Speedrunners use glitches to warp through the entire map without killing a single enemy.
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How to beat Elden Ring in under 9 minutes
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He has now done it in less than 7 minutes, squeaked it in at 6 minutes 59 seconds
https://youtu.be/XuUEk6e1LOE
https://youtu.be/XuUEk6e1LOE
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Ok, the ostensible objective of a game is to beat it then. Like, almost all games have a "win" condition, and for those that don't, it's often questioned whether it actually counts as a "game," and not, say, an "interactive experience."
Like, one can choose to just read the endings of books if that's what you enjoy, but that still doesn't count as "beating" the books. Also, if one plays a game but never triggers the win condition, it'd be wrong to say you beat it.
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[Edited to add that while I was typing this up, I was just marvelously ninja'd by marsilies. Well played.]
For instance, the win condition in casino blackjack is to exceed the dealer's point total without exceeding 21. But the rules don't permit you to alter the cards. If you get dealt 8 and 3, and you take a Sharpie and write 1 before the 8 so now you have 18 + 3, you haven't won the blackjack game. The casino won't pay you (but they'll probably throw you out).
The only way speedrunning could be considered "beating the game" is if you take a reductionist view of what "the game" means, to be simply "reaching the conclusion by any means necessary." But that's like saying you've read the Lord of the Rings trilogy by skipping to the last page of The Return of the King and reading
(Spoiler tag for anyone who hasn't read it, which on Ars is hopefully no one.)
Sure, you reached the end in just a few seconds, but you missed the epic journey along the way. That's the point of reading a book, and it's also the point of RPGs (both video game and tabletop -- imagine "speedrunning" a D&D campaign...). Just as reading the last sentence of a book isn't equivalent to reading the book to its conclusion as its author intended, exploiting bugs or glitches to skip to the conclusion of a video role playing game isn't equivalent to playing the game to its conclusion as its author intended.
That's not to say I have a problem with speedrunning, it's incredibly amusing and in many cases requires a very high level of dexterity. But as someone else said, speedrunners are playing a different game. It's more like post-launch QA testing, or beating the programmers, but it's not fair to consider glitch-dependent speedrunning to be "beating the game."
From a theory standpoint, though, there is a right answer. Games are defined by their rules, and that includes the win conditions. If you change the rules of Game A to create Game B, and then you play Game B, and in doing so achieve what would have been Game A's win condition, that doesn't mean you've won Game A -- because you didn't play Game A.
For instance, the win condition in casino blackjack is to exceed the dealer's point total without exceeding 21. But the rules don't permit you to alter the cards. If you get dealt 8 and 3, and you take a Sharpie and write 1 before the 8 so now you have 18 + 3, you haven't won the blackjack game. The casino won't pay you (but they'll probably throw you out).
The only way speedrunning could be considered "beating the game" is if you take a reductionist view of what "the game" means, to be simply "reaching the conclusion by any means necessary." But that's like saying you've read the Lord of the Rings trilogy by skipping to the last page of The Return of the King and reading
'Well, I'm back,' he said.
Sure, you reached the end in just a few seconds, but you missed the epic journey along the way. That's the point of reading a book, and it's also the point of RPGs (both video game and tabletop -- imagine "speedrunning" a D&D campaign...). Just as reading the last sentence of a book isn't equivalent to reading the book to its conclusion as its author intended, exploiting bugs or glitches to skip to the conclusion of a video role playing game isn't equivalent to playing the game to its conclusion as its author intended.
That's not to say I have a problem with speedrunning, it's incredibly amusing and in many cases requires a very high level of dexterity. But as someone else said, speedrunners are playing a different game. It's more like post-launch QA testing, or beating the programmers, but it's not fair to consider glitch-dependent speedrunning to be "beating the game."
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Why are you equating glitches existing that speedrunners use to bad QA?
How are speedrunners harming quality control for everyone else??
Elden Ring is freaking gigantic and has so many weapons, spells, enemies, NPCs, environments, etc, I can't think of another AAA game in recent years with as much hype that got anywhere near the stability and quality of Elden Ring at release (PC port excluded).
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I don't think it's true to say you can't "finish" games with procedurally-generated content. You can absolutely complete Skyrim - you can do every scripted quest and get every achievement.
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I thought they destroyed Sauron. You telling me he's back?
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Darn, ninja'd by acefsw.
Just a quick note that Distortion2 has since done a sub 7 second speed run in the same category (Any% Unrestricted).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuUEk6e1LOE
Just a quick note that Distortion2 has since done a sub 7 second speed run in the same category (Any% Unrestricted).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuUEk6e1LOE
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Eh, that's not true, even by your own example. Video games have a self contained set of rules, and you are not able to influence the game outside of those rules. In your Blackjack example, finding a way to write a 1 onto the card would have to fall within the rules of a video game, because it takes place within the video game.
Your "Reading a Book" example is a bit abstract for video games, since there's nothing like that, but there are plenty of story driven games where the key to being fast is skipping as much of the story as possible. Again, within the rules of the game. Finding the method to skipping to the "end of the book" is the point of the speedrun. A game that had a menu option to skip to the last page would never be speedrun, because the point of a speedrun is discovering the methods and executing them.
So yes, you might be reducing "finishing the game" to a mere checkpoint, but you're creating an entirely new story on the way there. The new story being the discovery, optimization, and execution of the tricks required to get you there.
I suppose a real world example would be writing "And Gandalf gave the ring to the birds" in book, and then ripping out several thousand pages of book, and writing "And then the birds dropped the ring into the Volcano" right at the point Frodo gets there. In the real world, that's not an achievement, because you're not limited in your ability to interact with objects. But in a game? That's be a pretty impressive feat.
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Again, I don't think the book analogy works, because we don't consider finishing a book as "beating" or "winning" the book.
How we describe experiencing various works changes based on what type of work it is.
"I watched a movie," means watching it in full. Otherwise one would say they've seen "part of" it.
"I read a book," means reading it in full. Otherwise one would say they've seen "part of" it.
"I beat a game" means achieving the game's specific win condition. There's nothing implied about experiencing every possible aspect of a game.
Like, one can win at Blackjack without having experienced every player/dealer hand combination.
The issue is that we insert narratives into video games now, so there's more to a game than just achieving the win condition. But that's still a goal players can have.
Likewise, speedrunning, even glitch explointing ones, are working within the rules set by the programmer. There's no using something outside the game to change it, like your marker example. The thing is, video games have SUPER complex rules, and the combination of them can produce behavior not anticipated by the programmer, even though they set up the rules to produce those results.
It's like the speedrun of Monopoly on NES, where the computer opponent is super easy to beat, since the programmer set up a series of rules for the computer opponent that leads it to make a very bad choice in a very specific condition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et1igFisdqs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHhdPrD0mUY
The things the speedrunners are using are dictated by the systems and rules the programmer(s) set up. They're working within the game that was programmed, and not altering code to cheat, or even using built-in cheats to alter how the systems work.
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"The simple 9-minute, no-attack method for beating Elden Ring"
Multiple frame-perfect glitch exploits=simple? I guess it was meant as a joke, but it's a little awkward. The URL (A) headline makes more sense.
Multiple frame-perfect glitch exploits=simple? I guess it was meant as a joke, but it's a little awkward. The URL (A) headline makes more sense.
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Achieving the specific win condition is necessary but not sufficient to beat a game. If I loaded up a save game file from someone who spent 100 hours playing Skyrim and had the final boss down to the last sliver of health, and I just pressed the button for the final attack, I didn't "beat the game" even though the win condition was achieved. You can't win a game without playing it.
That's a different issue, it seems like you're not making the distinction between a bug and a designed feature. Bugs exist and the resulting behavior is not equivalent to "the rules set by the programmer." For instance, there is a blanket disclaimer on the front of each casino slot machine that reads "malfunction voids all pays and plays." If a bug happens that results in a jackpot prize far larger than the machine's paytable indicates is possible, that doesn't mean the player is rich, it likely means there was a bug in a bonusing system, or the credit meter erroneously went negative but it's stored as an unsigned 32-bit integer, or some other spurious glitch, etc. This has actually happened several times, for instance:
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ia-supreme- ... 98848.html
https://money.cnn.com/2017/06/15/news/j ... index.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... wrong.html
And then there was the video poker double-up bug where you could change denominations and access a prior winning hand, so you could bet a small amount and then, when you had a good hand, change to a larger denomination and get paid as if you had bet that larger amount. That's not remotely within the rules of the game, it was a bug (and exploiting it was a crime), as reported here on Ars over a decade ago:
https://meincmagazine.com/tech-policy/new ... -poker-bug
The difference between video games and slot games is that real money is on the line, but that doesn't make bugs in video games any less erroneous or outside the scope of the rules. The rules of a game exist independent of any particular implementation. If a programmer fails to implement game rules properly, that's just a programming bug, it doesn't inherently bring the buggy behavior within the scope of the rules.
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The actual game is intensely boring. I mean boring on a pangalactic scale. Speedrunning is the only sensible response to such levels of boredom.
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Not in a single game. You can't win the rebellion for the Stormcloaks and crush them for the Imperials at the same time. You can't both join and destroy the Dark Brotherhood.
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Well, for the video game system, what you described is enough, since it will play the "you won" sequence. This is akin to someone taking over for someone else in the middle of a card game, or chess match, etc. It's outside the game itself to determine if that's allowable, and how it "counts."
A major thing is that there's typically no win condition for a novel. The only exception I've thought of is a Choose-your-own-adventure novel, where one doesn't read straight through, but chooses sections to read based on choices and page numbers given, and where there's often "good" and "bad" endings. So one could "win" one of those books without reading the entire book.
Well, opinions can vary. For those casino machine cases you listed, there's specific rules stated to the person about the game the machine plays, and even to the gaming commission, so if it goes outside those stated rules, it could be considered malfunctioning, and there's the specific disclaiming you mentioned. Outside of the fact that not all those cases are currently resolved, a game like Elden Ring neither specifies the specific rules it operates under to the user to define the win condition, nor does it include a disclaimer about "malfunctions."
And, of course, the casinos want to run those machines under conditions where if something goes wrong, it only goes wrong in their favor. There's not the same vested interest to denying wins to people who play a game solely for enjoyment.
And again, exploiting a flaw in a game system can be an actual game strategy. There's the old saw about Tic-tac-toe, where once one fully understands the rules, you can't actually lose a game. The game itself is broken, not the player exploiting the flaws.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qOV8xonfY
Another example would be a card game like Magic the Gathering, where the periodically have had to ban from play a card they themselves printed, because players find complex interactions that cause certain card combos to be way too powerful.
https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/magic ... ts-limited
Typically, up until a card is banned, people that won using the now banned card are considered to have won legitimately. The fault was with the rules, not the player, who simply exploited the rules to their advantage.
And of course, there's the old phrase "it's not a bug, it's a feature," where even if a program does something not intended by the programmer, it's not necessarily a negative, especially if it provides something of service to the user. Remakes/remasters of games sometimes leave in, or even re-implement certain bugs or glitches if they've become things players have started on rely on to win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_All-Stars
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Speed running is beautifully insane.
I’m fairly sure that 9 minutes will turn out to be fairly trivial eventually.
People are STILL speed running 25 year old games like Golden Eye, Mario 64 - and STILL finding new glitches or techniques to shave seconds or even minutes off.
A lot of people wonder about the appeal - but don’t forget, these players are highly skilled, and probably beat the game easily when it first came out, and now progress into beating it as fast as possible - grinding for days on end to perfect a technique and get the best luck. It’s a skill for sure.
I’m fairly sure that 9 minutes will turn out to be fairly trivial eventually.
People are STILL speed running 25 year old games like Golden Eye, Mario 64 - and STILL finding new glitches or techniques to shave seconds or even minutes off.
A lot of people wonder about the appeal - but don’t forget, these players are highly skilled, and probably beat the game easily when it first came out, and now progress into beating it as fast as possible - grinding for days on end to perfect a technique and get the best luck. It’s a skill for sure.
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This is not really my thing, although I do watch the occasional *glitchless* speed run.
But I don't understand the people complaining about bugs that don't really affect you 100% ing the game if you want to. It's not like the speed runner can use the glitch to steal your credit card info.
But I don't understand the people complaining about bugs that don't really affect you 100% ing the game if you want to. It's not like the speed runner can use the glitch to steal your credit card info.
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As far as a game such as this is concerned it is not product-breaking that speed-runs can be completed and quality control should invest their efforts in that ensuring that a person that plays the game somewhat as intended has a decent experience wherein they do not have to restart their game completely because of some technical bug.
That the game can be speed-run even adds to the exposure the game receives on social media, so it'd be a genuinely bad investment to vehemently ensure that these exploits cannot be used.
Your statement speaks to software dev management in a more general sense, at least that is how I read it. If management in say fintech somehow extrapolates from the fact that since Elden Ring can get away with allowing bugs such as these through into a shipped product means they can skimp on QA then that is the fault of the organization to allow such people to become managers rather than it is the fault of speed-runners for showing that **a game** can be beat quickly (quickly, not easily).
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MathExtremist: what you don't seem to understand is that this run is an "Any%" speedrun, not a "Glitchless" speedrun or "100%" speedrun or "Tool-Assisted" or any other category.
The rules of Any% mean that you need to get the game to display the victory screen, without using any automation for controls or interfering with the game's memory via external programs. You CAN use bugs in an Any% speed run, and you do NOT have to complete some certain percentage of the game (achievements, quests, etc).
A "Glitchless" run is just like Any% but without using bugs or other glitches. A 100% speedrun means completing 100% of the available content (all quests, achievements, etc).
A "Tool-Assisted" speedrun allows using a computer program to send the inputs at very precise timings, though it still doesn't allow modifying the game's execution state via a debugger or other external program.
Specific games also tend to have specific categories. Elden Ring has a concept of "Rune Level", characters start at "Rune Level 1" (RL1), and increase in power as they increase in Soul Level. There's a category of "Glitchless RL1" runs, where leveling up is prohibited and bugs can't be used. That category obviously only applies to Elden Ring, since other games don't have "Rune Level".
You probably want to restrict yourself to watching "Glitchless" runs.
The rules of Any% mean that you need to get the game to display the victory screen, without using any automation for controls or interfering with the game's memory via external programs. You CAN use bugs in an Any% speed run, and you do NOT have to complete some certain percentage of the game (achievements, quests, etc).
A "Glitchless" run is just like Any% but without using bugs or other glitches. A 100% speedrun means completing 100% of the available content (all quests, achievements, etc).
A "Tool-Assisted" speedrun allows using a computer program to send the inputs at very precise timings, though it still doesn't allow modifying the game's execution state via a debugger or other external program.
Specific games also tend to have specific categories. Elden Ring has a concept of "Rune Level", characters start at "Rune Level 1" (RL1), and increase in power as they increase in Soul Level. There's a category of "Glitchless RL1" runs, where leveling up is prohibited and bugs can't be used. That category obviously only applies to Elden Ring, since other games don't have "Rune Level".
You probably want to restrict yourself to watching "Glitchless" runs.
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It's disappointing how many commenters here clearly failed to grasp the idea of speedrunning even after it was explained at length, by multiple people, on every page of this thread. Hats off to you lot :/
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Right, that's the point: you're defining a new set of rules that reduces the win condition to a sterile display of the victory screen, and making a race out of who can reach that end the fastest. That race is a very different game than the rules and stories laid down by the game designers.
Someone else used a better analogy than I originally did: an "Any%" speedrun is equivalent to flipping through one of R.A. Montgomery's Choose Your Own Adventure books and finding a page that says "The End." That rush to the end is not the same as experiencing the branching storylines that Montgomery crafted, any more than skipping through most of Elden Ring to get to the victory screen is the same as experiencing the world and storylines that were crafted by Miyazaki and Martin.
It likely comes down to why you play in the first place. Do you play because you enjoy reaching the end, or do you play because you enjoy being in the middle?
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Yes, the speedrun is a different game. Every speedrun category is arguably its own game. So "Elden Ring" is a game. "Elden Ring Glitchless speedrun" is a somewhat different game. "Elden Ring 100% completion speedrun" is another, "Elden Ring Any% Speedrun" a fourth, etc.
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