, can the idea of a TAS competition be viable after all? Was this a somewhat failed experiment? Can it be made to work somehow?
(There is also the practical problem that it may be unrealistic to have a completely new never-before-seen game made for every single GDQ event...)
This thread seems to be taken less as a thread about "worrying trends" and more about "Warp is worrying" because speed running trends are all based on the context of what speed runners and their viewers enjoy, which seems to be obvious to everyone else. At this point, the thread is meant to help you understand and not stay worried about these trends which everyone else understands better and be contented.
Is it really so hard to simply discuss the subject and not make it personal at every possible turn?
xy2_, ais523 and YaLTeR participated in the discussion and brought up additional points of view and examples, and clearly wanted to talk about the subject itself, which is exactly what I wanted.
Speedrunning is a hobby. I like following said hobby. I like discussing things pertaining that hobby. Can we discuss the hobby and forget about whose nickname happens to be marked as the author of the post?
If you are not interested in this particular subject, nobody is forcing you to read the thread.
If you're not interested in runs that use things outside of the controller, nobody is forcing you to watch them.
It seems that my original request to not turn this into a flamewar fell onto deaf ears. *sigh*
I get it. Neither you nor feos like me. That's fine. You can hate me all you want. I don't mind. I would nevertheless humbly request you to stop attacking me in contexts where I have done absolutely nothing wrong, if it's not too much to ask. Thank you.
