ESA 2016 will be open from Saturday the 23rd of July at 8am until Monday the 1st of August at noon. Click here to visit the master thread!

This post was written by flicky

The Game submission and scheduling team are flicky, bangerra, Fatzke (new!). We will also reach out to individuals and game communities regarding runs, rules and so on to help us make our decisions as we have done in previous years. Currently we want to talk to the communities for Resident Evil, Sonic the Hedgehog (2d), Harry Potter, Kingdom Hearts, GTA and 2d Disney.

First Cuts
Hopefully we've done a decent job of cuts. We legitimately think that this is the best list of games we've had yet for ESA. As usual, we made these cuts based on the games only and not the runner or run quality.

We now have to make the decision on whether a second stream is required to house these things and so we'll be discussing that over the next few days and will announce our decision on the 27th of March.

Second round of cuts...
From this point on, we'll be looking at runners, runner skill and all of that stuff, so now you have to get to work! We will be giving you until the 1st of May 2016 to optimise your runs! Please update your speedrun.com leader-boards and pages with things as we'll be checking those for times and videos. You can also ask questions in this thread and post here, if you so wish.

If you want to change your estimates, please post only once in this thread before the deadline. We don't need to know every time you want to adjust the estimate, just once!

Feel free to discuss any of the cuts here. If you're like to contact any of us privately to talk about cuts, please check our contact info in the master thread linked at the post of this post! We can give any reasoning on request. We will be giving detailed reasons for the second round of cuts.

Expected date for final schedule: 29th of May 2016

The link to the cuts takes you to the tab of games that didn't make it. May want to fix that as it's a little confusing.

RIP memesis% never forget

@Dutchj Really? Are you sure those are the games that didn't make it? How do I see that?

This is my first year of ESA, and first year I submitted a game (obviously), so I'm curious about a few things..

..and not sure about a few things so sorry if I appear as a total idiot.. xD

Oh god all my games got in 😱 I wasn't expecting all of them to get in, damn, because now I still don't really know what to put aside... Guess I'll focus on my weaker games then 😛

@DanJTKT The games in red are those that didn't make it look at the botom to switch to the "SURVIVORS"

Quick question, is the document a list of games that got cut, or a list of games that got through the cuts? It's not very clear...

Little sad that Glory of Heracles got cut out, but whatever.
Gotta focus on XCX now I guess.

The googledoc has two tabs:

The red games are the ones that got cut (are not going to be in the marathon) and the green games are the ones that will be further decided on during the next cuts in May.

Not very many cuts at all, 2nd round will be fun if you decide to do only 1 stream

I guess I'll have to work on my games a lot now if I want to at least save one of them.

I'll be waiting for news, until then, I'll try to do some runs of my games.

Can we get a reason why Tales of Zestiria didn't make it past the first round of cuts? A lot of the Tales of runners are interested why.

i got a new pb in portal (20:47) and i'd like to put my estimate down to 21 😛 (if its possible)

Whooohooo~ all my games made round one! \o/ Ooze alone makes this line-up one of the strongest ESA game lists yet x3

When is the scheduling crew going to decide whether there will be a second stream? Will it also happen around the second round of cuts in May?

Edit: Thanks, Sphere, I feel silly now O:-)

"We now have to make the decision on whether a second stream is required to house these things and so we'll be discussing that over the next few days and will announce our decision on the 27th of March."

Just a quick question:
Will it affect our chances of getting into the marathon if we only stream in another lanuage than english?
I included an english showcase video in my submission but I would like to know if it would be better to stream in english for the next time.

@MLSTRM - it's the same unfortunate problem of JRPG length for runs. There are a lot of good series we'd like to represent and so to include more, we try to go for the shorter options.

@SirRouven - Fatzke and I both speak German, so we can still understand you. We'll probably need to hear that you can at least speak English while playing at some point, so as long as we know that, no problem.

im liking the GX representation