The pre-order content will have advantage over non-pre-order:
- Unique costomes (from what I understand, costumes in the game have their own stats and skills).
- Early access to some gadgets.
- Skill points to unlock new things early on.
Which makes me wonder how will you handle the situation. Will it be seperated from standrad copies or will the bonus content be straight up banned?
It's hard to say what the best way to handle this sort of thing is. I think it'll really just depend on exactly how much of a difference that stuff makes. Personally I'd probably lean towards splitting bonus stuff into other categories rather than outright banning them, but it's hard to say what the best way to go about it is until the game is actually out and we have a better idea of how the game works and what exactly this stuff makes a difference for.
Another thing to consider is, will any of this be available as purchasable DLC down the line? I imagine the costumes would be, so separating those would make a lot more sense than banning them, whereas I'd think the premium skill points probably won't be, so banning those would make sense to me.
Just completely remove pre-order content from here on out. It makes no sense to have it. Imagine someone wanting to run the game a year from now, they cant have access to it. Many other games, such as Dying Light, immediately banned it for this reason. It's fine to keep the runs that are on the board now because they are really slow, but we shouldn't encourage using them at all, or DLC stuff(but maybe make DLC stuff a variable down the road).
The problem with deleting the preorder content from what I've heard is that it's hard and in some cases impossible, especially if the game was pre-ordered digitally. Second, do we really want to just outright punish speedrunners for pre-ordering extra goodies? I don't think nothing should be done, but making them delete something that's already difficult to get rid of and that they likely wanted in the first place (for whatever reason) seems like too much for me.
I personally second the idea of splitting pre-order and non-preorder into subcategories.
You cant delete the pre-order stuff. It's just an early gadget, 5 skill points early on, and 3 suits. They really don't change much at all about the runs. You can't delete it either. In the end I don't see the content subtracting any time from anybody's runs. Like I said, it's impossible to delete anyway, so what do you do? Make it so if you pre-ordered the game, you are not allowed to speedrun it? I am currently doing a 100%, No fast travel, Spectacular difficulty run, and I can honestly say, you earn the preorder stuff super early anyway. Having a spider-bot early isn't speeding me up at all. Just my thoughts.
I don’t mean to argue, but it does make a difference, that’s just fact. I understand your perspective from your casual playthrough, but this is about the speedrun. Having any extra skill point or gadget to begin with does save time, it just does. Being able to put skill points into movement upgrades immediately is faster than having to earn the points.
There’s no plan for punishment or bad intent towards those with pre-order versions, but we can’t be focused on what happens to the speedrun in the first month of release. People who did not preorder cannot have these bonuses, and a variable isn’t good enough. A variable still has them competing with others who are running the vanilla game.
This discussion should have had a very obvious decision immediately. Allowing some people to compete with advantages that others can never use is very, very wrong.
As someone with the preorder bonuses, I agree they should be outright banned. You can still allow people with the preorder bonuses to play the game, just not to use the bonuses (except cosmetic suit w/o the powers, because why not). So in other words, people running with the deluxe version would have to:
- Always have a minimum of 5 skill points (ensuring they haven't used the 5 they get for free).
- Not use the Spider Drone without first getting all the requirements to unlock it (reach Fisk Hideout mission, Level 8, 1 Base Token, 3 Research Tokens). There's obviously the minor timesave they'd get for not actually crafting the thing, but I think at that point an exception can be made since we're talking about a static 1 or so seconds.
- Not use the Rock Out, Iron Arms, and Blitz suit powers (without first getting all the requirements to unlock). Since equipping the suit w/o the power is just a cosmetic change, I think it'd be fine to allow that.
100% runs are where it gets a little bit trickier since you wouldn't have to spend the materials on the suit powers/gadget, but restricting them to their level requirements would at least be a good minimum bar if trying to keep track of "I have 1 Base Token and 3 Research Tokens less than my count" becomes hard to maintain. But for Any% -- which is the main factor right now -- outright ban that shit.
Since outright disabling or deleting the pre-order bonuses appears to be impossible in some cases, it makes sense to allow the pre-order versions of the game to still be run, but using any of the bonus content should definitely not be allowed. The current world record has the content but did not use it, and I think that should be the official ruling from here on out.
Splitting the categories would be an option but long-term I don't think that really makes sense. Over time pre-order versions of the game are going to become less and less common, so eventually the pre-order categories are just going to die off, since all the competition is going to be in the version of the game that 99.9% of the player-base can actually play.
Banning the use of the pre-order content unfortunately does make things a bit more complicated for players who pre-ordered the game, but over time those players are going to be more and more of a minority in the community. Keeping all the competition in the same place is a better option than splitting them up for what will eventually become an incredibly small part of the community that has virtually no growth potential.
In the future Insomniac may release DLC that has the same effect as the pre-order bonus (no idea if this is actually planned or anything, just spit-balling), in which case the use of pre-order bonus stuff could be allowed. But until if/when that happens, outright banning it is really just the best option.
The general consensus seems to be to just ban the use of any pre order content, so from here on out if any pre order items are used during your run it will be considered invalid and will be rejected.
You can delete the pre order bonuses, but you have to delete the game and the bonuses and then reinstall it. The saves can stay there iirc but I'd really like an option to disable them
If we're going to outright ban the use of preorder content, then we need to lay out ground rules as to how to actually run without that content.
My suggestions are:
- Maintain and show at LEAST 5 skill points by the end of the game (i recommend just screencapping after credits)
- No use of the Spidey-Drone/Suit Powers exclusive to pre-order suits (Iron Arms, Blitz, and Rock Out)
All that sounds like a pain, but it's the only solutions I can come up with. As far as I can tell, you can't delete preorder content, because, as far as I can see, there's no distinction anywhere on PS4 to only delete the DLC content.
CTNS has been added to the boards (DLCs back to back), and I'm currently looking for a good way to add in DLC 100%. The only way that's feasible is to add a subcategory on each DLC which is messy since it only allows me to put it on a single category or all of them.
