@@N12015 game freak were the devs took their time to make 2 seperate badge checks on the elite four, but not making the camera solid enough so it wont clip through walls in the spawn room.
@@lem5689 Game Freak has two tiers of cutscenes - the dialogue-based ones, and then ones with more animation. (Example: The opening with the Legendary Bike flying around would be a 'Game Freak' cutscene, while talking to your mum is a dialogue-based one.)
It's the exact opposite of Sonic Frontier. One game seems to actively accommodate speedrunning, the other only seems to have polish in order to stop it.
afaik most of the reason for this is just bc Game Freak is still getting used to making fully 3D pokemon games, considering they did 2d games for decades before they suddenly had to start making these 3d titles bc Nintendo wanted them to modernize, that's why a lot of the glitches & bugs seem to be based on the environment/animations freaking out, rather than actual story progression being broken. this is just my theory tho
They had their priorities set on game content. I think they knew the game was going to launch hot, so they focused on making it content-complete above all else, polish be damned.
I thinks its more like: The games are so broken, that you cant even break it in your own favor. Because even very solid games have ways to break them, but at least its very hard to do it and it helps speedrunners sometimes... but here we have nothing.
Tbf it’s one of the funnest pokemon games I’ve played, it’s face isn’t TOTALLY shattered. And considering Legends Arceus was too solid to break open, this isn’t much of a surprise.
I think its more like SV has a solid bandaid to cover its brokenness. Adding lists and lists of conditional flags to avoid having to fix the core gameplay screams a bandaid to me
Idk if it's been mentioned yet, but the badge check at the E4 building letting you in with less than 8 badges is intended and doesn't require glitches at all. You're allowed to do the interview at any time, but it will auto-fail if at less than 8 badges.
The dialogue’s even different. Rika asks you about your favorite subject in school, refers to the starters by name instead of classification, and asks if you have any questions or concerns at the end.
@@davidhower7095 Wait... That's a thing? I mean, I guess it make sense that the Pokemon League would provide simulated interview chance for students, but it would never came to me that a game with so many scripted events would actually provice more branched options than it absolutely should, especially since the game doesn't acknowledge whether you are doing a rematch or not most of the time, but rather mostly just pretent that the previous match didn't happen.
Added info: if you have not gone to school yet, you are not allowed to do the interview showing that there is another check for the E4 building than just the badges.
This makes sense - with such an open world, the devs know that they can't control where the player goes in what order, so they did all of the checking in script rather than assuming the player would follow the set path.
Dan is actually way more than ddlc, he even made the most widely used rom hack for competitive melee and is a prolific Mario Maker creator so this really isn't out of character for him at all
to be fair, that is actually a perfect sumup of the open world design- 'go wherever you want, doing whatever you want, however you want* *please obey the laws of physics"
@@denverarnold6210 😂 True. My players tried to run from a main battle that they needed to participate in during my campaign. I just made the enemy attack them first so they had to defend themselves 😂
@@RonanMathieson That's honestly the best way to go about it some DMs just get angry that players aren't doing exactly what they planned in their head.
9:56 The first badge check actually does work! If you don’t have enough badges, the first badge check sends you to an unbeatable interview with different questions instead of just kicking you out. It’s pretty much the same thing as just kicking you out as it’s unbeatable
It’s even a different interview. Rika asks different, easier questions, almost condescendingly, and after the guy out front says they only take people with 8 badges seriously
Scarlet and Violet didn't keep the old obedience system, because the old obedience system cared about level AND Trainer ID. This one only cares about the initial catch level (not the actual level, as Pokémon you train past the level cap still obey you).
So I didn't test this out but I found something weird. I beat scarlet and bought violet to finish my dex. I took my starter from violet and leveled it up with exp candy on scarlet. I traded it back to violet and it wouldn't obey so there has to be some other check outside of level caught
@@christopher8397 it’s level caught and for trades it’s level obtained, so like if you caught a lvl 50 Garchomp it wouldn’t obey you, same goes for if you obtained a Garchomp from trades, even if the person who traded it to you caught is as a lvl 10 Gible
@@Null82085 that's how it always worked, when you obtain a pokemon over the threshold, it won't obey until you get enough medals...for traded pokemon it's always active, even if you get a lvl 1 traded pokemon it won't obey if it gets overleveled. For catched pokemon, it will always obey once you surpass its initial threshold.
The game has a separate level called the Obedience level which changes every time you trade it, so if you trade a level 20 pokemon while having 7 badge to someone, make them train it to 100 and then trade it back, it'll set the obedience level to 100, meaning it won't listen to you.
Pretty sure it only cared for the OT since back at swsh dlc any pokemon you caught in the dmax adventure raids even legends would've obeyed one no matter what from what I tested from that since in the dlc raid you don't use your own Pokemon so once you have access to the train and lose the one battle you can go and get a high level legendary
As a fan of speedrunning, I’m a little disappointed. As a software engineer, however, I am quite proud! Good job Game Freak! (with the sequence breaks at least…)
how is this a good job. Forcing players to do a manual tutorial doesnt just hurt speedrunners. It's so stupid that gamefreak tries to hold our hand more and more through every game instead of letting us play/
@@thomasmcmahan2631 Bro, we all hate the tutorials, but it has nothing directly to do with sequence breaking, which is what we all are talking about rn.
@@helion_ut I think the point being made is why put so much effort into ensuring the tutorial isn’t broken out of with the rest of the game being broken. I really wish more games had a “so what” attitude towards things that you have to go out of your way to do. “Ok you found a way to break out of the tutorial. Cool doesn’t really matter, enjoy the game” attitude basically
@@cosmiclikesminecraft Did you watch the video? It's not just specifically the tutorial, you can't really sequence break many parts of the game. That's something Gamefreak actually bothered to take care of.
@@helion_ut yes exactly and it’s pointless and obnoxious to do so. All it does is specifically target speed runners, rather then fixing actual issues. Who cares if you can get out of the tutorial the game should let you and continue as normal
They don't really have 2 badge checks at the E4, they let you in for a preliminary interview no matter how many badges you have but don't take you seriously if you don't have all 8
There are 2 checks but only the 2nd one is a badge check. The first check is if you have gone to school. If not, they won't let you in the building for the interview.
Thanks for featuring my discoveries! I still have some amount of hope that we can sequence break something, maybe clipping into the school building early? But yeah it's crazy how much effort they put into making sure you do everything in order.
Which is sad really, because it basically confirms they barely had enough time to complete it before they were forced to release the game. They focused all they had on the progression and before they had the chance to fix the rest the release date was there already.
Game Freak are generally very good at preventing sequence breaks, especially in recent titles. Regarding the E4 Badge check, that's intended. That guy just asks how many you have but he doesn't stop you doing the interview. Getting passed the first guy isn't a "skip".
A note- I'm no speedrunner and usually suck at executing glitches like a BLJ, but the BLJ in this game is super simple to perform. While toying with this in union circle with a buddy, we managed to use the BLJ to reach the top of the crater, prior to either of us having the wall climb ability. But, and I'm sure I'm not the only one to try this, jumping into the crater before unlocking it does not allow you to enter the crater, and just respawns you on top of the ledge. However you can have a picnic up there, so that's fun
You don’t even need climb to get to the zero gate early without glitches, once you have high jump you can climb onto the mountain at the Pokémon league and carefully traverse the mountain to the north side. Sadly if you jump down you can’t get out without calling a taxi.
@@geodude671 i think the game will reset you properly if you jump all the way into the crater. i did exactly what you described earlier tonight and whenever i fell into the crater, even if i landed on a couple ledges on my way down, it would always respawn me at the top rim
Gamefreak knew that there is no way to prevent people from getting out of bounds, so they did the evilest thing imaginable, they set flags in place so that you can't sequence break, or make it extremely tedious to do anything since you don't have the ride legendary yet.
9:55 I did this in my casual playthrough and it feels like a cheeky Easter egg, the interview questions are different so it's clearly intended. I'm actually surprised to hear that it only triggers at zero badges, I had assumed it would happen the same anytime before 8.
I found some clips while casual playing and the developers really knew that you would be able to clip and put fail-safes (I managed to clip into the area zero crater, it counts as falling into the void, which is programmed. I managed to break the "walk slowly" during the first zone of area zero with a slide (the character does a "woah" animation if you get near a cliff but you can actually input a dash during that animation and yeet yourself, they placed a void zone there too), I didn't break out of the slow walking after respawning
The area zero crater fail-safe was probably encountered many more times than maybe the school fail-safe because you can easily reach the top of the crater after unlocking fly or climb.
In regards to the elevator skip (Hey, I found that one), it’s usefulness depends on what the current route does/where you enter the town from. If you’re entering from the desert side of town it’s actually slower if you don’t take the elevator, but literally anywhere else it saves time, so much so, that if you go to the town via fly point, it’s up to 4 seconds faster to run all the way outside the town just to blj up the mountain. If you have climb unlocked, it’s obviously still faster to skip the elevator, but unfortunately no bljs. Trick saves the most time when coming from the south/northwest/southeast sides of the town; anywhere not mentioned you can just fall into the city from above no blj needed, so depending on whatever route’s currently known to be fastest, the trick may or may not even be used.
it'd be interesting to see how cracking open SV's code might affect this. getting into BDSP's code revealed where all the issues were, and though SV is a whole different kettle a' fish, it might reveal a missing check or oversight or two somewhere.
it's almost guaranteed to be a series of flags in a switch case function in fake pseudo code; at game start create booleans 1-18, set to false create interview boolean, set to false create switch case check with booleans 1-18 in switch case check, if booleans 1-18 are true, set interview boolean to true during gameplay if story event 1 complete, set boolean 1 to true if story event 2 complete, set boolean 2 to true etc. all the way through 18 if interview boolean is true, use rika's second dialogue tree for interview that enables you to progress there's a much lengthier version involving if-then statements, but the end result is identical... which is impenetrable unless there's an exploit that allows memory editing/arbitrary code execution, or 18 separate extremely rare quantum bit flips from stray astronomical particles.
Something tells me that if you could still chuck Pokéballs without going into battle like in Legends Arceus, picking a starter could be avoided entirely because of the Great Ball behind your house in Cabo Poco. Unless the game absolutely locks the trigger for Nemona showing up on Poco Path behind the battle with her after picking your starter, and knowing Gamefreak that's exactly what they did. edit: just finished watching the video, and god I hate it when I'm right lmao
It took me 10 hours to beat the first titan... I was procrastinating because I didn't want to go to school, so I spent hours scouring the little amount of world that was open for me lol. I am 11 hours in and once again I am exploring rather than taking on the first gym.
"Maybe all the time spent on preventing sequence breaks is why the twenty-five year-old windmill from Ocarina of Time animates better (than the windmills in SV)." lmao but also, yes.
Except... The "laggy" animations are not a bug. They are 100% intentional. If you are far enough from something, that distance gets even more aggressively culled in cutscenes, a ""low poly"" equipment is played instead to save on resources. So in development GF decided that they prefer those scaled down animations to be visible, rather lose on performance, or possibly other bugs that were happening without the culling. Just because it looks buggy, doesn't mean it is. They actually had to put in more work into making them look like they are running in 5 fps, than it would take for them to run at the speed of the rest of the game
7:46 I managed to get past that cliff by battling a Staravia across the gap on day 1, doesnt even require you to get that close. Didnt realize at that point that I'd essentially just skipped into the whole open world tho, but it let me get my boy Skiddo early, so I was happy.
I did that too for lols too by throwing a pokeball at a toxel and caught it. Then went on a spree of catching a lvl 35 salandit, a deerling, a riolu, and got my ass beat by a lvl 50 tera leafeon i was dumb enough to pick a fight with. I actually could've explored more but decided against going too far out what i knew was a sequence break because : 1. I wasnt even at school yet and this trip got me to lvl 20s and my cat evolved. 2. I was afraid i'd break this game even further and triggering story cutscenes or such i'm not even supposrd to see yet till i get there the normal way(so exactly what the speedrunners wanted 🙃 but i didn't)
In my non-optimized run of Scarlet, I found that I could clip through a wall into an out-of-bounds area from small caves such as one of the caves near the Orthworm titan fight. Under that area there is an ocean layer. If you can get Surf first, you can fall through and swim around under the map. So after getting Surf at around 20, I went back and dropped through, then went directly to the north part of the map. You can enable flight points if you go near enough to Pokemon Centers or similar, and you can also trigger Clive/Team Star cutscenes if you are directly below them. Using that, you can very quickly route to pretty much anywhere you want after you get Surf, unlock flight points, and potentially route differently before you have Rock Climb. I don't know if it's useful enough to be optimal but it seems relevant.
To all the people thinking that speedrunners are being targeted by GF: first of all, LOL. Second, did it ever occur that maybe the goal is to lower the risk that players accidentally find themselves in a situation they are unprepared for? GF probably knows by now that players WILL find ways to get where they are not supposed to be even on accident, so instead they set flags to ensure that they do not get in over their heads by an overleveled enemy, or by getting into battles without a Pokemon at all. At least that sounds more plausible to me than caring so much about a miniscule percent of players trying to clip their way into the credits.
Why are people so confused at why the BEGINNING of the game, and therefore likely the MOST WORKED part, would have so much anti-speedrun protection lmao.
my guess is the devs were terrified of sequence breaks coming from the open world since the past pokemon games were super linear, so they probably added a ton of checks out of caution
they didn't add multiple checks out of caution, and actually a bunch of the older games have an equal number of checks... they just also have the ability to progress onward available because they never expected/assumed it wouldn't be possible for sequence breaks. this is the first game where they used a modern switch case function that does the checking for them with minimal effort, that gates the next story element to progress.
It really seems to me like they knew their game was broken, so they included a bunch of extra checks to make darn sure you didn't go off track. How Nintendo of them.
@@DemonPrincessNyri it isn't really, it's just visual glitches and some optimisation issues, it was unacceptable on release but it's getting fixed as we speak
I found that skip to the main sequence break right before the school the first day on launch & made it to the school with a full team of level 30’s on launch day bc of exp candies lol
That is actually amazing. Now we can see speedrunners actually using Pokémon in intended manner to beat enemies and the game instead of warping into hall of fame. Pretty impressive
@@TheZero1312 Because generally glitched runs are the more interesting ones with regards to game mechanics and buggy code, they make for better videos. A glitchless run is purely playing optimally and routing smoothly, which doesn't have as much entertainment value as clipping through walls, wrong warps, buggy movement, etc... There's nothing wrong with preferring glitchless speedruns as a personal preference, it's just meh to watch as a youtube video. It doesn't have the same "wow/wtf" factor as the glitched ones do.
honestly though all they do is collect a shitload of exp candy and overlevel a mon to just beat everything in one hit. It's not the most exciting to watch
It seems to me the developers were sure that casuals would unintentionally clip through walls and doors. So instead of improving the movement and collision systems, they put in loads of progression flags to make sure casual don't sequence break or softlock the game.
@@JhoF79 11:35 If the loading trigger was behind that door that could be done accidently so easy. Casual: Oh hey a door! It won't open though, maybe if I press another button? *dashes against door and clips through*
@@alexschmitz3414 No casual does that alone, but if your game gets played tens of thousands of casuals, some clips and bugs will happen to some players. From the perspective of the game developer these rare occurrences shouldn't break or take away enjoyment of the game, so they make progression checks to ensure that for a small amount of the casuals the game still works. Videos like this make it seem developers go out of their way to just stop speedrunners from skipping parts of the game, but I think most of these extra progression checks are in the game because during playtesting (casually playing the game) some of these skips occurred and caused gamebreaking gameplay.
You guys might want to put up a slight-less spoiler-heavy image for the video - some people wouldn't have gotten the game yet. Just keeping an eye out for the viewers.
There are some places in the crater where you can jump down and it resets you to the next lab instead of where you were. I've done it by accident so I don't know where I did it from but it's possible, small skips
You can bypass some of the travelling inside area zero by falling off of a cliff and landing on top of, or near a research station. I guess the cutscene for 'discovering' a station overrides the game's check to see if the other characters are near you so you respawn in front of the station
It might be they have developed a dedicated library for sequence break checking which they can use, which knows where you're at in the sequence at all times so that you simply can't skip too far ahead. It wouldn't even be hard to code. Considering how much code they need to reuse for every game to keep up the crazy cadence they have, I'd expect that finding sequence breaks will be difficult in future titles; you'd only really find them if they forgot to put one in.
8:40 technically you could break the game with a high level pokemon if you can manipulate rng into consistently hitting the like 25% chance to have high level pokemon obey, obviously that would never be viable in an actual human speedrun but it might be funny to see some tas in the future where someone goes north to get the level 60 tera garchomp or the 75 lucario in that one cave to sweep the rest of the game with them (though i guess its debatable whether or not it would even save any time running that far on foot to get them)
I'm honestly kinda glad Gamefreak did all this. It's pretty tiring to see all speed runs boil down to "Hey watch how fast I can not play any of the game" It's nice to see a speedrun where you have to actually BEAT the game in a fast time.
I find it absolutely _hilarious_ how for the longest time GameFreak has had this dichotomy of thoroughly checking every corner of the game to ensure no softlocks are possible while still only allowing one savefile per game in 2022.
My theory is that game freak knows players like to hunt skips so they really made sure you couldn't skip the tutorial because it would be fun for people to try to find out!
I hadn't been following all of the speed run tech, but I'm not surprised that there's way more checks in this game. My first day of playing I managed to get into the entry point to area zero before unlocking glide and I was really hype because I thought I'd be able to get endgame Pokémon before my friends, but that's totally checkpointed too. Not sure if it's commonly known or not, but the game already had a way to skip the elevators without gliding into town. One of the walls next to the elevators on the... left side I wanna say? Anyway one of those walls has no water running down it so yoy can just climb it directly.
Besides BDSP (which was literally developed by a 3rd party), you rly have to give it to Pokémon for rly not having any game breaking sequence clips since gen 4 Like even glitch speed runs still play the game
Fantasticly explained video. I was super interested in what zany tricks were discovered from the speedrun perspective, but I couldn't locate a solid source of all findings. This video fills that desire.
I havent tested this, but my current route that Ive come up with is choose a starter. Catch a hoppip (early game pokemon with access to early level moves that can take down mons easy) sequence break to open world, gather exp candies to level up and obtain leech seed and sleep powder set up a warp point to porto marinado. Finish tutorial, Take on flying titan (ideally quaxly is the best starter) obtain pollen puff, take on false dragon titan (requires a bit of rng, but is possible with a lower level jumpluff) after this, the order is up for debate, but having access to surf and rock climb opens up the map, and your mon should be high enough level. This can be a tremendous time save, as now you can essentially take on the higher level gyms, you can speed through otherwise slow areas by climbing, and having porto marinado as a warp point allows you to access a large portion of the game's story points.
"And preventing sequence breaks is probably why the 25 year old windmill in Ocarina of Time animates better." Somebody call the cops, cause there's been a murder.
Honestly I believe that like Arceus they wanted to really make sure someone didn’t accidentally break the game and screw themselves over, lots of scarlet and violet issues are visual, I’m sure their are some full game breaks I haven’t encountered. But most of what I’ve seen of my and others games. It’s purely visual issues and issues with the game being able to run. I think they got the base structure down really well and took a lot of time to make it. And as they added more to the actual game they were rushed and ran out of time.
The game is completely broken where it should not be whilst working too well at places where for the sake of "fun" it shouldn't. It is almost like GameFreak is trying to kill its franchise.
You think speedrunners are that powerful? I am by no means on Nintendo's side but if you really think a lack of sequence breaks are an attempt to kill the franchise, you need to grow up.
@@TrailblazerCaelus1195 No not really, you started throwing around false assumptions so I simply countered you. GameFreak could take a huge dump on a piece of bread and sell it with great success, which is the problem. To spell it out for you, on the internet 'Trying to kill its franchíse' is often used to developers of games who couldn't care for listening to its audience what they would like to see.
It's basically impossible, if you can't get past that cloud barrier in the crater, you can't beat the game, and there's only one entrance through it during your first official visit, and it's locked for story check.
It's so unfortunate. When I saw the ability to turn off cutscenes coupled with the open world, I thought "Wow! This must be a great Pokemon game for speedrunning!" ...how wrong I was. Not only can you not turn off battle animations or play on Set mode, but turning off cutscenes doesn't even skip all cutscenes, just ones that meet very specific criteria. And even ignoring all of this effort to prevent sequence breaking, there is so much padding with completely unnecessary dialogue during major battles. You would think turning off cutscenes would skip all of this. But no. The game really wants you to care about every character. That's cool on a first playthrough, but it's really unfriendly to repeat playthroughs.
@@TrailblazerCaelus1195 it doesn't, actually. If you take the time to "engage with the world," you end up massively overleveled by the time you reach any of the game's challenges. You have to go out of your way to handicap yourself in order to be weaker than any of the bosses. Beyond that, if it was a matter of not wanting people to ignore the story, why would they include a skip cutscene feature at all? And don't even get me started on how pointlessly time wasting the gym trials tend to be.
@TrailblazerCaelus1195 1. I love pokemon, that's why I'm not a fan of the recent games completely changing the way the core game is played. You can enjoy the game if you want, I don't really care and that's not what this comment is about. 2. Your or my opinion about the quality of SV as a game has no bearing on whether or not it's friendly to speedrunning. It's very clearly not.
As much as people complain about graphics and animations now (and only because of Sword and Shield's Dexit controversy), it is kinda funny how much care they put into making sure you can't sequence break. Also how much care they put into preventing you from soft locking yourself
I mean if the story based game wants you to follow in certain way, like what where you really expecting besides few glitches here and there, my game barely glitch out but I guess it’s mostly people who looking for it will probably find the glitches more
@@Yoshizuyuner I didn't get any major glitches either, but it is just funny how people only care about that or the visuals but don't take the time to notice that the game doesn't have issues with sequence breaks
@@1ledluverjlp And tree textures when textures had nothing to do with animations. Even then the only thing I really see a problem with SV graphically is the places where the framerate drops, especially in a speedrun that can be annoying since some of these places are mandatory areas to explore
@@1ledluverjlp There's a good reason for that. It's because the developers directly stated that the main reason for dexit was so they could make "high quality animations". They lied. Though, it wasn't the first time nor the last time they would directly lie to their audience.
As for why they seem to have multiple checks to prevent sequence breaks, I think Gamefreak takes speedrunners in mind when making these games. I think given enough time ways can probably be found to break it, but a lot of the triggers are extra prudish, the only explanation I can think of is making it harder for speedrunners. And if you think that's ridiculous, remember, Nintendo. Lol
That is not even reall nintendo but just gamefreak, look at botw and mario odyssey, were they literally give you the option to speed right through everything if you are skilled enough
Mostly I think they made the game with casual players in mind, which requires some lateral thinking. A speedrunner is going to do whatever gets them to the goal faster. A casual player could do literally anything the game allows them to do, no matter how nonsensical, because you can't count on them knowing what to do in any given situation. So they compensate for that by trying to make sure the basic experience of the game doesn't change very much even if you do weird and nonsensical things. They probably decided on this system of checks and flags very shortly after the decision to make the game open-world in the first place, as you can't predict where a given player will go at any time, but you can give reasonable statements about where in the plot they are at that point.
You can also glitch jump with koraidon on some angled surfaces so you can travel at his falling speed instead of his dashing speed ive found it pretty useful at times
@@hibye-die to expand, Scarlett and Violet is poorly optimised, and that is unacceptable, but none of the glitches are game breaking (as far as I know) and slowly they'll get patched out. It's pretty possible that not having these flags could have been game breaking (or at least making the game significantly less fun to the average consumer) but we don't know that. I'm not anti-speed running but it really sounds like everyone whining about not having immediate sequence breaks, don't want to actually play the game, it's fun and from my personal experience doesn't actually run badly.
@@wowdogememe1541 oh no there are multiple game breaking glitches falling through the world and the sealed legendaries becoming uncatchable because it doesn't register you pulling out the steaks even though you did
Hey, a bit late on this, I would recommend changing the thumbnail to something a little different. The bossfight pictured isn’t part of the video and is a pretty big spoiler! It’s still relatively new, I’m assuming plenty of people who might’ve gotten it for Christmas haven’t gotten that far.
