Could we get a glitchless category? So no out-of-bounds, clips, etc. Maybe allow skips/sequence breaks still, or have 2 different glitchless categories to cover both options
I've been testing this off and on over the last couple weeks and I finished a glitchless run in 1 hour 7 minutes and there's plenty of time to be saved on that so theoretically it can be done in under an hour so I think it's reaonsable to try to get it added as a category.
Depends on what you count as a glitch, which is the bane of all glitchless categories. The reason we haven't made a glitchless category is that anything that can reasonably defined as a 'glitch' doesn't really make the run that much different. You can't really call 'crabbing' (the movement tech) a glitch because it is just how the game's physics works, would be impossible to police, and things like speed carrying over through levels is often difficult to avoid and only saves a few seconds, similarly with breaking rocks horizontally over vertically, it's just minor things that don't have any easy way to avoid or police. The only real thing that is reasonable then is just no out of bounds, which we did consider at a point, but the reality is that OoBs are just used in a few levels, so the run would just be mostly the same as any%, except a couple of levels which would just be twice as long.
The route would then be:
- Wendigo - Have to spend 10 seconds extra shooting the tree instead of going OoB
- Sussurus - Have to spend 20 seconds extra taking the elevator (if you count hitting the trigger from outside a glitch or OoB)
- Titan Rock - Have to spend 5-10 seconds not doing elevator clip
- Soma Facility - This would be very different, you'd have to take the trip around and it'd add a few minutes to the run, but it's also not very enjoyable due to being indoors and having to wait for door events
- Soma Reactor - This would be a few minutes slower but mostly just due to twice as long auto-scroller section and waiting for doors to open, would just be a less skillful level
- Camp Henday - Identical to any%
- Proving Grounds - Identical to any%
- Smoke Lake - Either it'd just be 5-10 seconds slower due to going to the end through the window instead of from OoB, or it'd just be adding like a minute of auto-scroller if you consider breaking the glass without grabbing the boots a glitch.
- Astra Facility - This is the main significant potential interest, you'd have to fight the boss which would add some interesting optimization challenges, but it would still add like 5+ minutes of janky indoors movements, waiting for elevators,doors and doing the laser thing + more auto-scrolling.
All in all, you add like 10-15 minutes of waiting and not very fun movement at the cost of getting like one interesting new thing and a few seconds of extra movement across what'll mostly just be an any% run that uses backup strats as the main route.
This is why we made All Suit Events, which tries to enforce new movement routes without making arbitrary restrictions on glitches or strats by just enforcing that you specifically pick up every object that changes your suit abilities (double jump,grappling hook, rail boots, lifeseed, magnet boots, water boots and returning the lifeseed again), Wendigo, Soma Facility and Proving Grounds are unchanged in this route but the other levels are meaningfully different at least. Unfortunately, the boss is still not needed to be fought in this run either though.
My other concept was to create a route that required you to actually 'check complete' all red (main) objectives, which would make you have to visit most places in the game in the 'intended' order, but the game has no real way of tracking that you've done this or even how many actually exist, and some of them don't actually ever give you a proper 'check' animation as they just stay on screen until you finish the level, and so it'd just be a nightmare to define and to verify.
That being said, feel free to define and run anything you determine to be appropriate for glitchless, if you have a suggestion for a ruleset and multiple people are interested in it, I don't mind creating a board for it :)
