I know, this again. (Sorry?) This is probably gonna come across as angry and whiny, because everyone thinks that of me (I must have the text equivalent of RBF). Sorry for that too. Anyway.

A couple weeks ago I put in a request for Days Gone, a major AAA game releasing this Friday. I didn't know until shortly before I did that that you even could submit game requests for non-series games prior to release. It was rejected, and while I don't have the rejection rationale in front of me right now, it was something about we need to see gameplay of this one before we can approve it. I thought little of it, and filed the idea away for post-release (for the record, I'm quite happy to do runs prior to the games getting listed here and would have it be that way for all games if it were up to me, which it of course is not).

Last week a game called Katana ZERO came out. I learned the game as best I could before submitting a game request (about 4 days hence) only to find out to my surprise there had been a board for the game since before its release. (Maybe I misspelled it when checking the last few days, I dunno) I won't deny a smidge of disappointment at not getting to help run the board for a game I correctly predicted would be quite active (someday I'll mod a game people actually run!) but I've left my suggestions for what I would have implemented that they haven't yet (5 mods already!) and will still run the game happily. Kinda feel like a fool though, for playing by one set of rules when they were playing by another.

But it brings me back to Days Gone. Now I'm relieved to see a pre-release board wasn't given to someone else, but I kinda have to wonder why a multi million dollar AAA game is apparently not certain to have enough gameplay in it for a board but a much simpler indie game was. Is there some basis for making the distinction? I've heard anecdotally from others that getting a board pre-release is "no big deal" and even games that wound up being minimally popular got them (the specific example I remember being mentioned is Death's Gambit).

In the end, it's not really Days Gone that I'm buggin' about (you can expect my first run of it before the weekend is out, and maybe even sooner), nor Katana ZERO. There's another game, you'll understand perhaps if I don't wish to say which it is, that I'm also incredibly excited about and really really interested in helping run the board. It's still a TBA release date (not even a year has been announced) so it's folly for me or anyone to submit it now, but it'll low-key break my heart a little if the same thing happens, if someone gets the board before I even have a chance. How soon pre-release can you submit such a request? What information is required, since you can't link your own run (which, again, I'd love to be required for every request). When I tried to submit Days Gone a few weeks ago, I included a trailer there (the site doesn't let you leave it blank or just put jibberish there).

My thanks to anyone who can help, I really just want to understand better

I guess what it boils down to is, I can grudgingly admit to seeing the logic behind pre-release boards for, say, a new Mario game, Zelda, Pokémon, something all but guaranteed to have hundreds if not thousands of runners. A free-for-all for those boards could be ugly. But anything below that I honestly don't. But being that pre-release boards are a thing, is there any reason not to just submit a request for every game I'm interested in? It feels "dirty" to do that but if that's how it works..?

I didn't mind the Days Gone rejection at all. What it sounds like you're saying -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that it wasn't the information supplied with the request that mattered (and perhaps that it never does in these situations), but rather the game itself.

Further, I've noticed that development studios seem to be taken unofficially (and officially in at least one case, unless there's some other explanation for "Platinum Clovers") as their own series. You bring up Sekiro, and in Katana ZERO's case it's from the same developer as Tower of Heaven. Should we just go all the way and declare these to be series per-se? I wouldn't love that, but it would sure avoid a lot of confusion (and probably lighten your workload a little).

And, well, shit.....this is gonna become impossible to follow if I continue to speak in generalities, so, paranoia be damned....the future game on my mind is Ghost of Tsushima. I'm a big, big, big fan of the developers, their games got me into speedrunning in the first place (and I ran one of them at AGDQ). I don't currently mod any of those games, but that's because they're so inactive that only one mod (who predates me by years) is needed. When we talk about a prebaked community for a game like GoT though, am I (prolific runner of past Sucker Punch games, founded the inFAMOUS discord server, even tried to unite all SP games under it) in that group, or is it the Sekiro/Nioh/Souls runners, to whom the game arguably looks like it more closely resembles (and I've heard many of them mention interest). I feel like I deserve to have a voice in that discussion (whenever it comes, it might even be a PS5 game at this rate) and I'll be I think understandably upset if those decisions are all made without me.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

[quote]but it'll low-key break my heart a little if the same thing happens, if someone gets the board before I even have a chance.[/quote]

I know you take nothing seriously, speedrunning least of all. It's not that I view it as life and death or anything, but yeah, there's aspects of it that actually matter to me. No apologies for that.

Not that it matters much, but having now gotten my hands on Days Gone it is about as ill-suited for speedrunning as I could possibly imagine, and in ways I wasn't expecting. Main (? more on that in a second) objectives are gated by zombie hordes that you simply can't fight effectively. There's no real checkpoint system for most missions (ironically, fighting hordes is one of the times I did notice checkpointing), and the manual checkpoints (quicksave at the bike) don't work like they're supposed to. There's copious glitches (and not the good kind), framerate dips, janky animations, and it's really cutscene heavy with long loading times too. Probably worst of all is there's no clear indication of what's required and what's a side mission. Now I could spend weeks of my life figuring that out, like our speedrunning forefathers no doubt did, but I'd rather spend that time on a better speed game.

It's not a terrible game (the moment-to-moment gameplay is fine, fun even) but it's not that great a game either. And I have a hunch any speedrun would be GoW 2018 level of long (there's a trophy for attaining maximum trust with three camps, after 14 hours in my launch stream I didn't even find three camps). I'll pass.