About twenty years ago I was a huge fan of watching speedruns. At the time, speedruns of Quake, Doom, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were some of my all-time favorites. And, in fact, still are (particularly the Quake ones.) Back then I used to watch as many speedruns of as many games I could, as most of them were really interesting. Before YouTube this was a bit more inconvenient, but especially after YouTube was created and speedrunners and speedrunning sites started uploading there, it was a treat.
Glitch abuse was significantly rarer back then (for the sheer reason that speedrunners were yet to discover most of the ones that are known today), but even then I found it fascinating. I oftentimes read with great interest the technical descriptions of how particular glitches worked and how they were executed.
The one thing I loved most about speedruns, particularly those of certain games, was the sheer awesome skill involved. Quake and Half-Life 2 (back then) were particularly stellar examples, with the runner zooming through levels at impossible speeds, doing maneuvers that felt almost impossible. It was like watching an extremely skilled craftsman perform some complicated task at an incredible speed and precision. It was absolutely fascinating.
But then, over the years, slowly but surely things started changing.
The main thing that started changing was that speedrunners became enamored with finding and using glitches to make their runs even faster. In fact, many speedrunners became outright "glitch hunters": They would meticulously research, study and test their favorite speedrunning games in order to see if they could figure out and find glitches that would help in completing the games faster. It became a source of great pride and accomplishment when they could announce yet another glitch that saved time, or a setup to make an existing glitch much easier to perform.
Thus, over the years glitch abuse in speedruns started becoming more and more common.
And the thing is, the domain for glitch hunting started being expanded more and more. Not only were they trying to find glitches that could be exploited from within the gameplay itself, using the in-game mechanics themselves, but they started looking more towards the outside for ways to glitch the game: Rather than keep the glitch abuse restricted purely within the confines of the gameplay proper, they started hunting glitches outside of it: In the game's main menu, the game's save and load mechanics, in the options menu, sometimes even completely outside the game itself (which became particularly common in console game speedrunning, ie. trying to find ways to manipulate the console hardware itself in order to affect the game.)
It was precisely Half-Life 2 speedrunning where I started to grow a dislike for these glitches for the first time. You see, back then speedrunners had found that a particular skip could be performed by quick-saving and quick-loading repeatedly. And not just a few times, but literally hundreds of times! That's right: At one point it became so bad that a Half-Life 2 speedrun could literally spend something like 10 minutes doing nothing but quick-saving and quick-loading hundreds of times in quick succession. (I believe that other techniques have since been found that have obsoleted this particular mechanic. I haven't really checked. Doesn't make much of a difference to my point, though.)
I grew a great distaste for this particular glitch execution because it just stepped so far outside the realm of playing the game itself. It was no longer showing great skill at playing the game, and playing within the confines of the gameplay proper. Instead, it was stepping outside of the gameplay proper and affecting it effectively from the outside (after all, quick-saving and quick-loading are not part of the gameplay proper, part of playing the game, advancing towards the end goal. They are a meta-feature that are not part of the gameplay itself.)
I endured this for some years, but at some point I just outright stopped watching Half-Life 2 speedruns. They had become nothing but boring glitch-fests with very little of the original charm and awe left in them anymore. Sure, the runner would still fly through stages at impossible speeds, but this would be marred by boring out-of-game glitch abuse. I just lost interest.
While Half-Life 2 was one of the first games where extremely heavy glitch-hunting and glitch-abuse, particularly of the "abusing non-gameplay meta-features" kind happened, rather obviously it was not the only one. The habit started spreading among all speedrunners of most games like wildfire.
One particularly bad example made me outright want to puke: In a speedrun of the game The Talos Principle, the runner at one point would go to the main menu, go to the game options, set the framerate limit to 30 frames per second, return to the game, perform a glitch (that could only be done with a low framerate), and afterwards go back to the options menu and set the framerate back to unlimited. This was so utterly far-removed from gameplay proper, and was just so utterly disgusting, that I just stopped watching the speedrun right then and there.
Of course there are myriads and myriads of other examples which, while not as disgusting as that, just make the speedruns boring. For example I was watching a speedrun of Dark Souls 3, and every few minutes, even several times a minute, the speedrunner would quit to the main menu and immediately load back in. Why? Because loading times did not count towards the total time of the speedrun, and doing that quit&resume would move the player to a particular location within the level.
The thing is, those particular locations were usually just a few seconds of running from where the speedrunner would quit&resume, and while quit&resuming took something like 10-15 seconds, that loading time wasn't counted towards the speedrun's time, and thus while they made the speedrun overall longer in duration, it saved a couple of seconds each time by the speedrun's official clock. And the speedrunner would do this literally hundreds of times during the run. This was so utterly boring and outright annoying to watch that, once again, I just stopped watching mid-way through.
There would be literally dozens and dozens such examples I could write about, but let me add one more, a very recent one: Very recently Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker speedruns have been completely overhauled by a new glitch that has become possible.
Not "discovered". Not "found a new setup that allows doing it more easily." But outright became possible. And what made it possible? The Switch 2, that's what. You see, the Switch 2 runs the game under a new internal emulator which has this curious feature that if the emulated game crashes, the user is allowed to just keep the emulated game running rather than resetting the emulator. And it so happens that one out-of-bounds glitch in Wind Waker causes the game to crash in the original GameCube, but not in the Switch 2, if you opt to allow the game to keep running after the crash. Turns out that after a minute or two the game somehow "recovers" and starts running again... with the playable character being in a completely different room, allowing for big skips.
That's right: This glitch now abuses emulation to make it possible, and it's only possible on the Switch 2, not in the original console. And this is allowed only because the emulator is an official one by Nintendo (such emulator-only glitch abuse is never allowed if using third-party emulators. But apparently it somehow makes it different if the emulator is an official one.)
I can't decide if this is less or more disgusting than the Talos Principle glitch abuse. They are closely matched.
Overall, this is just the top of the iceberg: Glitch abuse has become so utterly prevalent in speedrunning, and such a huge portion of it abuses glitches that effectively affect the gameplay "from the outside", via non-gameplay means, that it has pretty much ruined speedrunning for me. With the exception of just a handful of games (such as Quake, thankfully), long gone are the days when speedruns would just run through the game via sheer skill, without resorting to disgusting outside-of-the-game glitch manipulation.
But what about speedruns that only use "within-the-game" glitches and at no point venture out of gameplay proper? In other words, they never use saving and loading, never to go to the game's menu, never affect the gameplay proper in any way from "outside" of it? Are those A-ok in my books?
Well, for the longest time I didn't mind those glitches and those speedruns. After all, they were effectively "legit" in my book, by my own standards. What's there to complain?
Yet, in later years I have grown tired of those too. The more the speedrun glitches the game, even if it happens fully from within gameplay proper, the more boring I tend to find it. Out-of-bounds glitches in particular I find boring, particularly those that skip huge chunks of levels. Many of them just bypass what made speedruns originally so great entertainment in the first place: Seeing an extremely skillful player beat the game with astonishing precision and speed.
I like to use an analogy for this: Suppose you are going to watch a top-tier professional sports event, like a basketball match: You go there in order to witness the absolute best players in the world show their utter skill at playing the sport. You are expecting 2 hours of sheer excitement and wonder. However, suppose that one of the teams finds an obscure loophole in the rules of the game that allows them to effectively cheat a victory for themselves without even playing the game, the other team having no recourse: The first team just declared victory at the start of the game abusing the loophole, the match ends, and that's it. It's over, everybody go home.
Well, that would be an utter disappointment, and utterly boring. You didn't go there to watch a team abuse a rulebook loophole in order to snatch a quick technical victory without even playing the game. You went there to watch a game! The spectators would be outraged! You would certainly demand your money back!
Well, for me most speedruns that skip major parts of the game are the same: I don't find them interesting in any way. They skip what I was wanting to watch the speedrun for in the first place! They skip the most entertaining part! I didn't "sign up" to watch a player skip the entire game: I did it so that I could see an extremely skilled player play the game, not skip it.
Unfortunately, skips, out-of-bounds glitches and other ways to bypass gameplay proper have become ubiquitous in speedrunning (especially when it comes to 3D games), and only few games have been spared.
That is why I don't really watch much speedrunning anymore. It's just boring. I'm not interested in glitchfests anymore. I would want to see someone play the game skillfully, I'm not interested in seeing someone break the game and skip the majority of it.
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