NWN OC any% single-segment speedrun in 37:22 (WR)

[Legacy_mejcell]

               

Hey! I'm mejcel and I speedrun both Neverwinter Nights and Hordes of the Underdark and currently hold the any% single-segment world record for both. (For those that are unfamiliar with speedrunning terminology, any% basically means beating the game as fast as possible using any means possible, while single-segment obviously means I do everything in one sitting, the clock running all the time.)

 

Thought some of you might be interested in these. Both of the runs utilise the same kind of build, 3 levels of Wizard for Familiar (which is used to clip some walls) and Invisibility (to sneak through enemies, obviously) plus Expeditious Retreat where Haste isn't possible. Then we have the rest of the levels at Monk for the Monk Speed stack with Haste.

 

Both the runs utilise a trick called "quickresting", pressing rest, quicksaving the game and loading it to save time. Some other tricks the original campaign run uses is the "XP Demon", Chaohinon of the Void in Helm's Hold practically giving infinite experience points, and duping the plot items with the Divining Pool. HotU has it's own trick with buying/selling items with enough Appraise in order to raise money to buy necessary items etc.

 

Feel free to ask me questions about the run, speedrunning in general, or how to speedrun this game, or anything, really! Maybe you'll even get interested in running the games yourself!

 

 

P.S. I also posted this same message on the HotU forums with the HotU any% world record, respectively. Here's a link:

 

http://forum.bioware...un-in-10229-wr/

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WhiZard]

               

Given you are already using exploits (such as collisions to get on the other side of a door), why not just use DebugMode and get the campaign done in just a few minutes?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_mejcell]

               

That's called cheating, speedrunning isn't about that.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MrZork]

               

LOL. I guess if you take all (or almost all) of the combat out of the game and zip through the dialogs, you have shown that the campaigns need not take much time at all. Your biggest obstacle seemed to be getting past unkilled mobs who were blocking your path, unknowingly, since you were often invisible.

 

I tend to agree with WhiZard's sentiment that, at the point the player is deliberately taking advantage of game quirks that were never intended to allow a player the advantage that they do, then it's a small step to open the console and just go the whole way. Certainly, the start-rest-then-reload-technique was not intended to allow near-instant resting. And, as you saw, it can have side-effects such as lingering rest-blindness. It wouldn't be much of an advantage overall, except that the PC has to rest fairly often to keep his Expeditious Retreats going (he is expedited most of the time) and to use Invisibility so liberally. The trick of possessing familiars to slip past locked doors is another clever exploit.

 

(I know that a typical reply about the criticism of exploit use is that "Bioware left them in the game, they are part of how the game works, and any player can use them". No argument about that. But, the same can be said of the console.)

 

But, I can see how it might be entertaining to approach the game from a different angle. Minimizing the time to complete each module (and these are modules you obviously know by heart) instead of fighting most of the enemies and completing other quests is a legitimate way for a player to challenge himself.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_mejcell]

               

Yeah, well, the run is a lot more than just "glitching it out", requiring several hundred attempts (597 right now for me), striving for perfect execution and years of planning/knowledge (running this game was started in 2006 and only now is it in this state), so I think it's a really, really poor argument, as anyone indeed can use the console and cheat his way out however he wants anytime he wants requiring no effort at all.

 

The objective of speedrunning indeed is to do everything as fast as possible and sometimes there are exploits one can use, however for example in case of the familiar clipping, most of them are really precise tricks with little time and no room for error. When you start to exclude such glitches you hit a brick wall, since you don't know what the "developers intended" and what they didn't (monk speed stack with haste anyone? bunnyhopping in quake games?), so it's better for everyone to just use whatever tools everyone has available to their disposal.

 

Anyway, enjoy if you will, I know it isn't everyone's cup of tea. Cheers!

 

P.S. New record today! Updated post!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MrZork]

               

No one has said that playing the campaign the way you have is "just glitching it out", so there isn't much point in tearing down that strawman. I did watch the video, BTW, and think that it takes a lot of practice and talent to play that way. I didn't mean to diminish what you had done. I have a pretty solid knowledge of NWN and have played the OC several times. I saw you do things I didn't know could be done and that I certainly couldn't do without a lot of skill-building, and maybe never as quickly as you did them.

 

Of course, the run did use exploits to get the job done. I will agree that it is often difficult to determine the developers' intent. However, let's not pretend we think they intended that you could slip through plot doors, duplicate plot items, or gain several hundred thousand XP by repeating quest completion in pause mode. That does not mean that doing those things was easy, just that they are exploits. Plenty of exploits require skill and cleverness to make work. If that's the way speedrunning is done, then I have no issue with it. But, you have to expect that people in a forum where most don't do speed runs will tend to think of those techniques in the context that they are more familiar with.

 

By the same token, using the console to go through a whole campaign wouldn't exactly be a skill-free endeavor, either. Without practice (and without using some of the exploits you used), I doubt that most players could start in the Prelude and get through the whole OC using the console in under 40 minutes. Certainly, they aren't likely to be able to do it without going outside the game to generate a list of spawnable plot items and area tags, at least.

 

(BTW, as a side note, I think it's entirely possible that BW did intend monk speed to stack with other speed increase effects. I don't know that they intended it to stack quite as well as it does... But, it's certainly reasonable to think that they knew that it was happening well before the 1.69 patch and never got rid of it.)

 

Anyway, I enjoyed the video and I am glad you posted it. Even if I never speed run, I learned a thing or two.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WhiZard]

               

(BTW, as a side note, I think it's entirely possible that BW did intend monk speed to stack with other speed increase effects. I don't know that they intended it to stack quite as well as it does... But, it's certainly reasonable to think that they knew that it was happening well before the 1.69 patch and never got rid of it.)

 

I can speak to this.  When a speed effect is removed the game calculates the speed as the product of all speed effects plus the monk bonus.  When a speed effect is added the game calculates it recursively as: new speed= old speed * effect + monk speed.  If the recursive formula were to match the removal formula it would be: new speed = (old speed - monk speed) * effect + monk speed.  Thus BioWare never fixed the recursive calculation and allowed monk speed to be factored in more than it should be whenever an effect is added.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_mejcell]

               

Fair enough! I completely understand your point, and you're right, the run uses many, many exploits. However I do disagree even with this amount of glitches it being close to using the console cheats (to WhiZard's question). You could just teleport around really fast with keypad plus sign and insta-kill with Y, therefore not really needing any strategies whatsoever '>

 

Interestingly enough, the monk speed stack wasn't in the original version, so it got patched in at some point (wrongly or not?). However I can't find any mention of it in for example http://nwn.wikia.com/wiki/Patch this source.

 

And yeah, with the time this low the biggest obstacle seems to be the randomness of the game, some fights taking longer or mobs blocking your way or getting blinded or even killed for example in Prelude etc... There's a particularly difficult clip with the Dragons in the end though that is really hard to pull off as you have very limited time and a small gap in the door you can clip with a familiar through. Getting it perfectly would save that last ~30s to give this run a rest.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WhiZard]

               

 

Interestingly enough, the monk speed stack wasn't in the original version, so it got patched in at some point (wrongly or not?). However I can't find any mention of it in for example http://nwn.wikia.com/wiki/Patch this source.

 

 

I am betting that monk speed originally acted like barbarian fast movement.  That is, it always stacked but was not able to make the total movement speed exceed the +50% cap.  As it is now, the monk speed feat (and only this feat) increases the cap to +200% + monk speed bonus, which allows the stacking to go well beyond the haste speed.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Naeryna]

               

Ironically and surprisingly, this video made me think NWN is better game than I though (and I had really good opinion on nwn), but it has also make me feel stupid because I didn't try some of those exploit.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Gruftlord]

               I can respect speedrunning as a form of e-Sport, so i won't try to belittle it, or suggest the use of the console in its spite. I suppose speedrunning is a bit more popular on consoles, where (ironically) console commands are a non-issue. And any console commands would be seen akin to doping in the scene.


Personally i share little interest in speedruns myself, but i did find some of the nintendo jump-and-run videos about it amusing (mostly the layered tool assisted ones)


These forums are usually crowded with people with interests in role-playing, custom content creation, character builds and story telling. I think you are the first speedrunner i've seen to post here.


So my question is: How big is the nwn speedrun scene?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Naeryna]

               

I know you uploaded only nwn speedruns videos, but are you interested in bg2 video or bg1 speedrun video? I'm also planning to play IWD1&2, and I hope to see these too!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_mejcell]

               

I can respect speedrunning as a form of e-Sport, so i won't try to belittle it, or suggest the use of the console in its spite. I suppose speedrunning is a bit more popular on consoles, where (ironically) console commands are a non-issue. And any console commands would be seen akin to doping in the scene.


Personally i share little interest in speedruns myself, but i did find some of the nintendo jump-and-run videos about it amusing (mostly the layered tool assisted ones)


These forums are usually crowded with people with interests in role-playing, custom content creation, character builds and story telling. I think you are the first speedrunner i've seen to post here.


So my question is: How big is the nwn speedrun scene?

 

Yeah, I've played NWN and Bioware games/RPGs in general a lot when I was a kid, also some of the cool multiplayer worlds such as Path of Ascension, roleplaying, doing things the usual way, etc. Baldur's Gate II around 20 times through now. Console games are more popular because everyone has the same hardware, which isn't true for PC, so usually you want some kind of a program to subtract the loading times from the timing.

 

Only started speedrunning this fall, I've been following some of the scene already, mostly watching runs of games I've played as a child before. I'm interested in how you're given a limited set of tools and you need to make the most out of it, sometimes thinking really out of the box. I think speedrunning a game is like an advanced memory/puzzle game where you often need to think fast and need to be able to react to anything that could happen (and when you play a game several hundred times over some REALLY weird things happen from time to time).

 

Right now there's only three runners, ais523 (only unpatched version), TheVelcronomicon and me. As I said I started only this fall after seeing a tutorial made by TheVelcronomicon, which had a very finalised route already, which I tweaked a little bit. It has had like 20 people working on it since 2006 (the original goal was a segmented run that was like 1-2 hours without any of the significant glitches found later). I'm the only Hordes of the Underdark runner, did the routing in like three weeks, was really fun.

 

I know you uploaded only nwn speedruns videos, but are you interested in bg2 video or bg1 speedrun video? I'm also planning to play IWD1&2, and I hope to see these too!

 

http://speeddemosarc...t/FullList.html Here are some already finished runs that include Baldur's Gate and IWD1. Infinity Engine is totally different from Aurora Engine, so I don't really have any skills to make one! Those runs are already pretty awesome as well. I think I'm going to speedrun more in the future but I don't know what. I've tried a little SoU, but unfortunately it seems to play pretty badly as a "speedgame" because the whole campaign is so low-level, so you'd just be watching me cast Expeditious Retreat a billion times, walking slowly into places, which is totally fine for example in a Let's Play but not so much fun in a speedrun.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Grani]

               

Is the game really so full of exploits ready to be... well, exploited?

I mean, can the same tricks be used on PWs, for example the one to phase through locked doors with the help of one's familiar?

 

I really hope that's not the case, yet I can't find arguments.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MrZork]

               

Is the game really so full of exploits ready to be... well, exploited?

I mean, can the same tricks be used on PWs, for example the one to phase through locked doors with the help of one's familiar?

 

I really hope that's not the case, yet I can't find arguments.

The short answer is, yes. Not that it's necessarily easy to do during combat, but it's easy to get that particular exploit to work. Of course, it would also be pretty easy to get stuck someplace where resting isn't allowed and there is no way to get out without DM help...

 

I doubt that the speed-rest via reloading trick has a similar PW analog. Same for pause-mode exploits. But, most of the other exploits are the result of incautious scripting (e.g. the divining pool exploit, scripts that check that the PC has N quest objects but not N different quest objects, scripts that don't set a variable indicating an XP-granting convo has already run, etc.) and could be easily fixed.