Don't forget, in general people don't really speedrun a game unless they really like the game, and usually you get to really liking it by playing it normally, usually more than once. The speedrunner may have already spelunked the whole game before breaking it over their knee.
Hi Tim, I was the speedrunner that did the first two recorded and verified runs for Fallout. I already loved the game before I ever considered speedrunning, and had played through the game many times normally before I began even figuring out how to run it. The speedrun was basically a fun puzzle that gave me more to do with the game. I also was working on a speedrun for Temple of Elemental Evil, and managed to finish it in under 10 minutes, but I was having a lot of issues recording the run at the time. Edit: Just checked to see if anyone had done a run since then, and someone has finished it in 2:36! I'm loving these videos! Thanks for sharing all of these insights!
Don't worry, Tim. These speedrunners have already played the game very thoroughly. Sometimes multiple playthroughs to find out where to make the most efficient skips in a future playthrough. So they aren't missing things you put time and effort into!
Exactly! Many seem to forget that, anyone who has *that* level of familiarity of the game must've poured hours upon hours just experiencing the game down to the tiniest details.
But are they playing them thoroughly just to find the best strat for speedruns, or many playthroughs because they like it? And Tim actually points out exactly your comment ;)
@@ronnylarock13 people tend to speedrun games they really enjoy. So I'd say there's AT LEAST one full playthrough before they even attempt to skip anything
I never thought it get to one of these when it has "no views!" As a speedrunner, I'm excited to hear your thoughts on speedrunning. An important thing to note with soeedrunning is that the speedrun usually comes WAY down the line after we've enjoyed 100s of hours of regular play. The speedrunning aspect, for me at least, is to learn about how the game is made. "How can I break this? How did they construct this? Do i actually need to do this to beat the game?" Etc. Its a celebration of game development!
Said it very well, I'm not a speedrunner, but the reason I watch speedrunning videos and such is because I'm interested in all the intricacies of the game's mechanics. Legitimately, 90% of speedrunners have to spend a lot of time playing the game normally and exploring every nook and cranny to actually *find* how to do these things quickly. Most of them don't skip past stuff they haven't seen before, unless they're only playing the game to speedrun, but those people usually have less practice with the game than those with actual hours in the game casually.
If you feel like people are missing out on content through speed runs, you should watch the 100% category where they complete 100% of the game as fast as they can.
Speed-runners require an intimate level of knowledge that your average player lacks. A community of speed-runners is compelling evidence that a game is great as it takes very dedicated fans to learn the ins-and-outs of games enough to complete them in such a timely manner, and in that way it is also the case that the vast majority of these people have completed a conventional playthru as well. There are those who speedrun the entire Fallout franchise, in such cases it is not only reflective of their passion but also, I would argue, should provide you some relief or even satisfaction knowing what you’re witnessing is the most outright admission someone is a mega-fan. This is true for any speed-running.
I can't help but see the meta-irony of you and Leonard watching the rats get out of your maze faster than you ever expected (about a game with Experimental Vaults being monitored the same way). Flowers for Algernon come to mind with regards to dev/designer's reactions to speedrunners.
In regards to hiring speedrunners for QA, there's a major part of the speedrunning community that never actually do runs at all. Many people dedicate their efforts solely to finding tricks and glitches for others to use, effectively making them QA testers in their own right. There are sometimes even bounties posted by runners for hundreds of dollars to anyone who can find a skip for a particular thing in a game. Of course many of those people, like the runners themselves, are fueled by a passion for a particular game or group of games that they love. Whether translating that hobby into a job to work on any given game that comes along could keep them going is another question. Still, I'm sure there are some out there who just love the thrill of the hunt.
The communities centered around researching tricks and routing for speedruns is very much similar to the exploratory testing aspect of QA. It makes me wonder whether it works both ways and formal software testing methods and perhaps automation could be (or is?) utilized in service of speedrunning.
@@savagedregime8176 it is to an extent, look up "crowdsourcing cpu in paper mario" for an example in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. i don't think i can link the video without getting the comment hidden though
I love any% speedruns where people come up with clever ways of getting around game's mechanics or going out of bounds of playable area when you see how it's done on the inside.
I always thought it would be funny if Devs programmed a special cosmetic item for when speedrunners finish a game under an hour. A white t-shirt that says: I BEAT THIS GAME UNDER AN HOUR AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY SHIRT
"Speedrunners for QA" probably stems from their affinity for finding bugs, but people tend to forget that those bugs were found over multiple playthroughs of the game, and not necessarily intentionally.
these are some of the best vids on the net. production is great, no marketing bs, great content, simple format, straight to the point, insightful and idk just everything about these vids shows that you are a person who understands your industry and also the net and what is good for internet culture and the world at large
I think people are suggesting you hire speedrunners to test your games not so that you can prevent speedrunning, but because many speedrunners are adept at finding ways to break games and glitch them out, so they may be able to discover bugs more quickly than standard testers, including bugs that wouldn't be fun or useful for speedrunning and could easily be triggered accidentally by an average player and harm their experience. That said I don't know how effective this would really be, since not all speedrunners are interested in finding bugs even if they make use of ones which others have discovered. And many games have glitches that are useful for speedruns and go undiscovered for years, even though there are people actively speedrunning the game that whole time. I think that's a little less common these days though since speedrunning is so much bigger nowadays, so you have a lot more people searching for ways to break games and play through them faster.
I think it's great when games acknowledge skipping and speedrunning players, like having NPCs comment on how you shouldn't know certain things In Metal Gear Solid 5, there's a few missions like that, where they'll say you're going the wrong way, and then act surprised that the enemy showed up there. Things like that, where the devs acknowledge unique playstyles, go a long way in making a game enjoyable, especially across multiple playthroughs.
As a speedrunner, QA is something that just comes naturally to some of us. Not all, but some. When I am routing for a speedrun, I see detail in ways that normal players don't, and this is before I'm even at the stage when I'm actually speedrunning. So I wouldn't necessarily rule out all speedrunners as potential candidates for hiring QA, as we all have different skill sets. Glitch hunters for example, may not be the fastest, but you can be sure they know the ins and outs of the game from the countless hours they spend discovering things. Anyway, it always warms my heart and soul knowing there's devs out there who have positive things to say about our hobby. Good video!
i had at least 100 hours in portal 2 before i even considered speedrunning it. i think most people only end up running games that they love and care about before picking it up as a speedgame
Something worth thinking about, is that a few games have actually made changes, to make speedrunning better or faster. Ultra Kill having done this the most that I can think of, as it added more and more gameplay changes for it. There is also a long running rumor about Fallout New Vegas leaving in a bug just for speed runners.
I worked on a physics based game a few years back that was speedrun at GDQ. It was amazing and hilarious watching all of the bonkers physics tricks that had been discovered by the community to skip huge swathes of the game :') Lots of love for the speedrunning community!
I think speedrunning is the ultimate love confession to a game. It often takes thousands of playthroughs to set some kind of record (unless you invent the category and not actually competing with anyone).
The great thing about having one or two speed run minded QA testers is to help that community since they know what the process is and can help advocate for it (Most of the speed runners are huge into charity streams and events) and to get through a game build "Golden Path" as quick as possible. I had a few on my teams before and gave them some retractions that they needed to touch some quest states while doing the main quest golden path speed run. It helps a) check for adhoc state logics and b) game saves that we can parse out to other general testers when the older save archives become to out of date.
Also I encourage any dev team if you are not doing it to challenges QA to a speed run race. It is a good chance QA will win, but it nice to celebrate the game with the other department.
I think speed runners can be useful in QA particularly because they have a mind for finding exploits and bugs, not necessarily because they can speed run. Speed running just shows that they are capable of pushing a game past its limits.
Last night I offhanded heard you reference Arcanum as a failure (one of your many commentaries on learning from failure). You've done a few targeted videos on systems related to Arcanum, but have you ever told the macro-scale version of the story? I haven't watched the Leonard Boyarsky video yet (maybe it's covered there?). Would love to hear it sometime. I was in your beta tester community / in the forms for this one. Still very much respect the end product, though I remember feeling some elements didn't match my expectations (on the whole I liked it, and finished it).
Thank you for those videos Tim. As A huge fan of Fallout, especially original games, these videos are very insightful both in and out of game context. In the first Fallout there was an 'Ask about' feature, I imagine that the original idea behind it was an ability to have some sort of natural conversation with characters. Back then such features were extremely limited and therefore didn't work very well. Now with the rise of AI and especially LLMs we are starting to approach the point where we can finally have natural conversations with NPCs and even have some in-game consequences of those conversations. I wonder what you think about this new AI-powered technologies and would you use it in Fallout if it was available back in the 1990's?
That's so funny you mentioned the "Going Down. . .?" Achievement from WoW. I remember almost always getting it accidentally, and the same way: running off the Scryer elevator in Shattrath city by habit. Never even intended to get it.
Speaking of post game patches I’m reminded of a time I got very frustrated with Prey (2017). There was a game breaking bug where a necessary key card would drop though the geometry locking a door forever. Arkane was aware of the issue and had marked it fixed, however I still experienced it in my game. Bugs happen, no big deal- but what angered me was that someone had decided to lock the console so I couldn’t fix the bug myself! I just couldn’t fathom why they would do this? Surely allowing players basic tools to get around problems that *WILL* come up is the safer option? Guess I should let it go at this point x) , but I remain curious why.
I'm never one to do speed-runs myself, or watch them. But somewhere I'm just a fan of how one can short-cut something like the Fallout 1 main quest because it shows a certain flexibility in how the game is constructed and I feel it encourages creativity and "messing with the system". I really like that in RPGs, where the reins are not too tight on the player even if it might mean that things can be slightly screwed up.
Hiya Tim! Pardon me if this isn't the best place to ask this, but I had a question about reviewing your co-workers' work. Originally, I just wanted to ask about reviewing code. I'm a software engineer as well, and we do peer-reviews very often. My question was initially "How does Tim Caine review code?", but thought that was too specific. In your various positions, I imagine you've had to review a lot more than just code. How do you review art assets? How do you review dialogue? How do you review things that you haven't worked on or are outside of your skillset? Most importantly, how do you deliver the bad news that they might have to go back and re-work something? Thanks for the videos, they're really insightful!
Careful considerations to prevent railroading of the storyline? It's something I enjoy in RPG games, being able to come up with interesting solutions to problems that either weren't expected or are clever usage of the mechanics presented to me.
I once prevented speed-runners skipping right into the Chinese Temple endgame area in Bloodlines, because anybody could do this and mess up the main quest.
I remember speed running Fallout 1, took roughly 20mins, and this was on an old pc, with load time taking up a chunk of that. :P High speach, and abusing entering in and out of combat.
Tim I hope you realised over the years that even if someone speedruns the game in 8 minutes they almost certainly played through it a ton normally first.
If you had a 1-use time machine that could only be used to "fix" the Fallout speed run "error" and put in a flag requiring the player to go get the Waterchip, would you do it?
I think the important thing to realize is that most people speedrun games they played and enjoy. The majority of speed runners aren’t just going in and speed running the second they fire the game up. So they usually aren’t missing or bypassing anything in the grand scheme
I see speedrunning as a sort of metagame that's great for a subset of players who love a game and find joy in figuring out its systems and pushing both those and themselves to the limit. The only bad speedrunning-associated experience I've had was when a friend watched a speedrun of a nonlinear narrative game (skipping 99.9% of the content) and concluded that the game wasn't worth playing from that.
oh, one other thing on QA, speedrunners are often really good glitch hunters, irrespective of the act of running, so you may be missing on some overlap here :)
If I ever make a game I know I would try to design the fastest route to finish the game to be as silly as possible knowing that a secret route will probably get a lot of coverage as soon as people find out it's the fastest haha
Hi tim, loving all these videos from you. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on storytelling in tabletop rpg campaigns and how it compares to your experience developing rpg games
Excellent video! Thank you! Do you feel similarly unconcerned about save scumming or is that behavior something worth mitigating by design? In the latter case, what are some good ways to prevent or minimize save scumming? Thanks again and have a great day 😊
Also curious! Save scumming is definitely on people's minds these days. Does it bother you when people fear failed skill checks to the point where they just refuse to continue until they pass that percentage?
@@Battury Good question! The concern I have (as a player; I am not a game designer:) with save scumming is when it becomes trivial to overcome obstacles that are removed via a single skill check/roll. E.g. Baldur's Gate 3 allows you to quicksave in the middle of dialogue right before rolling the dice to see if the skill check passes. This trivializes the check and if the successful outcome is always more preferable than the failed one then the game incentivizes you to try again as the cost of getting what you want is minimal. So the question for me becomes: Is such a skill check even meaningful if one outcome is considered (say for the sake of argument by the majority of players) better than the other and you can simply roll for it multiple times? It's not a clear cut answer to me. In table top RPGs they have tried to solve this by the failing forward paradigm which requires the game master to keep the game's momentum moving forward by allowing the player to get what they want (e.g. unlock the locked chest in front of them) but at a cost (e.g. by applying negative consequences) That is a cool approach but it puts a lot of work on the developers who is now tasked with creating extra content for the failed scenarios. Not necessarily a bad thing but certainly costly. I wonder what other cool strategies are there. E.g. you could have a mini game like elder scrolls 4 or later to make the failed checks worth retrying. Or do it New Vegas style and use 0/1 thresholds for succeeding.
I think the New Vegas system is much better than randomized skill checks in CRPGs for this reason, but it still could be considered not yet ideal in certain ways, e.g. there can't be situation where the player experiences uncertainty about whether they will pass a check or not. I think/hope that eventually somebody will make a 'Souls-like CRPG' that is Ironman-only and continually saves in the background so that you can't retake skill checks, etc without impractical or obvious cheating, but on the other hand makes irrecoverable failure impossible. Planescape: Torment had a great conceit for this and was a lot of the way there, but still had a traditional manual save system that facilitated and typically encouraged scumming, as well as a few situations that could permanently kill you.
@@globalistgamer6418 Agree that New Vegas was a good solution. I also agree that removing manual saves would fix the problem but for some reason does not sit well with me (I guess it makes it difficult to check some short term consequences in a CRPG but maybe that is ok -- especially if the game is not too long). Between the two I do prefer the new Vegas approach :)
Yeah, I think there is more to improving the kind of scenarios that get scummed than just strictly the save system. Having a lot hinge on a single random skill check tends to be unsatisfying regardless of whether you can easily retry it or not. I think it would be preferable to see deeper diplomacy systems comparable to those used for combat where the number of rolls becomes more statistically stable, and there are also more tactical aspects like having to spend limited resources to be able to pass/recover from certain checks (a few games do these things to a degree but it seems like there is a lot of potential for further improvement).
I remember watching a speedrun done live of Psychonauts in front of the dev team. The speedrunner was wondering out loud why they couldn't get over one specific wall with an exploit and then you hear one of the programmers from the back of room yell, "Yeah, because it goes to infinity!". The developer part of my brain thought, I wonder if they're using std::numeric_limits::infinity.
Speedrunner "TomatoAn(g)us" has made speedrunning the entire Fallout series a 'thing', and he seems to make it through the first Fallout in literally minutes. He did a live run through of all four Fallouts at a live GDQ a few years ago, in front of a large crowd, which I thought was quite memorable. ua-cam.com/video/6ekogf10P-c/v-deo.html
The enjoyment for me at least from speedrunning is less from the game more from the act of speedrunning pulling off those tricks and mechanical manipulatios perfectly.
man I was just watching that TOW speedrun commentary with you and Leonard last night, which is weird because the last time I watched that was years ago and it just popped up in my recommended recently. Maybe the video got picked up in the algorithm again?
I don't know if you've been asked this question before but what is your opinion of the Bethesda Fallout games compared to the originals? Thanks for the great content!
I'm wondering how somebody discovered that you are actually not required to deliver the water chip to Vault 13. I imagine some speedrunner thought "let's do other objectives first" and was very surprised when they saw the ending.
haha, not entirely speed run, but stuff from the approach that every character should be able to complete the game that can be used: in Arcanum I got a copy with bug, when Nasrudin's dialogue is messed up (he spoke my lines, I had his lines in dialogue options, something like that) so just to see what happens ofc I killed him and got banished into the Void and... completed the game :D
From my experience the vast majority of speedrunners have played the game casually and extracted as much enjoyment as they can via engaging the intended gameplay formula. What speedrunners are effectively saying is that the game is good to them that they’re willing to invest 100s if not 1000s of hours bashing their heads against a brick wall so they have another avenue to experience the game they’ve fallen in love with.
"We don't fix bugs based on speed running" Yes, that's the mentality I love, and I wish 343 had this instead of fixing all the speedrunning bugs in Halo
Video is looking great now, but softness is back, I think you got an excellent camera and you are now experiencing the lack of good light, need to get a ring light now, that would make everything look perfect.
Plugging HBomberguy's wonderful video "Speedrunning Is Awesome, And Here's Why", where he talks about their crazy creativity and also how wholesome the community is, since their craft is based on sharing information and tips. It also lead to his legendary 48h 101% slowrun of Donkey Kong 64 that raised a crazy amount of money for trans support charity.
I really hope you are just creating these out of a personal want to. You’ve been blazing through content & I simply worry you will burn out. An equally reliable & more infrequent upload schedule would be just as valid
I think there are certain qualities in a particular speedrunner that could be good for testing, but it's more "I in particular enjoy getting into the nooks and crannies and testing the limits, I should look into QA and stress that" than "speedrunners in general make good testers in general."
The reason I think speedrunners would make quite good testers is that they're very practiced at deliberately breaking games and finding bugs/exploits, obviously not all of them will be a high priority to fix but having people go through your game trying to break it could definitely expose some high priority fixes.
I think speedrunning only becomes an issue when new players assume thats the way the game should be played and look up the fastest or most effective strategies in advance. Speedrunners usually beat the game for the Nth time befor they actually start speedrunning, because they still want to expirience and enjoy the game fist. Also regarding hiring speedrunners for QA. Finding glitches that save time is mostly a community effort. Speedrunners usually are the ones that put in the time practicing the execution.
"So, I made this game over a period of 2 years and made sure it's fleshed out with over 100 hours of gameplay.." Speedrunner, 8 mins later: "Finished!" Dev: "What?!"
About hiring speedrunners. Often the people who find skips and plan the fastest route through the game are not the same people as the ones who actually "execute" the speedrun. Speedrunning is a community effort and usually the person holding the controller didn't discover most of the bugs they exploit during their speedrun. There are people in the community who are very meticulous when it comes to breaking a game, but doing something voluntarily as a hobby is different from doing it as a job.
Speedrunner might be good for QA, since they usually spend countless hours "breaking the game" and understanding the mechanics and how to use them - so that in mind one of those guys could "break your game" and let you know what is broken beyond casual player level...
Speed running often shows off the structural integrity of a game's rules as well as the nonlinearity of a game. Obviously speed runners don't START a new game speed running, speed runs are done after the game has been finished, usually many times.
thank you tommysalami6694
very cool
Massive shoutout to tommysalami6694!
Tommy salami!!!
Classic Tommy
Don't forget, in general people don't really speedrun a game unless they really like the game, and usually you get to really liking it by playing it normally, usually more than once. The speedrunner may have already spelunked the whole game before breaking it over their knee.
exactly
Hi Tim, I was the speedrunner that did the first two recorded and verified runs for Fallout. I already loved the game before I ever considered speedrunning, and had played through the game many times normally before I began even figuring out how to run it. The speedrun was basically a fun puzzle that gave me more to do with the game.
I also was working on a speedrun for Temple of Elemental Evil, and managed to finish it in under 10 minutes, but I was having a lot of issues recording the run at the time. Edit: Just checked to see if anyone had done a run since then, and someone has finished it in 2:36!
I'm loving these videos! Thanks for sharing all of these insights!
Don't worry, Tim. These speedrunners have already played the game very thoroughly. Sometimes multiple playthroughs to find out where to make the most efficient skips in a future playthrough. So they aren't missing things you put time and effort into!
Exactly! Many seem to forget that, anyone who has *that* level of familiarity of the game must've poured hours upon hours just experiencing the game down to the tiniest details.
This right here. I played stray extremely thoroughly and experienced all it had to offer before I ignored half of it and started running.
But are they playing them thoroughly just to find the best strat for speedruns, or many playthroughs because they like it?
And Tim actually points out exactly your comment ;)
@@ronnylarock13 people tend to speedrun games they really enjoy. So I'd say there's AT LEAST one full playthrough before they even attempt to skip anything
Yeah, I attempted Halo 4 under 3 hours. It turned out I played through the game more than ten times.
I never thought it get to one of these when it has "no views!" As a speedrunner, I'm excited to hear your thoughts on speedrunning.
An important thing to note with soeedrunning is that the speedrun usually comes WAY down the line after we've enjoyed 100s of hours of regular play. The speedrunning aspect, for me at least, is to learn about how the game is made. "How can I break this? How did they construct this? Do i actually need to do this to beat the game?" Etc. Its a celebration of game development!
Congratulations on speed running this video. :P
As a fellow speedrunner. i agree.
Said it very well, I'm not a speedrunner, but the reason I watch speedrunning videos and such is because I'm interested in all the intricacies of the game's mechanics.
Legitimately, 90% of speedrunners have to spend a lot of time playing the game normally and exploring every nook and cranny to actually *find* how to do these things quickly.
Most of them don't skip past stuff they haven't seen before, unless they're only playing the game to speedrun, but those people usually have less practice with the game than those with actual hours in the game casually.
If you feel like people are missing out on content through speed runs, you should watch the 100% category where they complete 100% of the game as fast as they can.
Speed-runners require an intimate level of knowledge that your average player lacks. A community of speed-runners is compelling evidence that a game is great as it takes very dedicated fans to learn the ins-and-outs of games enough to complete them in such a timely manner, and in that way it is also the case that the vast majority of these people have completed a conventional playthru as well.
There are those who speedrun the entire Fallout franchise, in such cases it is not only reflective of their passion but also, I would argue, should provide you some relief or even satisfaction knowing what you’re witnessing is the most outright admission someone is a mega-fan. This is true for any speed-running.
I can't help but see the meta-irony of you and Leonard watching the rats get out of your maze faster than you ever expected (about a game with Experimental Vaults being monitored the same way).
Flowers for Algernon come to mind with regards to dev/designer's reactions to speedrunners.
In regards to hiring speedrunners for QA, there's a major part of the speedrunning community that never actually do runs at all. Many people dedicate their efforts solely to finding tricks and glitches for others to use, effectively making them QA testers in their own right. There are sometimes even bounties posted by runners for hundreds of dollars to anyone who can find a skip for a particular thing in a game.
Of course many of those people, like the runners themselves, are fueled by a passion for a particular game or group of games that they love. Whether translating that hobby into a job to work on any given game that comes along could keep them going is another question. Still, I'm sure there are some out there who just love the thrill of the hunt.
The communities centered around researching tricks and routing for speedruns is very much similar to the exploratory testing aspect of QA. It makes me wonder whether it works both ways and formal software testing methods and perhaps automation could be (or is?) utilized in service of speedrunning.
@@savagedregime8176 it is to an extent, look up "crowdsourcing cpu in paper mario" for an example in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. i don't think i can link the video without getting the comment hidden though
I like the thumbnail, it has that "listen here you little shit", vibe.
I love any% speedruns where people come up with clever ways of getting around game's mechanics or going out of bounds of playable area when you see how it's done on the inside.
I always thought it would be funny if Devs programmed a special cosmetic item for when speedrunners finish a game under an hour.
A white t-shirt that says:
I BEAT THIS GAME
UNDER AN HOUR
AND ALL I GOT
WAS THIS
LOUSY SHIRT
Ah...the Reverse Samus.
"Speedrunners for QA" probably stems from their affinity for finding bugs, but people tend to forget that those bugs were found over multiple playthroughs of the game, and not necessarily intentionally.
these are some of the best vids on the net. production is great, no marketing bs, great content, simple format, straight to the point, insightful and idk just everything about these vids shows that you are a person who understands your industry and also the net and what is good for internet culture and the world at large
I think people are suggesting you hire speedrunners to test your games not so that you can prevent speedrunning, but because many speedrunners are adept at finding ways to break games and glitch them out, so they may be able to discover bugs more quickly than standard testers, including bugs that wouldn't be fun or useful for speedrunning and could easily be triggered accidentally by an average player and harm their experience.
That said I don't know how effective this would really be, since not all speedrunners are interested in finding bugs even if they make use of ones which others have discovered. And many games have glitches that are useful for speedruns and go undiscovered for years, even though there are people actively speedrunning the game that whole time. I think that's a little less common these days though since speedrunning is so much bigger nowadays, so you have a lot more people searching for ways to break games and play through them faster.
I think it's great when games acknowledge skipping and speedrunning players, like having NPCs comment on how you shouldn't know certain things
In Metal Gear Solid 5, there's a few missions like that, where they'll say you're going the wrong way, and then act surprised that the enemy showed up there.
Things like that, where the devs acknowledge unique playstyles, go a long way in making a game enjoyable, especially across multiple playthroughs.
As a speedrunner, QA is something that just comes naturally to some of us. Not all, but some.
When I am routing for a speedrun, I see detail in ways that normal players don't, and this is before I'm even at the stage when I'm actually speedrunning. So I wouldn't necessarily rule out all speedrunners as potential candidates for hiring QA, as we all have different skill sets. Glitch hunters for example, may not be the fastest, but you can be sure they know the ins and outs of the game from the countless hours they spend discovering things.
Anyway, it always warms my heart and soul knowing there's devs out there who have positive things to say about our hobby. Good video!
i had at least 100 hours in portal 2 before i even considered speedrunning it. i think most people only end up running games that they love and care about before picking it up as a speedgame
Something worth thinking about, is that a few games have actually made changes, to make speedrunning better or faster. Ultra Kill having done this the most that I can think of, as it added more and more gameplay changes for it. There is also a long running rumor about Fallout New Vegas leaving in a bug just for speed runners.
I 100% assure you the people speedrunning the games have already went through at least A few Full Playthroughs its very rare for them not to
I always love hear devs talk about speed running. It’s basically a medium that takes advantage of all the mistakes that the devs made.
Thanks for answering questions and engaging so much with us viewers. The food analogy is hilarious because I know people like that irl.
I worked on a physics based game a few years back that was speedrun at GDQ. It was amazing and hilarious watching all of the bonkers physics tricks that had been discovered by the community to skip huge swathes of the game :') Lots of love for the speedrunning community!
As a designer who is interested in Game Development, I find your channel gold. 💌 I am huge fallout and Outer Worlds fan. Thank you!
I think speedrunning is the ultimate love confession to a game. It often takes thousands of playthroughs to set some kind of record (unless you invent the category and not actually competing with anyone).
The great thing about having one or two speed run minded QA testers is to help that community since they know what the process is and can help advocate for it (Most of the speed runners are huge into charity streams and events) and to get through a game build "Golden Path" as quick as possible. I had a few on my teams before and gave them some retractions that they needed to touch some quest states while doing the main quest golden path speed run. It helps a) check for adhoc state logics and b) game saves that we can parse out to other general testers when the older save archives become to out of date.
Also I encourage any dev team if you are not doing it to challenges QA to a speed run race. It is a good chance QA will win, but it nice to celebrate the game with the other department.
I think speed runners can be useful in QA particularly because they have a mind for finding exploits and bugs, not necessarily because they can speed run. Speed running just shows that they are capable of pushing a game past its limits.
Last night I offhanded heard you reference Arcanum as a failure (one of your many commentaries on learning from failure). You've done a few targeted videos on systems related to Arcanum, but have you ever told the macro-scale version of the story? I haven't watched the Leonard Boyarsky video yet (maybe it's covered there?).
Would love to hear it sometime. I was in your beta tester community / in the forms for this one. Still very much respect the end product, though I remember feeling some elements didn't match my expectations (on the whole I liked it, and finished it).
I was wondering how designers viewed that as it skips a lot of the content. Great video as always this channel is so awesome.
New camera settings look great!
Thank you for those videos Tim. As A huge fan of Fallout, especially original games, these videos are very insightful both in and out of game context.
In the first Fallout there was an 'Ask about' feature, I imagine that the original idea behind it was an ability to have some sort of natural conversation with characters. Back then such features were extremely limited and therefore didn't work very well. Now with the rise of AI and especially LLMs we are starting to approach the point where we can finally have natural conversations with NPCs and even have some in-game consequences of those conversations. I wonder what you think about this new AI-powered technologies and would you use it in Fallout if it was available back in the 1990's?
That's so funny you mentioned the "Going Down. . .?" Achievement from WoW. I remember almost always getting it accidentally, and the same way: running off the Scryer elevator in Shattrath city by habit. Never even intended to get it.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on our humble hobby, Tim!
I love your view on this. High level speedrunning is fascinating to watch
Speaking of post game patches I’m reminded of a time I got very frustrated with Prey (2017). There was a game breaking bug where a necessary key card would drop though the geometry locking a door forever. Arkane was aware of the issue and had marked it fixed, however I still experienced it in my game. Bugs happen, no big deal- but what angered me was that someone had decided to lock the console so I couldn’t fix the bug myself! I just couldn’t fathom why they would do this? Surely allowing players basic tools to get around problems that *WILL* come up is the safer option? Guess I should let it go at this point x) , but I remain curious why.
I'm never one to do speed-runs myself, or watch them. But somewhere I'm just a fan of how one can short-cut something like the Fallout 1 main quest because it shows a certain flexibility in how the game is constructed and I feel it encourages creativity and "messing with the system". I really like that in RPGs, where the reins are not too tight on the player even if it might mean that things can be slightly screwed up.
The fact that you can finish Fallout in 8 minutes is great. You are basically like Tom Cruise from Edge of tomorrow.
Hiya Tim! Pardon me if this isn't the best place to ask this, but I had a question about reviewing your co-workers' work.
Originally, I just wanted to ask about reviewing code. I'm a software engineer as well, and we do peer-reviews very often. My question was initially "How does Tim Caine review code?", but thought that was too specific.
In your various positions, I imagine you've had to review a lot more than just code. How do you review art assets? How do you review dialogue? How do you review things that you haven't worked on or are outside of your skillset? Most importantly, how do you deliver the bad news that they might have to go back and re-work something?
Thanks for the videos, they're really insightful!
Careful considerations to prevent railroading of the storyline? It's something I enjoy in RPG games, being able to come up with interesting solutions to problems that either weren't expected or are clever usage of the mechanics presented to me.
Getting the water chip: a built-in Speedrun
I love Salami, especially Tommy Salami
And I'm speedrunning through your videos on youtube:)) Came here after Alper Caglar's stream and need to catch up with the new videos.
I once prevented speed-runners skipping right into the Chinese Temple endgame area in Bloodlines, because anybody could do this and mess up the main quest.
The thumbnail of this video is legendary
I remember speed running Fallout 1, took roughly 20mins, and this was on an old pc, with load time taking up a chunk of that. :P
High speach, and abusing entering in and out of combat.
Tim I hope you realised over the years that even if someone speedruns the game in 8 minutes they almost certainly played through it a ton normally first.
If you had a 1-use time machine that could only be used to "fix" the Fallout speed run "error" and put in a flag requiring the player to go get the Waterchip, would you do it?
That thumbnail is hilarious though! Just want to say your new camera is looking awesome! If you have EQ settings you could trim the treble just a bit.
I think the important thing to realize is that most people speedrun games they played and enjoy. The majority of speed runners aren’t just going in and speed running the second they fire the game up. So they usually aren’t missing or bypassing anything in the grand scheme
I see speedrunning as a sort of metagame that's great for a subset of players who love a game and find joy in figuring out its systems and pushing both those and themselves to the limit.
The only bad speedrunning-associated experience I've had was when a friend watched a speedrun of a nonlinear narrative game (skipping 99.9% of the content) and concluded that the game wasn't worth playing from that.
oh, one other thing on QA, speedrunners are often really good glitch hunters, irrespective of the act of running, so you may be missing on some overlap here :)
Camera looks great today! And a great topic :D thanks for your thoughts and shout-out to Mr. Salami for the great question. :]
If I ever make a game I know I would try to design the fastest route to finish the game to be as silly as possible knowing that a secret route will probably get a lot of coverage as soon as people find out it's the fastest haha
Fallout doesn't even check for the water chip 😆
as a speedrunner, this video is amazing to watch. thank you for not being one of the haters hahaha
Here’s a really great Fallout question! What the hell happened to the clay heads you and Leonard used for Fallout?!
The video looks better than last time! Less washed out. Let's hope that's not just in my head
Yeah it looks better now.
Hi tim, loving all these videos from you. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on storytelling in tabletop rpg campaigns and how it compares to your experience developing rpg games
Excellent video! Thank you!
Do you feel similarly unconcerned about save scumming or is that behavior something worth mitigating by design? In the latter case, what are some good ways to prevent or minimize save scumming?
Thanks again and have a great day 😊
Also curious! Save scumming is definitely on people's minds these days. Does it bother you when people fear failed skill checks to the point where they just refuse to continue until they pass that percentage?
@@Battury Good question! The concern I have (as a player; I am not a game designer:) with save scumming is when it becomes trivial to overcome obstacles that are removed via a single skill check/roll.
E.g. Baldur's Gate 3 allows you to quicksave in the middle of dialogue right before rolling the dice to see if the skill check passes.
This trivializes the check and if the successful outcome is always more preferable than the failed one then the game incentivizes you to try again as the cost of getting what you want is minimal.
So the question for me becomes: Is such a skill check even meaningful if one outcome is considered (say for the sake of argument by the majority of players) better than the other and you can simply roll for it multiple times? It's not a clear cut answer to me.
In table top RPGs they have tried to solve this by the failing forward paradigm which requires the game master to keep the game's momentum moving forward by allowing the player to get what they want (e.g. unlock the locked chest in front of them) but at a cost (e.g. by applying negative consequences)
That is a cool approach but it puts a lot of work on the developers who is now tasked with creating extra content for the failed scenarios. Not necessarily a bad thing but certainly costly.
I wonder what other cool strategies are there. E.g. you could have a mini game like elder scrolls 4 or later to make the failed checks worth retrying. Or do it New Vegas style and use 0/1 thresholds for succeeding.
I think the New Vegas system is much better than randomized skill checks in CRPGs for this reason, but it still could be considered not yet ideal in certain ways, e.g. there can't be situation where the player experiences uncertainty about whether they will pass a check or not.
I think/hope that eventually somebody will make a 'Souls-like CRPG' that is Ironman-only and continually saves in the background so that you can't retake skill checks, etc without impractical or obvious cheating, but on the other hand makes irrecoverable failure impossible. Planescape: Torment had a great conceit for this and was a lot of the way there, but still had a traditional manual save system that facilitated and typically encouraged scumming, as well as a few situations that could permanently kill you.
@@globalistgamer6418 Agree that New Vegas was a good solution. I also agree that removing manual saves would fix the problem but for some reason does not sit well with me (I guess it makes it difficult to check some short term consequences in a CRPG but maybe that is ok -- especially if the game is not too long).
Between the two I do prefer the new Vegas approach :)
Yeah, I think there is more to improving the kind of scenarios that get scummed than just strictly the save system.
Having a lot hinge on a single random skill check tends to be unsatisfying regardless of whether you can easily retry it or not. I think it would be preferable to see deeper diplomacy systems comparable to those used for combat where the number of rolls becomes more statistically stable, and there are also more tactical aspects like having to spend limited resources to be able to pass/recover from certain checks (a few games do these things to a degree but it seems like there is a lot of potential for further improvement).
Tim, what do you think about fanmade patches (Arcanum and Vampire are good examples)?
Next topic: save scumming😊
Speedrunners have often played every quest and encounter in a game 10s of times before they start speed running the game.
I remember watching a speedrun done live of Psychonauts in front of the dev team. The speedrunner was wondering out loud why they couldn't get over one specific wall with an exploit and then you hear one of the programmers from the back of room yell, "Yeah, because it goes to infinity!". The developer part of my brain thought, I wonder if they're using std::numeric_limits::infinity.
Speedrunner "TomatoAn(g)us" has made speedrunning the entire Fallout series a 'thing', and he seems to make it through the first Fallout in literally minutes. He did a live run through of all four Fallouts at a live GDQ a few years ago, in front of a large crowd, which I thought was quite memorable. ua-cam.com/video/6ekogf10P-c/v-deo.html
The enjoyment for me at least from speedrunning is less from the game more from the act of speedrunning pulling off those tricks and mechanical manipulatios perfectly.
man I was just watching that TOW speedrun commentary with you and Leonard last night, which is weird because the last time I watched that was years ago and it just popped up in my recommended recently.
Maybe the video got picked up in the algorithm again?
I don't know if you've been asked this question before but what is your opinion of the Bethesda Fallout games compared to the originals? Thanks for the great content!
His early videos touch on it, he's a big fallout 3 fan. 4 not so much
I'm wondering how somebody discovered that you are actually not required to deliver the water chip to Vault 13. I imagine some speedrunner thought "let's do other objectives first" and was very surprised when they saw the ending.
Hey, Tim, your thoughts on crafting systems? Like crafting weapons/armors/alchemy or maybe crafting unique spells.
I know you don't do reviews, but I would love to hear your professional opinion on Baldur's Gate III.
One thing people also need to take into account is speed runners already beat the game over and over the normal way.
haha, not entirely speed run, but stuff from the approach that every character should be able to complete the game that can be used: in Arcanum I got a copy with bug, when Nasrudin's dialogue is messed up (he spoke my lines, I had his lines in dialogue options, something like that) so just to see what happens ofc I killed him and got banished into the Void and... completed the game :D
Can you make a video about your experience with Sonantic voice ai or your thoughts on ai
From my experience the vast majority of speedrunners have played the game casually and extracted as much enjoyment as they can via engaging the intended gameplay formula.
What speedrunners are effectively saying is that the game is good to them that they’re willing to invest 100s if not 1000s of hours bashing their heads against a brick wall so they have another avenue to experience the game they’ve fallen in love with.
"We don't fix bugs based on speed running"
Yes, that's the mentality I love, and I wish 343 had this instead of fixing all the speedrunning bugs in Halo
Comparing speedrunning to achievement hunting is a perfect analogy - It's definitely not about enjoying the game anymore - you're making your own fun.
4:44 - Warcraft 3 death sound
Time to go speedrun Fallout
Video is looking great now, but softness is back, I think you got an excellent camera and you are now experiencing the lack of good light, need to get a ring light now, that would make everything look perfect.
Plugging HBomberguy's wonderful video "Speedrunning Is Awesome, And Here's Why", where he talks about their crazy creativity and also how wholesome the community is, since their craft is based on sharing information and tips. It also lead to his legendary 48h 101% slowrun of Donkey Kong 64 that raised a crazy amount of money for trans support charity.
It's like making a great car and then someone drift in that.
It wasn't designed to drive sideways - stop having fun in an unusual way! ;)
@00:35 Indded a very funny one to watch :D
I really hope you are just creating these out of a personal want to. You’ve been blazing through content & I simply worry you will burn out. An equally reliable & more infrequent upload schedule would be just as valid
Thanks. One day, I might drop back to a few times per week, but right now I am having fun and enjoying the energy and interaction with the commenters.
I think there are certain qualities in a particular speedrunner that could be good for testing, but it's more "I in particular enjoy getting into the nooks and crannies and testing the limits, I should look into QA and stress that" than "speedrunners in general make good testers in general."
The reason I think speedrunners would make quite good testers is that they're very practiced at deliberately breaking games and finding bugs/exploits, obviously not all of them will be a high priority to fix but having people go through your game trying to break it could definitely expose some high priority fixes.
You never checked for the water chip.....tears hair out lol
Camera looks great
Camera is doing great!
I think speedrunning only becomes an issue when new players assume thats the way the game should be played and look up the fastest or most effective strategies in advance.
Speedrunners usually beat the game for the Nth time befor they actually start speedrunning, because they still want to expirience and enjoy the game fist.
Also regarding hiring speedrunners for QA. Finding glitches that save time is mostly a community effort. Speedrunners usually are the ones that put in the time practicing the execution.
"So, I made this game over a period of 2 years and made sure it's fleshed out with over 100 hours of gameplay.." Speedrunner, 8 mins later: "Finished!" Dev: "What?!"
About hiring speedrunners. Often the people who find skips and plan the fastest route through the game are not the same people as the ones who actually "execute" the speedrun. Speedrunning is a community effort and usually the person holding the controller didn't discover most of the bugs they exploit during their speedrun. There are people in the community who are very meticulous when it comes to breaking a game, but doing something voluntarily as a hobby is different from doing it as a job.
P.S. - the color looks great!
Speedrunner might be good for QA, since they usually spend countless hours "breaking the game" and understanding the mechanics and how to use them - so that in mind one of those guys could "break your game" and let you know what is broken beyond casual player level...
Speed running often shows off the structural integrity of a game's rules as well as the nonlinearity of a game. Obviously speed runners don't START a new game speed running, speed runs are done after the game has been finished, usually many times.
Tldr: he doesn’t care
thanks, that was a good answer
TO be fair the people speedrunning most likely already experienced the game and now decided to "break it".
do you have a link to the video where you watch the speedrun?
Hello mister Cain.
Would you like to do a Fallout or Fallout 2 playthrough?
Maybe someone have asked you this question before.
Your color setting never bothered me Tim, and don't sweat it if you can't get the colors perfect.