The Gold Split - Week #15: Signs of Wrong Warps
Week #15 (October 10th): Echoes of Wisdom; Disaster Relief; Tetris Rebirth; Blindfolded Super Mario 64; Marathon News; New World Records: Portal 2, Super Mario Bros. 2, Pac-Man, Astro Bot
Happy Week #15!
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This week’s main story will be about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. I did my best to avoid spoilers and it only contains one big fat warning, but if you’re still working on playing through the game, you might want to consider bookmarking this edition, marking it unread or adding it to your reading list and coming back to it later.
Contents
Up to Speed ⚡️
I’d like to cover much more, but many great stories stay confined to the communities for a specific game or series and rarely get out. I encourage you to think about what happened recently in the communities you are a part of. If there are any stories, articles, glitches, events, or other topics I should cover, go ahead and submit them here or in the Gold Split Discord! 📨
Story of the Week
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has only been out for two weeks, but it already looks too good to ignore. Let’s take a look at what the speedruns for this game might shape up to be. One major spoiler will be indicated as such, and I did my best to avoid them wherever possible.
Basic Game Mechanics
In Echoes of Wisdom, you’re playing as Zelda, finally. But instead of using a sword, shield, bombs and other weapons, Zelda wields the Tri Rod. This rod allows you to pick up “Echoes” of items or enemies and conjure them again. You may summon a bed to rest and heal, fight your enemies with an army of Keese, use floating platforms to fly high in the air or warp to wherever you please by using signs... but we’ll get to that.
Often, the first instinct will have players stack as many objects as possible in order to try to get on top of things which present insurmountable boundaries in other top-down Zelda games, like treetops or rocky cliffs. And instead of using invisible walls to prevent you, the game will simply let you do that, which is genius. It creates the illusion of outsmarting the game, when in reality, you’re still playing within its rules. You’re granted plenty of freedom, but no sequence breaks… or are you?
Tech & Glitches
Speedrunners are infamously persistent and regularly find optimisations and new strategies for games that are decades old. For Echoes of Wisdom, it really only took a few days to blow the game wide open. Players very quickly found ways to gain more vertical height than intended and discovered ways to speed up their movement through the world. For example, holding a piece of meat, conjuring a bird and locking the bird with your companion will have the bird push you sideways and slightly upwards through the air, as in some impossible carrot-and-donkey situation.
Better techniques also soon emerged. For example, placing a bed, getting onto it and summoning a specific enemy echo on the opposite side will catapult both Zelda and the bed at high speed. You can trigger this again in mid-air, chaining multiple boosts together and travelling very quickly.
But the major one I want to focus on today, the splitter of categories, is of course: the W̵̢̋r̴̮̩͝o̵̳̓̽n̶͙̯̓͝g̷̞̒͠ ̴͉̟̾̓W̷̺͝ḁ̷̩͌͠r̸̻̍̔p̵͎̜̏̐. Wrong warping in general describes teleporting to a different point than normally possible. And often, the system that allows wrong warps in the first place can be tinkered with to get a desired result. And that’s exactly the case in Echoes of Wisdom.
All this is enabled through a glitch called Pause Storage. It enables playing the game while the pause menu, map menu or inventory menu is opened. The terms Map Storage or Inventory Storage are used as well, but I’m going to stick to Pause Storage as I believe it includes all variations.
Players can enter this glitched state by interacting with a signboard near a void-out area and quickly opening the Echo menu during the void-out. Void-out triggers are placed around areas or at heights that the developers considered too far away from where the player should be. The screen will go black briefly and place them a short distance away from the forbidden area.
Once the glitch is active, selecting a waypoint but not confirming the warp, opening a second map instance, and then confirming, the game will send Zelda to a different waypoint than the one originally selected, potentially even one that was previously undiscovered. Then, using an additional manipulation and entering a dungeon (which also has waypoints) in the glitched state before teleporting, players can teleport to a waypoint inside a dungeon with the same index as the waypoint they initially chose on the world map. In the current Any% route, this allows a Wrong Warp straight into the final dungeon of the game. Here’s a great video by loohhoo explaining it, and this is where I’ll need to put the big fat
SPOILER WARNING
Leaderboards & Durations
The leaderboards will open TODAY. There are still a few open questions about category names, which ones will be present and some rules, but most of them are set and this is what we can expect:
Any%: No-holds-barred and wrong warping to your heart’s content. As of now, runs are already clocking in at under 40 minutes.
Any% (No Wrong Warp): The name might change, but the category won’t allow wrong warping, and might even be mostly glitchless, focusing on playing the game as intended. With the rules still up in the air, it’s hard to estimate a solid time for this category just yet, but around four hours might be a good guess.
All Dungeons: Completing all dungeons. This category might be split into a restricted and an unrestricted variant, but it’s still to be decided what completing a dungeon actually means. Unrestricted runs will probably soon be faster than two hours.
100%: Do and collect all the things! It’ll be a long one.
A category that will end at a rough half-way point of the game
One more thing that needs to be decided is whether or not the use of amiibos will be allowed. Amiibos can grant smoothie ingredients as well as outfits. It’s likely that the leaderboards are open by the time you read this and you’ll find the final categories as well as the rules right there.
Conclusion
With how fast speedruns are changing in the early days of a game’s lifecycle, everything I have written might already be outdated tomorrow. I still think it was worth exploring, learning about it, and giving an early overview of the situation. I expect Pause Storage and wrong warping to still be relevant in the future, so this also makes it easier to come back to it at a later point.
If you’re looking for people attempting speedruns of Echoes of Wisdom RIGHT NOW, look no further than HERE on the game’s speedrun.com page.
Up to Speed
🧩 Tetris player beats the final level and achieves Rebirth (5 minute read)
The original version of Tetris crashes around level 157, but by using a modified version, pro player dogplayingtetris was able to get past level 255, making the game wrap around to level 1. A video of the achievement is available in the article.
🔗 European speedrunning events announce joint event (Tweet Thread)
The Marathon Alliance consists of seven events, each showcasing their individual strengths during a four-day online event from November 7th to 11th. Further links to the events’ pages as well as the submission page and Twitch channel are available in the thread.
📣 Games Done Quick announces Disaster Relief Done Quick (Tweet)
The 3-day speedrun event starts on October 11th and raises money for Direct Relief, supporting people impacted by hurricanes Helene & Milton. A schedule is available here.
🙈 Bubzia breaks the 20-minute barrier in blindfolded Super Mario 64 (16 Star) (29 minute video)
After 118 days of trying, Bubzia broke through one of the last current barriers for the category and achieved a time of 19:43. This time is only five minutes slower than the non-blindfolded world record.
💔 Splits.io will be shutting down at the end of the year (3 minute read)
Beyond December 31st 2024, the speedrunning statistics and analytics platform will only store and export previously submitted split data. Splits.io will remain open source and users are hoping that other websites in the space can include the same features in the future.
Marathon News
🏁 Finished:
Games Done Hitless raised $16,166 for the American Heart Association
Unity Speedruns raised $1,600 for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund
Pixels for People 2024 raised $3,020 for Child’s Play
🔜 Upcoming:
Starts October 11th: Disaster Relief Done Quick (Schedule), raising money for Direct Relief, helping victims impacted by hurricanes Helene & Milton
Starts October 11th: USC - Ultimate Speedrun Championship (Schedule), raising money for AbleGamers
Starts October 12th: UKSG Blue 2024 (Schedule), raising money for Crisis
On October 12th: Time Tick 2024, raising money for Safe In Our World
Starts October 16th: Running Through Wonderland (Schedule)
This Week’s Top Times
🥇 First Place:
Portal 2 (Single Player: No SLA) in 00:55:44.250 by Burger40
Video • Twitch • YouTubeRed Ball 4 Vol.1 (Any%) in 00:01:47.167 by Starline (She/Her)
Video • YouTubeSuper Mario Bros. 2 (Any%) in 00:08:11.557 by EthanRTA
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSuper Mario Odyssey (Any%: 2P) in 00:55:50.000 by Jambo
Video • Twitch • YouTubeThe Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Glitchless: All Main Quests) in 03:35:21.000 by Smaugy
Video • Twitch • YouTubePac-Man (10,000 Points: NES) in 00:00:38.116 by RyuHayabusa89 (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeDevil May Cry (Any%: Normal, Dante) in 00:33:51.000 by Waifu
Video • Twitch • YouTubeFinal Fantasy XIII (Any%: PC) in 04:24:55.000 by Z3R01337
Video • Twitch • YouTubeAstro Bot (Any%) in 02:12:28.000 by MoxyK_ (She/Her)
Video • Twitch • YouTube
🥈 Second Place:
Super Mario 64 (120 Star: N64) in 01:36:25.000 by Karin
Video • TwitchEarthBound (Any% Glitchless: EarthBound, No RNG Manipulation) in 03:49:32.000 by Czikubi (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeThe World's Hardest Game (Any%: Flash) in 00:05:09.899 by BetaTR (He/Him)
Video • YouTubeSecret of Evermore (Any%) in 00:55:54.000 by Cliqz (It/Its)
Video • Twitch • YouTube
🥉 Third Place:
Spyro the Dragon (Any%) in 00:37:19.000 by laura
Video • Twitch • YouTubeOuter Wilds (Any%: PC, Normal) in 00:07:34.040 by Maitre_Phoque (He/Him)
VideoStar Wars: Battlefront II (RotE Any%: Bonus) in 00:45:08.849 by Starfy_99 (She/Her)
VideoDark Messiah of Might and Magic (Any%: Inbounds) in 00:15:04.000 by Radwoo
Video
Fun Stat of the Week
📊 This is a rather arbitrary one and I should’ve saved this for March 14th, but it was fun to figure out: within my speedrun.com dataset of runs from May 2024 the time that matches closest with the number π is 00:31:41.583, achieved by Sabera in a speedrun of Axiom Verge (Any% Normal). It matches with the first five digits (3.1415) of π!
Reddit Choice
🔝 The r/speedrun choice of the week is… this spot-on visualisation of what it looks like to be too slow to break the record and creating a new category instead.
👋🏻 And that’s it for this week! See you next Thursday, October 17th 2024. 👋🏻
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