Speedrunning 

very cool

Massive shoutout to tommysalami6694!

Tommy salami!!!

exactly

Exactly! Many seem to forget that, anyone who has *that* level of familiarity of the game must've poured hours upon hours just experiencing the game down to the tiniest details.

This right here. I played stray extremely thoroughly and experienced all it had to offer before I ignored half of it and started running.

But are they playing them thoroughly just to find the best strat for speedruns, or many playthroughs because they like it? And Tim actually points out exactly your comment ;)

@@ronnylarock13 people tend to speedrun games they really enjoy. So I'd say there's AT LEAST one full playthrough before they even attempt to skip anything

Yeah, I attempted Halo 4 under 3 hours. It turned out I played through the game more than ten times.

The communities centered around researching tricks and routing for speedruns is very much similar to the exploratory testing aspect of QA. It makes me wonder whether it works both ways and formal software testing methods and perhaps automation could be (or is?) utilized in service of speedrunning.

@@savagedregime8176 it is to an extent, look up "crowdsourcing cpu in paper mario" for an example in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. i don't think i can link the video without getting the comment hidden though

Congratulations on speed running this video. :P

As a fellow speedrunner. i agree.

Said it very well, I'm not a speedrunner, but the reason I watch speedrunning videos and such is because I'm interested in all the intricacies of the game's mechanics. Legitimately, 90% of speedrunners have to spend a lot of time playing the game normally and exploring every nook and cranny to actually *find* how to do these things quickly. Most of them don't skip past stuff they haven't seen before, unless they're only playing the game to speedrun, but those people usually have less practice with the game than those with actual hours in the game casually.

Also I encourage any dev team if you are not doing it to challenges QA to a speed run race. It is a good chance QA will win, but it nice to celebrate the game with the other department.

Thanks. One day, I might drop back to a few times per week, but right now I am having fun and enjoying the energy and interaction with the commenters.

His early videos touch on it, he's a big fallout 3 fan. 4 not so much

Yeah it looks better now.

Also curious! Save scumming is definitely on people's minds these days. Does it bother you when people fear failed skill checks to the point where they just refuse to continue until they pass that percentage?

@@Battury Good question! The concern I have (as a player; I am not a game designer:) with save scumming is when it becomes trivial to overcome obstacles that are removed via a single skill check/roll. E.g. Baldur's Gate 3 allows you to quicksave in the middle of dialogue right before rolling the dice to see if the skill check passes. This trivializes the check and if the successful outcome is always more preferable than the failed one then the game incentivizes you to try again as the cost of getting what you want is minimal. So the question for me becomes: Is such a skill check even meaningful if one outcome is considered (say for the sake of argument by the majority of players) better than the other and you can simply roll for it multiple times? It's not a clear cut answer to me. In table top RPGs they have tried to solve this by the failing forward paradigm which requires the game master to keep the game's momentum moving forward by allowing the player to get what they want (e.g. unlock the locked chest in front of them) but at a cost (e.g. by applying negative consequences) That is a cool approach but it puts a lot of work on the developers who is now tasked with creating extra content for the failed scenarios. Not necessarily a bad thing but certainly costly. I wonder what other cool strategies are there. E.g. you could have a mini game like elder scrolls 4 or later to make the failed checks worth retrying. Or do it New Vegas style and use 0/1 thresholds for succeeding.

I think the New Vegas system is much better than randomized skill checks in CRPGs for this reason, but it still could be considered not yet ideal in certain ways, e.g. there can't be situation where the player experiences uncertainty about whether they will pass a check or not. I think/hope that eventually somebody will make a 'Souls-like CRPG' that is Ironman-only and continually saves in the background so that you can't retake skill checks, etc without impractical or obvious cheating, but on the other hand makes irrecoverable failure impossible. Planescape: Torment had a great conceit for this and was a lot of the way there, but still had a traditional manual save system that facilitated and typically encouraged scumming, as well as a few situations that could permanently kill you.

@@globalistgamer6418 Agree that New Vegas was a good solution. I also agree that removing manual saves would fix the problem but for some reason does not sit well with me (I guess it makes it difficult to check some short term consequences in a CRPG but maybe that is ok -- especially if the game is not too long). Between the two I do prefer the new Vegas approach :)

Yeah, I think there is more to improving the kind of scenarios that get scummed than just strictly the save system. Having a lot hinge on a single random skill check tends to be unsatisfying regardless of whether you can easily retry it or not. I think it would be preferable to see deeper diplomacy systems comparable to those used for combat where the number of rolls becomes more statistically stable, and there are also more tactical aspects like having to spend limited resources to be able to pass/recover from certain checks (a few games do these things to a degree but it seems like there is a lot of potential for further improvement).