I had a suggestion about your Tommy's Dam skip, TheThrillness.

Is the issue that you are too high to hit a checkpoint? If you dive under water before Joel t-poses can you get low enough to get one? Or will he still drown.

I tried recreating it on PS4 but failed, not sure if that's me being useless or it being a PS3 only thing.

I think the camera influencing despawns would explain the resort despawn, hope I can get some time to try that out. It should be easy to test as the enemies start talking when they spawn. There are a few nooks around the horse which you could potentially push the camera through.

I'm presuming that due to the way photo mode works you can't force the matter using that?

I don't see that the current glitchless run can get much more optimised so this is the natural progression from that anyway. I'm interested in seeing how quickly / easily these things can make the game, and it doesn't invalidate anything achieved so far.

I failed at trying to recreate the resort despawn today, but at least I do now have a save from the start of that area to play with. I don't think it was PS3 I did it on but it was ages ago and maybe.. All I managed to do was find an area you can stand on air woo. http://imgur.com/Cz7IwlR Anyway if I find out how to reliably recreate that despawn I'll post here again, otherwise will lurk as don't want to clog this thread up.

Hey TheThrillness.

Nah that's not insulting at all. There's a reason I made my video Jan this year and never really shared it, which was that I didn't really feel like I'd done anything someone hadn't done before, I just never found anything when searching. I found it probably mid-2014, so well after the guy you mentioned. It just happened to me when I think I forgot a firefly pendant so went back and got it and when I came back they were gone. I suspect that's what a lot of people did. Credit where credit's due for sure.

I'm glad this game is finally starting to be pulled apart this way, good work guys!

If incognitowatts found the tunnel despawn then all credit to him. I found people talking about it in forums after I worked it out but never one which said how to do it, but it was certainly a common enough event that I'm sure someone knew about it long before me. I've not felt comfortable claiming it as my skip for that reason, but I certainly didn't find any video saying how to do it, and showing the glitch, before I made one earlier this year.

I want to get some time to work on recreating the same thing at the resort after the horse is shot. You can despawn the enemies there too but I can't get it consistent. From reading that TheThrillness said about how the camera comes into play with hitting checkpoints then that could be it. It's something like horse get shot > enter cabin through left window > go into front room but immediately back out (maybe keeping camera facing forwards) > leave cabin through other bedroom window > run back up to horse > enemies gone.