Memorizing a long game!
4 years ago
North Carolina, USA

How many full playthroughs or speedruns of a long game(a game that takes the average runner 3 or more hours to complete) did it take you before you were able to memorize everything about the game without problems of forgetting where to go and what to do?

Antarctica

Most people don’t memorize long runs fully, they make notes as part of the learning process. Then they use those notes to serve as a reminder of where to go and what to do. After many, many runs you might be able to memorize parts of the run, but the longer the run, the less people are likely to memorize fully. They just might not have to reference their notes as frequently.

United States

Depends on factors. For example, I've memorized all the categories of one game I run, which has runs of 2 hours, 2.25 hours, and 3 hours. I can run any of those categories without notes. However, it's also a more linear run, so there's not as much routingwise to memorize. Another run I do is 3.66 hours and I only have the first 1.5 hours fully memorized. That said, the remaining 2.16 hours is almost fully memorized, it's just a handful of equips which I need the route for. Longer categories for this game (at over 7 hours or even over 8 hours) I consult notes a fair bit, and for more than just equips. I'd like to get to a point where I have the routes fully memorized, but it's much harder due to nonlinearity.

Israel

I didn't run any long run (30+ minutes) yet, but even for short runs I use notes occasionally. Sometimes the notes are on my splits names, sometimes they are external.

If I am not doing much practice before the first run, it may take me about 10-50 tries before I can remember everything (depends on the game of course).

Florida, USA

When I first started running Assassin's Creed Odyssey about a year ago, the WR was sitting around 5hrs. It was not only my first speedrun but it still is the longest I've ever done. Odyssey is a huge world and the difficult part was trying to remember specific land marks while running through forests and mountains that looked the same. I started taking notes per split and followed the WR holder at the time and watched their every movement. I would take the first half of the run and practice it countlessly. Doing that made it much easier to build a foundation of a run and it helped learn the speed of the game with combat, movement, mechanics, ect. I then learned the second half of the run and then ran that constantly. After only 10 attempts I was 2mins within the WR. Good news is Odyssey is a 2 and 1/2hr run now!

I think the problem with some speedrunners and long runs is they tend to take it as a whole, let it sit on their brain too long and things get way too complicated. If you take specific parts of the run (especially ones with difficult glitches or tricks) and learn those as if you can do them in your sleep, then the rest will come easy.