Awesome Games Done Quick 2016

[Chesspiece_face]

For those who may have missed it: Awesome Games Done Quick this year did a run of Diablo and Diablo II.

As always, very entertaining and done for a great cause.

[Nystul]

Cool! It's pretty surreal for me to watch the D1 speed run, because nothing about it is new or surprising from what was known maybe 15 years ago. Quite a credit to Jarulf and the others who dissected this game.

Even shows how to kill the Butcher using one of the techniques from Pete's old guide. But then *cough cough* of course "Butcher is literally a joke" when you dupe 70k gold to get supplies before killing him.

[kandrathe]

Even shows how to kill the Butcher using one of the techniques from Pete's old guide. But then *cough cough* of course "Butcher is literally a joke" when you dupe 70k gold to get supplies before killing him.

I was just into D1 when D2 appeared. So, I never got that far into D1. It seemed the speed run is actually antithetical to "game play" in that the bulk of the time "played" was exploiting a dupe bug, exploiting the low health no stun lock on energy shield, avoiding most of the mobs to get to the end of game. The equivalent Chess game would be a checkmate 2 moves. It may be interesting one time, it too requires certain conditions (exploits), and not very fun for either player to repeat.

I like the 100% rules (all quests incl. Cow King in all difficulties) for DII speed runs, done in as little as an hour now by certain classes.

[Chesspiece_face]

I like the 100% rules (all quests incl. Cow King in all difficulties) for DII speed runs, done in as little as an hour now by certain classes.

I find some games are more conducive to entertaining glitch runs (generally speaking action/platformers). The D1 glitched speed run was fun for a quick watch, but I would have preferred more talk about how and why the exploits happen. I nerd out like crazy when watching a run and the speed runner says something like "I'm going to slow down for a second here so I can exploit the RAM so I will get a better enemy pattern in the next section."

During the DII run when the runner queued up 10+ minutes of stamina potion was eye opening. Even after years of playing the game I didn't know that was a thing.

[Nystul]

I was just into D1 when D2 appeared. So, I never got that far into D1. It seemed the speed run is actually antithetical to "game play" in that the bulk of the time "played" was exploiting a dupe bug, exploiting the low health no stun lock on energy shield, avoiding most of the mobs to get to the end of game. The equivalent Chess game would be a checkmate 2 moves. It may be interesting one time, it too requires certain conditions (exploits), and not very fun for either player to repeat.

Kind of yes and kind of no. For the few people that run that category, they obviously find it worthwhile to do over and over again. It would be mundane if the goal was simply to kill Diablo, but the goal is to beat the record time, and it would take some crazy combination of skill and luck to pull it off. I don't know if it would be entertaining to watch on a regular basis, but maybe for some people it is.

It's clearly a glitch run (or cheating, as we used to call it :p), but it's not so different from power gaming through Diablo either. I remember certain players who timed Laz runs back in the day. The last 2 minutes of this run would be like their games. They didn't dupe gold, but had plenty of gold from the last run. They didn't have "low hp", but could still blind teleport into any room without getting stunlocked due to equipment or character level. They spend hours teleporting from staircase to staircase to get to level 15 a hundred times and try to find that golden whatever.

[FireIceTalon]

It's clearly a glitch run (or cheating, as we used to call it :p), but it's not so different from power gaming through Diablo either. I remember certain players who timed Laz runs back in the day. The last 2 minutes of this run would be like their games. They didn't dupe gold, but had plenty of gold from the last run. They didn't have "low hp", but could still blind teleport into any room without getting stunlocked due to equipment or character level. They spend hours teleporting from staircase to staircase to get to level 15 a hundred times and try to find that golden whatever.

The true goal of games like D1 was never about speed runs or even "beating" the game IMO, but rather about power gaming. I.E, learning all the mechanics, mastering the end game (PvP, Ironman, or other variants), and ultimately building the best char(s) possible. To me, making a char like this is far more impressive (and interesting) than duping a bunch of gold and books to see how fast you can teleport to Diablo and kill him:

http://www.tristr.am/character.php?characterid=3085

That is the payoff of playing an absurd amount of hours/days/years of D1. And thats just my main rogue (and main char in general), the others are almost equally well geared but FIT is pretty over the top. Most of this stuff, naturally, was found when I least expected it rather then directly seeking it out, with a few exceptions. The perfect DZ ring of course is the one screen-shotted in the xmas thread, and is among one of those rare exceptions. I would argue though that I had just as much luck finding nice loot on dlvl 16 as @Laz, perhaps even more so.