Why Ocarina of Time is falling behind the Speedrunning Community
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- Опубликовано: 1 июн 2024
- Speedrunning has seen a huge shift in the past couple of years, and certain games have seen a steep decline, but why is that? Today we dive into that question.
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Clips Used:
@gamesdonequick (SMS, OoT, PM, SM64)
@Savestate (OoT Ace)
@mittonton1090 (Paper Mario)
@karinpune (SM64)
@ZFG (OoT)
@secureaccount (Celeste)
@ClintStevens (OoT)
@Murph_E (OoT)
@dannyb21892 (OoT)
0:00 - Intro
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2:22 - Video 
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- Do you think that Zelda Speedruns have become too complicated in recent times? Or do you think the more broken a game is, the better? Let me know what you think!
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Awesome video
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Well, specifically with ocarina, any% became a meme category, and 100% basically got slaughtered with the discovery of lightnode. You take two of the largest categories that generate the most interest and kill them for very similar reasons and you lose a large portion of people who want to run it.
To clarify only hundo SRM is affected by lightnode. Currently yes that category is in purgatory, but non SRM hundo should hopefully see a resurgence next year once ZFG comes back to it hahaha
@@DesTr069 Yeah, I suppose I should have specified. I was thinking it as I was typing, but never actually included SRM into it. ZFG is definitely a big driving force behind SRM's popularity, but honestly I think its probably the coolest category, at least in its previous state. The strats used in it are absolutely wild. Just the fact that F boots are a thing is bonkers.
It's crazy I still remember years ago when OoT runs were at least 20-30+ minutes and seeing each breakthrough as people found them was nuts.
What's lightnode? I'm not familiar with OoT 100%.
@@jedimasterpickle3seedborn has a video and they srm a ram editor in.
Oot is just more fun to watch as a randomizer. It forces the runner to utilize the full suite of movement and glitches and react in realtime
Yeah I fall asleep to ZFG videos too
many such cases lol. As both an audience member and a player, its much more fun to see people changing their routing live and figuring it out as they go rather than doing the same route they've done for literally years. Theres a place for both but rando is just so fun to me
Bingo is way better and its not even close
@@LunaticJ Bingo randomizer, yes.
To be honest, I prefer randomizers without glitches. Watching the streamer suffer thinking about the places they can go without breaking the game is more entertaining. :D
As someone who follows speedrunning very casually, yes, you've hit the nail on the head. I'd assume someone who's very familiar with the strats will still get a kick out of it, but as a casual it's pretty unsatisfying to watch someone jump in place a couple of times and then see the credits roll. I'm well aware that also takes tight execution, but it's much easier to get excited over someone doing a great mario run, because even to a casual all movement appears very goal-oriented.
It also makes for a better history. What history happens in runs with wrong warps? The player at one point start doing some (seemingly) random bs and the credits roll. There's no drama, or, at least, less so. Meanwhile, runs without wrong warps, will tend to have a lot more tension (at least tension that the viewer can understand).
It's entirely this. People don't like using their brains very much, especially while being entertained.
@@dylandoyle493 I think even people who like to use their brains while being entertained just don't like needing to understand all the intricacies of something in order to begin to enjoy it, especially if it's still not gonna be very visually interesting. If someone uses a big "wtf" skip but that's only a small portion of the run, I think that's pretty fun to watch. If you can skip like a level or two of a twelve level game with a wrong warp or something, I think most people will find that pretty sick. A credits warp from basically the start of the game? Big yawn from most people. I'm in no way representative of people at large but personally I can appreciate the ACE speedruns intellectually but I can't find them entertaining.
The mario titles with srm/ace strats are way less satisfying than typical min. exit runs
@@archerelms Yes, exactly like I said.
I think the biggest factor is that speed running in general was not well known out of the community and the first time oot was beat in 16 minutes was mind-blowing. I remember the headlines which introduced everyone to Agdq. Now AGDQ is so well known that everyone expects games to be beat in absurdly quick times using glitches. It's almost like the magic has been revealed and it just doesn't hit the same anymore. This and the fact that every game goes through popularity phases and oot already had its time, means it is in general just unpopular now.
While I do think popularity phases are important to acknowledge, do you really think that's the main reason it has faded so much from popularity? I definitely think the fact that using ACE is visually uninteresting and quite short plays a much larger factor in the fall. The original SMB is still way more interesting despite being a much simpler game and very short too, but that's because the gameplay is recognizable and interesting to almost anyone watching. And while SM64 skips a lot of gameplay, the majority of the time is still spent in levels or on doing tricks where you can see the payoff without the run suddenly ending.
Maybe I'm missing something or I'm oversimplifying, but I definitely think what you mentioned is true but isn't the main component of the loss of popularity
Owls need HUGS
honestly i can see this being part of it. because for example watching a celeste speedrun is always mind blowing to me lol
To me it feels less like glitches in general and more a problem with arbitrary code execution specifically. Noone dislikes BoTW because of all the movement glitches discovered in that game for example. ACE meanwhile just makes the game completely unrecognisable, and while that might be neat to watch a video on and see the non-speedrun related applications of; to me it makes the run seem unapproachable and not fun to watch live
An exception I can see somewhat is BiTMagic from Skyward Sword and its sibling games. They're more limited in scope and actually display and manipulate how the game was built in a way thats interesting to me. They are most likely still unapproachable for new folks though...
Yeah that's exactly the reason why i don't like oot runs, the first time you see it and hear the explanations and what you can do with these glitches is pretty cool but after that every run just looks boring and random. I like the idea of seemingly random movement and stuff you do having a weird outcome but it's not really fun to look at
Agreed! Once you achieve ACE in a game, you can do anything to it- and you're no longer watching someone play a game, but instead watching someone code with a really obtuse UI.
Yeah, as someone that just likes to watch speedruns casually and primarily got into it through documentary videos from people like Summoning Salt, speedruns get ruined through the discovering of ACE in games. I mean, it’s cool and all to see how it gets performed but after that it just gets so lackluster to watch as an actual speedrun. Any% speedruns get ruined by it, and, personally, glitchless speedruns can sometimes be just a chore to watch.
IMO there should be a separate category for speedruns that ban the usage of ACE if discovered in a game. Like Any% ACEless should be a thing because it’s more entertaining to watch people break the game more than just seeing ACE performed in a matter of 2 minutes.
@@katowoozy3664 There almost always is
This is why I love randomizer. Every run is a roguelike and is relatively different than the previous.
ACE is a scourge. It’s awesome that people can figure out how to do it and understand under the hood why it works, but it’s the end of the speedrun forever. The minute a game goes from “play the game in the sickest way possible” to “do this bizarre string of arbitrary actions,” the speedrun dies immediately.
This. ACE is only entertaining to watch when it's the first time you see it. Then it becomes completely uninteresting. Watching an OOT ACE any% run is as entertaining as watching a speedrun of opening Excel and making a table.
@@MRazorK10the Microsoft Excel championships beg to differ on your spreadsheet comment 😂
Agreed
as a programmer, I absolutely love ACE, but I agree. it really kinda kills the category. it's only fun to watch once as a viewer, and that's it.
Zelda is a franchise where the 100% is usually the better category in my opinion. could never like the 3 minute wrong warp any% in OOT. It's not fun. Cool to see once or twice, but not entertaining because its so arbitrary. Wrong warps are my least favorite glitch in any game. Glitching through walls to hit a loading zone, thats fun, but just doing a preset sequence of moves to play with the code to give you a warp directly to the end.... yeah no.
I agree. I normally love watching glitches in speedruns but wrong warp to the credits is boring after seeing it once whereas watching skillful play with glitch abusing movement and collision is way more rewatchable
The 16 minute Ganondoor wrong warp is pretty amazing and fun to watch just because there is a fair bit of setup that goes into it- leaving Kokiri early to get the bottle, going to the Lost Woods for the bugs, and then beating the Deku Tree largely as intended. And then you still have to do the castle collapse and fight Ganon's final form.
But yeah, using memory corruption to execute arbitrary code to write items directly to the inventory or warp to the credits? Nah.
I agree, I don't even get how it's considered "beating the game"
You may as well just play an mp4 of the credits and say you beat it.
@@KEVBOYMUSIC While I sorta agree, you did get the game itself to play the end credits, so it counts. Doesn't mean i have to enjoy the category.
@@DigitalStarry Definitely. It feels like theres something at stake. Messing up and not performing the glitch correctly is always a possibility, and makes balancing glitches with intended play a great risk vs reward scenario. It gives much more room for improvement because many games are still at the point where all the possible time saves aren't being used in the world record because just how risky some are.
OoT also has a diverse community that have branched into different aspects that are tangentially related to speedruns but aren't just the typical RTA grinding out runs. You have the RTA runners but you also have people that do rando (both speedrunning and casually), you have folks that create or do ROM hacks, you have the decomp team, you have the bingo crew doing races or tourneys. I think there's still a lot of people playing the game but everyone's kind of doing their niche thing within an already niche community.
The legend himself has spoken!
If you think the OoT community is niche you never have been part of a niche community.
@@turkenheimer4448 Yeah this runnerguy guy doesn't know what hes talking about. source: I watched zfg like, 10 years ago
on the topic of categories, I think it's interesting to bring up that one of the current popular speedrun games you mentioned, Hollow Knight, has glitches that let you beat the game in under 5 minutes, but the main category for the game is no major glitches, which bans these. the all glitches category is much less popular
This, I was also about to mention how Mario 64, a game broken to the point where you can beat it with 0 stars, essentially thrives off of the categories that are not Any% but instead force part or all of the intended route without necessarily banning all glitches (Namely, 120 stars, 70 stars and to a lesser extent 16 stars)
These speedruns aren't that long either, so that helps
As someone who has only been running these glitch heavy games (I hold 6th in oot any% for example, as shown at 7:36), something I don't see people bring up is that most casual viewers are completely unaware that speedrunning tutorials or communities even exist.
This leads most newer runners to purely go off of world record videos or their own strats for learning these games, so when they don't understand right off the bat how stuff like SRM, ACE, wrong-warps, etc., they just don't even bother trying to learn them, despite how easy some of these tricks are to actually pull off.
I think if big speedrunning content creators would better stress about how important these two very, very valuable resources are (@LunaticJ does a great job of this), I guarantee that we would have many more people running glitch-heavy games/categories than we currently do.
I think the reason glitch-heavy speedruns are dying is because of the accessibility to players.
The main example I can think of is Minecraft, even tho there aren't really any glitches involved. In 2020 it was one of the top speedrun games, and now it's not that popular anymore, because of how it has evolved. In 2020, to get a world record, you'd just need a bit of skill and luck with RNG.
But now ? The WR has multiple tabs open until he can find a seed, uses the F3 menu to figure out exactly where a buried treasure is, uses that ravine portal speed building, got lucky with the Nether (which is alright), uses freaking TRIANGULATION to figure out where the stronghold is, uses the F3 menu AGAIN to figure out where the portal is, and kills the dragon with beds which is a usual speedrun strat.
Not only is speedrunning not accessible to casual players anymore because of how overcomplicated some of these tricks are, but just as a bonus, the guy had his render distance to over 20 chunks the whole time. Plus the extra tabs. This makes speedrunning also unavailable to people with a lower end setup, because now you need a freaking 2k$ gaming PC to do it
I'm not sure as to how much I agree with this, because depending on the person speedrunning isnt just about the world record. Lots of folks just want to play fun runs and focus on their own self improvement, not necessarily gun for world record; and I dont think the things you mentioned would effect a viewer of a speedrun necessarily.
It is unfortunate that minecraft's dropped off though...
That new Speedrun route sounds so interesting but I know I'm in the minority of degenerates that like overcomplicate Speedrun strats
I agree that minecraft speedrun requiring so many additional features is a bad feature that feels kinda like a tas, but specifically triangulation I like it because it kinda rewards you for knowing math, which is unique in a speedrun
triangulation always has been used to an extent, as well as F3.
I was confused when you said OOT was down to 3:52. I'm soo glad they updated the rule set to start timing after the intro, it was always crazy to me that you'd spend 3 minutes of the run watching a cutscene
Well this sort of thing is always up for debate in many games, even TotK. I just recently got into paper mario TTYD speedrunning and it's similar to a long discussion there too. The issue is that the player DOES have control during the intro (the textboxes) and that there is room to be faster or slower for said control. So while you and another could do a perfect run after gaining full control in Link's house, if you mashed better in the intro you'd have a faster time.
I'm glad they got rid of it too, but it really is game and community dependent.
@@sagetarus1 Totally, I understood why it was in originally, but I remember watching all the early ACE runs and thinking how silly it was to watch 3 minutes of cut scene for a 8 minute speed run. It made more sense to me in the old wrong warp days, but I can't think about how many thousands of hours speed runners have spent watching that damn thing mashing buttons lol
@@hjewkes until someone finds out by doing a certain combination of controls and doing a handstand whilst juggling with your feet during the cutscene lets you beat the game in 23 seconds.
It’s been incredible watching Ennopp and others all be back to be speedrunning Majora’s Mask. Feels like a moment in a Summoning Salt vid where he mentions that a legend came back
thanks, you just made the summoning salt music play in my head
@@idontwantahandlethough *Bwiiiiiiiimmmmm...*
@@MapleLunii brrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmm bo weo bo weo bo weo
*Summoning Salt Presents*
for me its not understanding tricks and glitches. Watching a documentary on tricks and glitch is more entertaining since it allows you to understand what is actually happening and why they are doing what they do. Most games you have to really dig hard to find someone to explain something and that's more effort than I'm willing to put into understanding a speedrun. More runners need to put more effort into creating content to explain what they are actually doing as those are the videos that keep people interested in your game
If someone can't explain a trick during a live run, then the live run probably isn't fun to watch and I'll turn to the documentary
Tbf OoT is largely perfect with speedrun tactics, while a new glitch or speedrun strat is discovered every other month in sm64
My counterpoint would be Mario Bros 1. That game has been literally perfected and still active.
No? There's been very few new strats in sm64 maybe you can say hard strats that have been known about for a long time are finally getting implemented but not new discoveries really
Any% maybe, but 100% is sitting on big stuff rn, just not enough people to break down the incredibly complex task of finding new routes with it.
@@alanlight2715 I think part of that comes down to SMB1 being a literal 5 minute game at even a medium-tier level of play.
@@buffbear7890 there's also many more ways to go about sm64 speed running.
Here are some other potential reasons why people might lose interest in a run of a game:
- too long for a new record
- too long for the route to change
- too much of the run is cutscenes
- too much rng
- massive skip with a really low success rate
- runners not entertaining enough
- I think speedrunning was more niche and has only recently become popular, but now everyone has seen the wr of all their favorite games and has become bored seeing them, so they stick with like 1 or 2 games that dont fall into many of the previous points
I think there is a bigger, overall picture to think about here as well. When Twitch was new and speedruns were beginning to really gain traction (early 2010s), there was kind of a lightning-in-a-bottle situation because it was the perfect time for the most invested demographic (90s gamers) to see their favorite games blown wide open. I think that golden era has passed, most of us are in our 30s and 40s now with lives and jobs to worry about and we don't have time to dedicate to watching OoT live streams like we did 10 years ago. That's the main reason I stopped watching Twitch and catch what I can on RUclips.
This! What a blast used to be watching Siglemic, Cosmo, Runnerguy and the crew speedrun, compete and overall have fun (while you also try getting into it yourself! XD)
I'm guessing another factor in which games get attention is how optimized the route is. New runs means chances to see something different, something unique. Some people doubtlessly enjoy watching more optimized games where the routes are nearly identical every time; they're there because they want to see that end number drop. But for more casual people, watching an optimized game means watching the same thing over and over, with any differences being almost imperceptible aside from the runner commenting that they nailed a trick that they missed earlier. Some people likely aren't here for that.
I think this is a very solid explanation. I have talked a lot about how, very unintentionally, people like Summoning Salt, Karl Jobst, Abysssoft, etc. have killed live attempt viewership. I mean speedrunning is very repetitive, it's just way more entertaining getting an update every 6-12 months and a well done breakdown, than tune into a stream (or even GDQ) and be super confused. I think we're gonna see speedrunners who are genuinely entertaining, whether they're doing a run or not, continue to succeed, but the days of Siglemic, where people just watch because of pure skill, are over.
Stuff like ACE is why i began to prefer OoT randomisers instead. Watching a normal any% run was fantastic because, not only could you see the skill and really interesting glitches, you could imagine doing them yourself. It's the same kind of awe you got as a kid struggling to beat a boss or level, so you gave it to your brother / dad and watched as they seemed to effortlessly do what you were struggling to do.
With stuff like ACE / warping to credits, yeah sure there probably is some skill involved, but its more invisible. There's nothing you can really point to and go "wow, maybe if I practice I can do that awesome thing!". It's almost like the speedrunner is playing a game with Godmode enabled, there's no visible "challenge".
For me there's a certain point where it's "if I want to see stuff this far out of my comprehension I'll watch a TAS" because then the human error element is removed. If your run is 20 minutes long and has like, 9 frame perfect tricks, 2 rng rolls, and a precise amount of staring at walls, then I'm just going to watch the perfect version.
Agreed. Watching a glitched speedrun is less about seeing what a particular runner can do and more about seeing the absolute limits of what is possible. This also explains why human-run glitched runs are more popular on RUclips than Twitch. I don't want to watch someone try over and over to nap a truck; I just want to see what happens _when_ the trick is finally landed.
This also contributes to why I think Minecraft's cheating scandals are so common. Nobody wants to try over and over until they get perfect RNG, and nobody wants to watch that either, so they hack to give themselves perfect RNG and run with that.
A TAS I expect to see nonsense. That's the fun. A person I expect to see play a game and be good at it. Heavily glitched runs just aren't that.
This is just my perspective as a viewer, and as someone that tries to incorporate speedrun strategies when I play games on my own time, but I've personally preferred when glitches aren't being used to skip entire sections, nevermind multiple, unless it's something like Wind Waker's ocean. Any run that utilizes a warp to credits I pretty much ignore for my own standards and just stick to watching the game's other categories. That said when it comes to Zelda, I'm not too big on most 3D Zelda games whether it's playing or watching, only being a fan of WW and MM.
Man, it's wild how well both those games hold up. I just finished replaying WW and just started MM last night and I'm blown away by how well they hold up!
also, just realized that my two favorite zelda games are upside down versions of each other: WWMM! so that's kinda neat :)
I feel like it can be boiled down to a mix of two major factors
Skill expression - Mario 64 and the like have plenty of input nuances that allow players to decide how and where they want to execute tasks that viewers are likely familiar with.
Zelda without glitches lacks this by comparison.
With glitches it's more impressive skill expression but you also need to be informed on what is actually happening as it looks like magic and not the game you remember. (I personally love this but I see this as the breaking point for most people)
The second point being personalities. If there simply isn't enough runners that charasmatic, entertaining and/ or good educators of the game it directly impacts the interest.
I agree with the last point the most. Ever since the Siglemic era I feel there hasn't been much of those speedrunners around in the games I care about, for me the last nail in the coffin was when Bonesaw was banned from AGDQ after his legendary Jack & Daxter run in 2016. Although I know AGDQ is not necessarily the absolute entity for speedrunning, one can't really separate their influence over this still-niche community, even if it hit a somewhat mainstream notoriety...
Hello Linkus, as a casual speedrun watcher I think I can explain some, as there are quite a few factors at play.
The first factor you went in depth in the video somewhat. Short, glitch heavy runs, are hard for the casual audience to understand and appreciate, however that isn’t the sole reason.
Another reason (at least among my friend group) is that (for games like Alttp, OoT, and MM) is that when credits warps/ACE were discovered, to me and my friends, those games were dead, as those types of glitches are both, in depth, not fun to watch, and rarely incorporate skilled gameplay besides doing the glitch. It’s far more fun (imo) to watch someone glitch to the final boss and have to fight it with low level gear, than to just have the run end because they were able to get to the credits without engaging with much of the game at all.
The final major reason I can think of is that the speedruns that do well are often platformers, and this is because they have iconic and cool movement. Zelda does too, but this kind of stuff is seen less when credits warps and ACE are in the picture, my current personal favorite Zelda speedrun is Windwaker because of the crazy swim momentum, and I would be really sad to see the category die as the main because a credits warp was discovered.
The final reason I think was somewhat in the last one, the main and fastest category will get the most runs from skilled runners, meaning once a truly game breaking glitch like a credits warp or ACE are discovered, watching the run that previously had a lot of fun, understandable movement and glitches to do regular gameplay as fast as possible, is now replaced with pure glitches to circumvent the entire game.
Thank you so much for the video linkus, I hope my comment is a helpful perspective
Why do you all think like this? Any% is the only category that allows ACE, and the vast majority of categories ban SRM. Saying the game is dead to you just because any%, which by definition has zero restrictions other than no cheats, is super busted? Not to mention any% isn’t the most active category. Seems very shallow and a surface level view of the game when categories like Defeat Ganon (old any%) GSR, MST, 100% No SRM, and legacy categories like No WW are still being pushed due to new discoveries. All I’m saying is you’re missing out
@@LunaticJ I'd argue that Speedrunning as it's often presented inherently elevates Any% to be the most important category in most people's minds. If the goal of speedrunning is just to beat the game as fast as possible, then the category that does that with no strings attached is automatically elevated to be the most important one. This is obviously a flawed perspective, but one that I can't really blame casual viewers for having.
I love watching zfg. Whether it be rando or speed runs of oot. I just like to watch him lol.
Yeah the main reason I don't watch 100% runs anymore is just because he pretty much stopped running the category, not because I wouldn't be interested if he did. I actually love 100% SRM but basically no one runs it.
Just don't watch his Missing Link playthrough
yeah, ZFG is the only one I still watch by now, and I enjoy it much more when he is not speedrunning
Going along with what you said in the video, I think that part of it is that in the old days, people grew up with Mario 64 and Ocarina. For them, watching speedrunners break the game in ways they never could have dreamed was a special experience for them- I expect much of these runner's current audience can relate to this. But nowadays, people who did not grow up with these games are growing into adult gamers of their own. They cannot understand many of these older games from these glitched runs, let alone want to play them. To these gamers who grow up in this world of gaming, glitchless skill is likely more appealing to them than the glitching of childhood nostalgia was to the older generation. New speedrunning is popping up all over the place, and I think the community has to evolve to meet it.
I agree on your points, but there is one more thing, at least for me.
I used to speedrun OOT, and I stopped when the "community" decided to allow ESS adapters on Wii VC.
For me there is no point in competition when external tools are allowed.
Because screw credits warp. Previous warp to the tower at least gave you a catharsis of beating the final boss.
Oot went from clutch hard glitches to barely seeing the game at all. The cutscene is the majority lol
My read on the situation is a bit different. I don't think glitch heavy games drive away viewership, they drive away runners. From my perspective the most important thing to a game having a strong presence on twitch is the mid and low level runners, the new and casual players. The barrier to entry to learn the any% in oot is astronomically higher than it was 10 years ago and with the advent of randomizers the primary pool of new players that may be interested in speedrunning the game have a much more accessible way to spend time grinding out runs of their favorite childhood game. The continued success on youtube tells me that people are still interested in watching this content but we simply don't have the raw number of people on twitch running them to sustain growth in that community right now.
I think runners being driven away is a by-product of viewership being driven away, not really the other way around. People can't invest the same amount of time into running something like OoT when it's not feasable to make a living off of streaming it anymore, unless you're very specific runners with pretty much "legacy" viewership.
Runners have always came and gone, but when the viewership is gone, there aren't as many eyes on the game, which makes the stream of runners out beat the stream of runners in.
@@Txrje that might be true in some rare cases for people who ran a game to get viewers, but those people were so rare that you can count on your fingers how many people have been able to pull it off. Speedrunning was always more of a "do it for fun" hobby, share your PB with a video, find a few racing partners, in rare cases stream if you really have the means and the desire...Going into speedrunning and streaming with livelihood on the line was never really the end goal.
@@Kosac07 I think you've misunderstand what I said.
I'm saying that those few whose livelihood depended on it are a HUGE part of the game's viewership and attention, and that viewership and attention is what creates new runners by them becoming a part of the community. When these people that had massive viewership has their numbers decline, there won't be as many new runners getting into the game due to the now lower discoverability of the community.
@@Txrje I get what you're saying, but the question is "why did they have massive viewership in the first place and why did the numbers drop over time?" What is the reason for the viewership decline of a certain streamer who makes a living by running a certain game (why does Biinny come to my mind here? :p). Under the assumption that there hasn't been any drama or controversy involved, there is going to be an inevitable drop in numbers due to various reasons like people losing interest in the said game, runner getting burned out or not improving significantly, getting to the limits of what is possible to achieve with current strats and ultimately hitting a wall like we've seen in oot any%, and some other very execution-heavy games where improvement is counted in milliseconds... Popular speed games come from games that are popular to begin with and rarely the other way around. You can make it big if you're very good at it, going for PBs and then even WRs, and then on top of that you need to have at least some form of enjoyable personality. Everyone knows that it's just a matter of day before the interest in a certain speedgame will die off unless something new is introduced to the run. People want to see a popular game AND progress, lose one of those things and it's over. Even if the biggest streamers were to start running a certain game for a month, two, three, they would experience a drop in viewers over time if they don't take it seriously enough and they don't show incremental improvement. Once they drop the game, it's back to oblivion with it.
Even if Siglemic played typewriter at his peak, Adam_ak ran age of empires instead of GTA III, Cosmo/Narcissa played that Beatle racing game while taking a break between oot any% runs for that famous low 18min run, they all had a huge discrepancies in numbers, going from several thousands to a few hundreds at best. Unless you have a very interesting and fun personality for people to like (SimpleFlips, Simply, Clint...), speedrunning itself is not viable, things must always change in order to retain interest, that's why popular content creators always play something different and/or new.
Something I don't think you really address in your video is that it's normal and healthy for the community is that runners often play a game for a while, get a time they are happy with, then move on to another game perhaps returning if someone knocks them down on the leaderboard.
This is especially noticeable and easy to track in the Resident Evil speedrunning community because you can count on the same people to crop up whenever a new mainline game comes out, but it happens across multiple series as well.
People playing casually play a game for a while then move on, and speedrunners do too. The cycle of when that happens just looks a bit different. There are some enduringly popular titles that people run forever or that continue to attract new runners, but that is more the exception than the rule. Most games get run for a while, then the majority of the community moves on to different stuff.
my personal angle on speedrunning is that it has the same sort of enjoyment as any progression based game: the enjoyment comes from the journey of trying to get to the point where it has been "solved". The end goal is to, as a community, beat the entire game as fast as possible by any means necessary. Glitches discovered are huge milestones that push those limits even further, and are an enjoyable part of the process to experience.
But at the same time, there is always an end. There's a point where the game has been so thoroughly solved, dissected, and stripped for its exploitable parts that there's no more time that could be saved at all. At that point, whoever has the world record has it for good, so people will end up just fighting for their spots down the line, if they continue fighting at all. This happens in casual games, too: once you get to the end of the game, there's nothing more to do except either make the rounds throughout the game world for fun or restart the whole game. Unlike games, however, you can't reset a game's speedrun community in the same way, and so eventually that game "dies" because nobody can have that journey with it anymore.
It's the life cycle of speedrunning, and it's most likely going to be how speedrunning works for a very, very long time.
Not to disagree with your thoughtful analysis in the video, but I think ZFG not really doing OOT categories since early 2022 has something to do with it. If he returns with some big 100% No Srm runs I think the game will see a resurgence.
yeah. Oh well, we can't expect one guy to keep doing the same thing over and over again. Might go insane
@@karamelflan1838 Pretty sure it has more to do with the fact that the new SRM manipulation was so complex it made it impossible to route for, and ZFG always seemed like the guy that wants to see how far stuff can go, and knowing there is a way to potentially save a huge amount of time without enough manpower to figure out how it works doesn't help lol.
Yeah I think you've hit the nail on the head. Obviously as somebody who runs several movement-heavy Mario games in the more-or-less "intended" category, I'm quite biased. But to me, glitch/skip-heavy games have never been very enticing. I love hearing the breakdowns about them on RUclips, and hearing the technical explanations, but I have little desire to actually watch full runs, much less sit down and actually learn the runs myself. In fact, I sometimes get very frustrated with SMS because it feels like a Zelda game at certain points in the run. Tricks and skips like Gelato Beach Skip, Yoshi Skip, Early Yoshi-go-round, etc, where I have to stop and meticulously set Mario up at the correct angle and clip in just the right piece of geometry, feel like speedbumps in my speedrun. But I tolerate them because for the other 90% of the run, the movement mechanics feel amazing. (Mind you, I'm also the type of runner who will put off learning these tricks for as long as possible because grinding them out is just not fun. I'd rather practice movement.) I don't think I could ever sit down and learn a run for a Zelda or Pokemon game where it's almsot entirely skips and tricks.
I personally think intended speed running is much more interesting to watch. Small glitches are a fine to watch but part of the joy of speed running is watching someone do something masterfully you are familiar with. The OOT stuff is too out of the world now. It's fun to watch crazy stuff happen once but most people certainly don't want to watch it over and over and really don't want to spend hours learning about how it works. It's like homework.
Yeah the classic Mega Man games are still fun to watch live, will be over in 40 mins and with a few exceptions in zips with MM2 its just how you played them back 30 years ago, just really good
I am in the boat that things will stagnate if you can't get new blood interested.
I think a lot of it is in the presentation, but executing code in a speedrun just isn't interesting for me. I've played Ocarina of Time many times, but I have no relationship with code execution in the game because the game never tests you on it.
Now movement? Puzzles? Some gliches here and there? Yeah, the game actively tests you and fights against you on some of these things, and if you see that the wall you've seen a million times can actually be clipped through when you do a jump attack in the right position, that's awesome.
For the most part, I like glitchless speedruns, but some are more than fine. Some are amazing. I think the thing to do is keep stuff accessible. If you do glitches that anyone can do in order to get somewhere early, then you open the door for the viewer to apply that stuff to their own game. Heck, one of my favorite things is learning tricks I can use in Randomizer runs myself!
This is, as you say in the video, exactly what games like Celeste or.. MOVEMENT based games do so well though. It's really impressive seeing someone have absolutely mastered the control or movement of a character in a way that you could only dream of... but again, the connection is still that I as a viewer HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN IN THESE SITUATIONS. Wrong warps to the credits through code execution or whatever.... It could've been literally any game and it would be just as uninteresting to me.
Not only are you a genius speedrunner but you take the time to truly appreciate the craft, be introspective and retrospective and only want to understand how to keep the passion alive for everyone involved.
Keep it up! Been watching for years and you're always on the front lines of bridging audience to skills and speed.
I would say that there is a difference between actually getting to the final boss and warping to the credits. I think the categories that mostly would die off faster don't show the same type of gameplay that is expected and it is almost all behind the scene pixel manipulation. If it takes awhile to get there and it is interesting then it could still be a good run but if it is too short then while it is still interesting, it would kill my enthusiasm. I do think I would still watch an OOT wrong warp and Ganon fight even now but I wouldn't watch one where they never leave Kokiri forest more than a couple of times at most. One is just more exciting to me. I think sequence breaks are still fun an interesting for a lot of games but it depends on the game.
I think games with unrealized skill ceilings as well as active discovery and strategy refinement allow for the most competitive environments, making it more compelling to run those games. Games like SMW, Super Metroid, the mega man series, have seen their strats and executions become exceedingly rigid to be competitive. When there’s not urgent competitiveness at the top of the leaderboards it’s often an indication of the community’s overall state.
I think the rise of A.C.E. over the past few years as well as insane tricks that are optimal but not super fun to watch are why my attention has seemed to go more to randomizers over speedruns. A lot of games have come out with their own unique randomizers where you can use the cool tricks from speedruns but it is also different most times you watch or play.
I think part of it (not just OoT, but multiple games) comes down to some categories getting reduced to their absurd limits with credits warps or other forms of ACE, and in some cases some really rigid RNG manipulations being discovered. Those are all the sort of things that are a wonder to chase and discover, but they're just not as fun to watch after the first or second "Wait, WHAT?" moment, and they're just inherently more intimidating to try to participate in. Of course that's not the whole story, as I can't remember seeing any leaderboards going long without forking off a manipless, "no ACE" or "no credits warp" category after it became relevant to do so. On the other end of that, some runs turn into constant OoB, but there's also "no OoB" categories in those cases.
For all I know, it might just boil down to a lot of games stagnating after a while, with fewer routing variations and fewer new _enjoyable_ glitches being discovered. For some games, a modern run is virtually identical to a run five or ten years ago and the spectacle is mostly dried up for people who've watched or ran it back then. Fwiw, I still treat speedrunning as a second replay thing, and take that as my time to either read up on what people are doing with a game or just start trying to exploit it myself using only stuff I found in previous playthroughs. We might see older games fall out of favor over time for those reasons, but I don't think we'll see people lose interest in speedrunning games entirely or watching runs they simply haven't seen before.
I also think a part of it is accessibility, with old speedruns it felt like "oh yeah that's cool, probably in like a few weeks of practicing I could get down all those tricks and get a solid run".
Where as now a lot of games take literal years to learn to speedrun and that's just not as appealing. The glitchless games also allow for (IMO) a higher skill ceiling.
A lot of glitches are luck dependant or so hard they might as well be, and people would rather watch a player go absolutely insane with their movement in celeste to save a few seconds than watch someone who finally got a frame perfect input that saved minutes or even hours. I think the glitchless games with just insane movement also are a little bit more relatable, everyone's pulled off some sick movement before but few people have manipulated code to wrong warp to the credits.
An example of this would be only up. That game exploded because everyone could play it, everyone could get good at it, and people could even watch their favourite streamers get genuinely good times. Speedruns from well known RUclipsrs and streamers were actually way more popular than the world record runs because they were just more relatable. Seeing your favourite youtuber hit a sick bounce off of a bed was way cooler than seeing the pros perform what was basically wizardry.
Also it's possible that there's just less of a shockfactor now. I remember ages ago watching the first ww attempts using superswimming and thinking how crazy and silly it seemed. And now pretty much half the games you watch have something somewhat similar where you stare at a wall for a couple seconds and then go flying at the speed of light. Like TOTK speedruns have become progressively less interesting to watch because it slowly becomes more and more just flying across the map like BOTW.
Thank you for all of the content on both the glitch heavy runs and the movement heavy ones, as well as anything in between! Personally I enjoy almost the whole spectrum from glitchy to vanilla gameplay, but once you get near ACE territory I stop being so interested in the run and would just like to hear an explanation of the mechanics. The more precise and reset heavy a run is, I think the more fun it becomes to watch it in RUclips breakdown form than live, but in general I find them all entertaining especially if it's a game I already like!
I think the games who's main category have been busted open by ACE (and similar grade technical glitches) are simply in need of changing up which category is considered Main (with maybe a couple ruling changes if necessary). Speedruns that are in essence technical breakdowns of how video games, software and coding works are definitely extremely interesting for video essays, but they make for a poor live viewing experience! OOT for example is still the very same game people still love, but the 3 minute ACE route needs to be put on a shelf as a secondary category oddity, not the crown jewel of the game's speedrun scene.
if super metroid can have its glitched category as a secondary one oot most certainly could too
i’ve always preferred glitchless or 100% with glitches because it gets much closer to skilled gameplay than just using grass and coins to code the game to show the credits
A few minor glitches makes for a cool video to watch, but yeah, watching someone backflip 175 times to find the magic pixel to skip the last 97% of the game just doesn't do it for me. I also personally don't like watching games with really stupid movement tech, like Castlevania Bloodlines (it might be Dracula X though...can't remember which one because I didn't have a Genesis as a kid) where you do backwards flips to move rather than the standard run tech.
Yay, new Linkus video! Always a fun watch!
I kinda understand what you mean, Linkus. I am a lover of Randos and Glitchless (or less glitched) Speedruns where I can understand what is happening. For example I speedrun glitchless Indie Speedrun like To the Moon ect. to bring the story to the viewer.
One thing to note on games that heavily rely on glitches for their speedruns is...the difficulty of some of them, kinda like happened with DK64, that some of the glitches were SO HARD and INCONSISTENT to do that a most pople BUT the ones already on the top of the chart kinda dropped it, since most people couldn't perfom those tricks, or it wasn't worth it for them to do the time investment in such complex tricks that are inconsistent
I got into your channel and ZFG as well due to randomizer races of both OoT and Wind Waker. I enjoy randomizer runs in general, but always thought it was cool seeing 2 or more people compete with variations in the routes on the same seed. I wish they would happen more often to be honest, cause I can't speedrun to save my life haha.
I totally agree with you. It’s like people want to be able to ‘relate’ to the run in a recognizable way. Similar to how they played the game in their youth, but with a few tricks thrown in. This is why i enjoy speedruns for games that haven’t been totally ‘broken’ yet.
I think there's a line where: on one side if a run is close enough to a casual playthrough but optimized and with a small number of tricks, skips, and tech that are easy for a viewer to understand, then that encourages them to try running it themselves ("Oh that's cool! I could do that!"); and on the other side, if the run has so many glitches, exploits, and frame-perfect inputs that a viewer can't really tell what's going on unless someone on RUclips explains it to them, then that discourages them from attempting such a run ("Woah, that's crazy. I could never do that lol" or even, "Ok so you warp to the credits in the first area... That's cool but then are we even playing Ocarina at that point??").
As for people who are already in a speedrunning community, I think it's natural that as the tricks get more difficult and the record pushed more to the edge of human limits that people just move on to other games that aren't as hard or are just more fun and less pressure. So as old runners move on and new runners prefer other games, it's only natural that games like Ocarina would fall off over time. That's how I see it anyway.
I would say that playing the game "as intented" is more popular for runners because it feels more accessible than "crouch to the corner and throw 5 bomb oranges to clip through the wall and walk along the invisible barrier" (dk64)
It also feels lile you are improving at the game itself rather than exploiting it
Imagine sending a video to a friend who has no idea about speedrunning where you say "look, this guy beat Ocarina of Time faster than anyone else." Then they watch the video, and it's just using a glitch to trigger the credits. They wouldn't be impressed, they'd just be confused. Nowhere other than the speedrunning space would that be a meaningful completion of the game.
It's very interesting... theoretically, I love the types of glitches that result in credits warps, I love thinking about how a flaw in the code of the game could allow it to rewrite itself. But in a run? It's boring! It often cuts out most of the game! Which, y'know, I'm usually watching a game to see the *gameplay*. And it's not that I hate all glitches- it's just that, in practice, "rewriting the game so it's just done without much visible feedback until the credits pop up" is a lot less fun to watch than performing a precise trick to skip a chapter and seeing the exact moment they pass or fail. And, as you mentioned, there's a very real feeling with the "intended" category of games that I could do it myself, if I tried. If I got consistent enough at Celeste, if I could learn the "Grandmaster-level" tricks, I could absolutely be in the running for a world record. Ocarina of Time? No shot. What the hell do you even do there? How do you know if any of what you're doing is right? Even in Super Mario 64, even in the low-star categories which bypass most of the game, there's a feeling of "I could learn this game, I could learn to do these tricks", even if they're hard, even if it takes me years...
This makes me sad. The entire appeal of speedrunning to me is getting to understand the inner-workings of video games, and see how those things can be exploited to beat the game.
it's like... a test, but everyone is allowed to cheat, and whoever cheats the best wins!
I can see why that doesn't work for a live stream format though; it would require the runner to explain while playing and that's probably not something most people have the mental bandwidth to do (I know I sure don't lol)
I personally find watching ultra glitchy runs to be boring. Like, "oh yay, this guy just did 175 backflips out of bounds and now he's at the credits." Super Metroid is still my favorite to watch...it's just perfect execution of Super Metroid, and even I (someone who has beaten the game 20 times total) can pull off most of the tricks...just not as consistently as Oats and Zoasty.
Yeah, I’m a bit late to the party, but I think you hit the nail on the head about live streaming- it’s just not the right format for really technical tricks like ACE/credits warps/etc., because the interesting part is what happens behind the scenes, but the execution is too demanding for anyone to get anywhere while talking and playing at the same time.
That being said, I think the situation for games like OoT isn’t nearly as dire as it looks, because people are starting to recognize the limitations of the live format. Live is for things like randomizers where the fun is dealing with bullshit as it crops up, or runs like SM64 or Celeste where even the glitches (if any) are done using the same mechanics anyone can use, so it continues to boil down to “do what everyone does but better”. There’s nothing wrong with saying “you know, this would make a better video essay” and… doing video essays.
I'm curious about where the randomizer are in comparison.
Normal speed runs of M64 and Oot glitch or intended all end up being optimized to the point that every speed run of those categories are the same. Minor seconds off here or there but even positioning in a 3D game with pixle perfect glitches will look the same as the others.
But randomizers will require knowledge as well as routing strats that change the viewing experience. And I go to zelda randomizers far more often than any other game because of the nature of zelda as a collect-a-tion that unlocks areas. Like Metroid.
Heck I heard of Metroid/Zelda randomizer speed runs before I got into the speed running community.
One other aspect I think is important is if the strategies you see in a speedrun make you want to try it out yourself. If you see a BLJ in Mario 64, or cool strategies for a level in Goldeneye, you might pick up the game and try speedrunning yourself. If you see a bunch of stuff on screen that looks awful to do, you’re not gonna wanna try it
Hmm. As a brief counterpoint- Hollow Knight speedrunning, Any% NMG (No Major Glitches) is the most popular category
There's a lot of cherrypicking in this video. At one point he talks about categories and mentions only any%, but he includes Mario 64 in "intended", where 0 Star is anything close to that, but, I think, he means it because of 120 Stars, which, even if glitched, is much closer to intended gaming.
Thanks for marking the sponsor as a chapter. It makes it possible for me to watch it over and over and over again and purchasing hundreds upon hundreds of [PRODUCT BEING ADVERTISED].
Ill never forget oot 1810. (and the teacup dude beating it shortly after :D) The years prior were so much fun.
For me it started losing its magic with the dekunut shenanigans. Thats when I realised all my fav glitchheavy categories were on a timer. Once a new strat gets found, I might not be the audience for this game anymore.
My other fav runs to watch used to be paper mario and Luigis mansion. But back then they played through like 80% of the game which nowadays feels like its only 10-15% left. Have not enjoyed watching those in probqbly 8+years.
Typing this made me feel older than thinking about school lmfao
the reason i don't really care about speedruns all that much anymore is because, as you said, it's flawed in nature. when the sole objective is doing something as fast as humanly possible with little to no regards to how fun is it, it turns out to not be very fun, shocking right?
your really the only speedrunner i watch since i love the way you explain how/why you do glitches. some of my favorites vides are the ones when you react to various speedruns and explain what they are doing.
I’m a portal speedrunner, and we see the exact same thing here. Of the 4 main categories, the most popular categories by far are glitchless and nosla, which have a much more movement-focused system of gameplay than inbounds and oob. While inbounds and oob is still popular among the top level players, new runners just don’t see the appeal in it and stick to the easier-to-understand categories that they can optimize to perfection.
I can't remember the last time I watched a full speedrun over watching one that had all the boring parts like unskippable cutscenes cut out or one that had great commentary that made it worth watching the cutscenes. I think the only speedrunner I could watch a full speedrun for these days is ZFG because he's just so chill and not overreacting to every difficult trick that he pulls off (the overreacting is chat's job.)
I always wanted to try speedrunning but the tricks that people used in the games I wanted to run felt borderline impossible unless you had four sets of arms to press all the buttons at the same time or reaction time so precise that you could dodge a bullet before it had even been fired and some even require you to use 3rd party tools just to have a chance at being competitive on the leaderboard, maybe that's why some games fail to retain player attention when it comes to speedrunning like OoT or, as another commenter mentioned, Minecraft.
I've had a similar feeling for a long time as well where I would never want to play an any% run if the gameplay strays way too far away from typical gameplay into ACE but I love the problem solving aspect of how people tried to make it faster. I love the theory but not the execution
7:53 There's a unique prestige and discoverability to any% compared to other categories. I wonder if communities will start relegating major game-skipping glitches to their own categories as soon as they're discovered, and guarding any% as a relatively accessible category. We already saw a variant of this in Elden Ring, where any% bans the use of zipping, as it's limited to fairly specific PC hardware.
Any% is just inevitably a category that is prone to eventually fall into an unfun spiral. Either the run is unfun to watch because it looks more like someone just playing a weird demo, or it just gets so reset-heavy that people don't want to sit around playing or watching hundreds of thousands of failed runs. It's ok though, we have other categories.
Only in the popular games. The large majority of games (at this rate) wont ever get a busted any% the same way that games like oot would.
Arbitrary code execution isn’t compelling to watch. It’s basically that simple.
When the barrier to entry is low (the speedrun isnt optimized) a lot of people run it, when it's too optimized it's too much of a time sink to learn and RNG heavy, so people go to newer games instead.
Most basic way to put it is. You enjoy seeing someone being very good in a thing you love.
But when if the game is too glitched. It's not the "same" game you love.
Its like someone being good in basketball, cuz they have springshoes.
I think this is why people love challenge runs or speedruns explained nowadays.
I don't like any% runs where it's discovered that you press four buttons and prompt the ending credits... It feels like if I counted navigating to the Credits section on a main menu as my speedrun any% of Hollow Knight or something. It's why you have rules for speedrunning, because people will eventually break a game enough to not actually need to play the game. If I wanted to watch someone boot up a game, jiggle out of existence, and then play the cutscene prompt to stop the timer I'd just look up the first scene and last scene of the game instead to save the hassle.
Sometimes its just nice to sit down and watch someone speedrun the WHOLE game, rather then get a fraction through and it just ends. Its also nice if you have the games yourself and learn some of the tricks from speedrunning you can use on a casual playthrough yourself if that makes sense. I really enjoy watching puwexil speedrun final fantasy games because he does runs that dont have glitches that skip pieces of the game but still uses tricks all over throughout the whole game that are just interesting to see.
For me, 100% was always the best OOT category, and the prime 100% route for me was just before SRM came into the picture and it became so foreign to me after that, before it many of the tricks seemed to make sense, even if I could never do them but that’s when I more or less checked out. Now all I watch of OOT are old runs and randomizers. Still love the randos
Conflating credits warps as “beating the game” was the biggest mistake.
It's time for more category splits! I've been thinking speed runs have been less fun to watch as the years have gone on because of wrong warps etc.
It would be great if there were more categories that were about fun and love of the game, like you said about the good old days. I feel like more glitches getting moved to a separate category would solve it, or making new categories entirely that have their own rules
This makes alot of sense, i think it explains why ultrakill is a very popular speedrunning game. Because it follows intended routes (atlease in P% routes) but with some of the most insane movement possible and it is awesome.
I think that when a game is broken to arbitrary codes like Zelda and Super Mario World, the runners have completed the mission, you know? Even if the runs are split in categories and all...the game is boken, the secret was revealed, it become less popular and the people look forward to the games that are famous and nostalgic but not SO BROKEN yet.
Yeah, also these massively broken games like oot are just fun the first time you watch them, there aren't really any clutch moments
Personal opinion: ACE kills games. They are super cool for TAS settings but it always ends up over optimizing the run to the point it is not fun to watch or needs a 3 hour explanation to show why it’s cool
I think the divide really comes down to ACE vs non-ACE. Once an ACE is discovered in the game, the speedrun is pretty much at it's final state. Sure you can iterate on the ACE but you're really not playing the game at all anymore, just finding faster ways to write code. I think this makes these games less popular for both speedrunners and audiences
I fully agree, but I got one thing to add. The different categories often suffer from length. A run that is 15-60 mins long is a good amount. Anything shorter often gets to technical and glitch heavy and anything longer becomes a podcast you have to actively watch to enjoy... defeating why most people listen to podcasts
I would say the most popular games for speedrunning are those which have very complex and hard to be perfected movement mechanics. If the movement is too simple then the playing just looks like toward from one object to another - it's not super interesting on the long run. But if the movement mechanics are complex then playing the game the intended way is much more interesting. It doesn't matter that much how broken the games actually are - like any% is quite broken for Hollow knight or Super Mario 64 but those are not the most popular categories by far.
and for Oot ACE or SRM did not help to gain popularity that's also true.
Came into this knowing what was up and still enjoyed the video!
I think there is a discussion to be had about wether manipulating RAM addresses to force the game to show the ending screen really counts as "beating" the game. Technically, playing any game even casually can be boiled down to "manipulating RAM addresses", but in most any% runs for most games you still tackle the main objective of the game. In OoT you don't even leave the starting area anymore.
There’s been 10 years of dominant running, it had its run. It’s all good 👍, all the glitches and work has been done and now others can shine.
I used to watch ZFG religiously entil the arbitrary code stuff was found and quickly lost intrest after that. So I'd very much agree with your assesment
in my opinion, things like SRM and ACE definitely killed a lot of my enthusiasm for Speedruns of OoT...i want to see HESSes, Megaflips, Bomb-Hovering, etc; not Spongebob's Bubble Blowing Technique...its almost like putting in a Cheat Code-- very odd yet very specific controller inputs that 'magically' beat the game for you...
This might be an unpopular opinion but I hate runs that end in just wrong warping to the credits.
It’s unsatisfying to me.
For example, in paper Mario you play for 38 minutes, wrong warp and your done. Impressive looking but unsatisfying
Then you have wind waker where you use your knowledge to break past a barrier to skip towards the end. You don’t just immediately finish, you still have to kill ganon. I personally find that way more interesting to watch then if skipping that barrier just made credits roll.
Yess i was looking for a vid to watch before bed thank you.
Goldeneye is a great example of an optimization making speedruns not entertaining for viewers. When someone pointed out that looking at the ground improves the framerate which makes it faster even to the ingame timer, it meant runs are now looking at the ground most of the time.
I do think there's something to be said about the relative age of the top games in your list though. Other than SM64 the games are all newer, people in their 20's probably played them as kids. If someone never played the game themselves they won't have that as an interest factor for the speedrun, which I think draws a lot of the audience to initially give the run a watch.
I think part of it is that for me personally i didn't know much about speedrunning so i was more impressed five years ago when crazy stuff happened but the more often you see it the less impressive it gets
I think this is a little narrow sighted of a whole problem. There is a lot more factors why there is less speedrunners in older popular games. Most I personally talk to just don't enjoy running a basically solved game and player expression is low like any% OOT. Also players in general hop onto randomizers to be able to express their skills in more creative ways. I love KH2 randomizer since I can apply tons of my game knowledge but running base game is rough since it's a strict route but there is tons of player expression during a KH2 run. Also older speedruns have tons of top players just get older having families and have no time to catch up with the newest tricks the community has founded. Just too many factors in general to be like "this community in this game is dying because of this."
memory manipulation is the bane of speedruns imo. it becomes more about the simulation behind the scenes rather than the content itself.
Also the inherit value of "faster == always better". but no one is gonna watch the link to the past 5 minute run for more than an hour. nor the mario bros 1 speedrun in which you may attempt it 10 times in an hour... but you're not gonna retain an audience that isn't just there chilling with you on in the background unless you're approaching a world record...
its interesting, cause i personalyl dont like glitchless, its just a fast playthough of a game, while iwth glitches, you learn something new about the games, and see just amazing stuff some people have found, and most glitched runs are very entertaining to me
I wonder if part of the issue is discoverability and clear communication of what is being run on twitch. Let's say you follow a runner who has only been running one category for years, and that category gets a credits warp and becomes less interesting to watch. The runner shifts to a more interesting category. But on the twitch sidebar, you see they're playing the same game. You don't immediately recognize that they have shifted to something better. You assume they're doing the same thing they always have, and don't engage with the stream.
Similarly, if you follow a game on twitch, and something makes people start losing interest in the game, runners may start shifting to other games that are just as interesting! But if you don't follow every runner individually, you won't see where everyone has gone.
There's a lot of factors at play here, and I have a lot more thoughts than I can put in a youtube comment right now.
There's always going to be a conflict between a game that's done as fast as possible and a game that's entertaining for a regular person to watch someone play.
And Zelda games unfortunately tend to fall short here, whether it's the god forsaken pause buffering of Wind Waker, or the glitches that are impossible to understand without doing homework in OoT, the runs simply aren't entertaining to watch for a wider audience.
Love to see the Clint footage
The time when ZFG ran OoT 100% SRM no ACE with F boots was great. It was a super complicated run and to get the specifics you would have to run the game yourself, like which angle you needed to manipulate your inventory and the places you warp to when entering a loading zone, but once you had a general understanding of the mechanics and the route, it was very exciting to watch. 3.5 hours of gameplay where in the last half hour just a single mistake could end the run and getting bad Dampé RNG could turn a god run into a joke... Those were the days
I 100% agree with this! When I got into watching runs, runners like Narcissa, Siglemic, and Zoast were showcasing how glitches and fun movement can combine into a REALLY exciting and interesting runs. And live watching those runs was really enjoyable due to the fast paced movement and or combat and glitches, all with high stakes. It was SO ENGAGING! The movement and gamplay is just fun to watch. Another really good example of this, IMO, is TTYD speedrunning. When SolidifiedGaming found the Gloomtail warp set up that was viable in RTA and in the Any% route, it was monumental! Even the TAS for that was still 2 hours. But now there's a credits warp. This is super cool as a youtube video, but watching live attempts of something like that is... not enticing to me. I think the point you made about older runs being much more like "watching someone play a game you love but in a really cool new way" is major, and contributed hugely to the BOOM in speedrunning and the popularity of speedrunning events
Cosmo*