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Re:I thought I made a hard game and then speedrunners destro... by rcthompson on Monday July 01, 2019 @03:29PM (#20328865)
The thing about Celeste is that it's essentially two games in one. The first game is when you play it with only the abilities explicitly taught by the game up to that point (for most of the game, just jump, climb, and dash), and the second is when you go back and replay it from the beginning, having learned about wallbounces and hyper dashes and such. The level layouts of the "second game" are all identical to the first, of course, but the traversal becomes completely different with the mobility allowed by these newly-learned moves. (More recently, you could argue a third game has developed around un-taught and unintended tech like ultra dashes and demodashes, but you get the idea.)

But at least for me, the existence of this second game (and third) does not in any way detract from the quality or enjoyability of the first one. The speedrunners are basically playing a different game, and unlike most other video games, in Celeste this is by design.

Re:I thought I made a hard game and then speedrunners destro... by bscphil on Monday July 01, 2019 @09:09PM (#20331242)
> un-taught and unintended tech like ultra dashes and demodashes

These are the things I had in mind. It's quite astonishing to see a TAS or even some runners skip straight through an obstacle or jump off of a spike.

Re:I thought I made a hard game and then speedrunners destro... by rcthompson on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @12:25AM (#20332122)
I guess I don't understand how it takes away from the casual experience when challenges in a game can be skipped through strategies that you would never even think of in a casual playthrough. Does the existence of a 17:01 world record for Ocarina of Time Any% that skips 95% of the game via a wrong warp make the game not worth playing casually?