Multiplayer Speedruns are Awesome, and Here's Why

speedruns are really awesome but what if two of [Music] them the idea of a multiplayer speedrun is pretty self-explanatory one game two players go fast right and yeah it is all those three things and a secret impossible step we have to make friends first but Cooperative speedrunning exists in a plethora of different forms everything from actual multiplayer games to modded co-op in single player games to whatever the hell the Mario Odyssey speedrunners are doing more on that later and while they have a slightly higher bar of Entry again you need to have friends multiplayer speedruns provide an additional layer of strategy and complexity to the mix introducing new strategies that depend upon interacting with your partner using branching routes where each player is acting independently and oh God when do you find the time to practice I've been fascinated by multiplayer speedruns for ages but have never really gotten the opportunity to dive into the topic before in this video I'll be covering a handful or so popular multiplayer speedruns and why they're worth paying attention to there are so many different wonderful runs that were recommended to me when I asked you on Twitter but for this video I think I'll stick to one example of each type starting with my own personal Speed game Hollow Knight now as you might know Hollow Knight is a pretty cool game don't believe me Hollow Knight is a very cool video game thanks fireborne but as cool as it might be there's usually only space for one little bundle of murderous void in honest however due to the diligent work of the game's modding Community there's a wonderful and well realized multiplayer mod one that has spawned a massive swath of adaptations of Classic Party games everything from t hide and seek geoguesser Bingo and so on hkmp along with item sync mods that allow you to share progression between players also allows us to delve into the world of multiplayer runs because of hollow night's Metroid Vania World design the simple matter of having two or more players changes a lot of things across most Hollow night runs a sort of Anchor Point route structure ends up establishing itself because it's the most efficient way of traveling most of the time time what I mean by this is that we quote unquote anchor ourselves at a bench or other hard save point Branch off to Whatever item or boss we need next and then quit back out to the bench to optimize travel times if you bring a friend each player can bite off one of the branches simultaneously and basically cut out a solid third of the runtime for example let's imagine you've crossed the Blue Lake and entered a resting grounds here one player could go up and get dream nail while the other person books it straight for City to get luran it becomes even more interesting when you factor in player interactivity because of the way the game is programmed the knight's attacks such as the nail or even spells count as Pogo hit boxes something that can be used for some pretty cool skips even in the vanilla form of the game take for example the slope ball or the shriek Pogo here both of these strats depend on you poging your own projectile to gain height unfortunately these skips are usually quite Limited in use in multiplayer mod however all you need to do is have your friend slash upwards then you jump and Pogo their nail to get free height fun fact if you get enough people and everyone jumps and spams down slash you can fly upwards indefinitely together it's fantastic all right ready and go yes wait we had it we had him we had go go go go go go go go [Laughter] go yes I almost fell win this isn't uh exactly feasible in like a practical situation but however in a practical setting with two people this could for example allow one player to enter fungal waste's item lists and given that horizontal and vertical movement or such a big block in early game map progression any sort of sequence break could usually go quite a long way this is especially useful when it allows one person to be sent forward leaving the other one to get items and abilities while you fight bosses early now my personal favorite theoretical multiplayer Hollow Knight speedrun is by far the 112% all Pantheon bosses two player run 112 is my main speedrun and because of my obscene time spent running it I have quite an in-depth understanding of the complicated multiple hourong r route with a second player you could not only cut the quote unquote cleaning out areas collectathon aspect of the run in half where for example one person could do the second pass through Green Path while another one does Cliffs or for example one does the late game cleanup while the other one is busy with a Coliseum of fools my very favorite idea by far however would be pantheons though due to synchronized progression one player could go fullon YOLO Fury of the Fallen mode in there while the other one rushes around honest collecting lifeblood cocoons to sustain their friends berserking providing a relatively safe speed boost to the 40 minute long boss Gauntlet at the end the possibilities are quite endless when you have a second player involved now I haven't actually routed any of these myself and the hollow night multiplayer speedrunning scene has largely been left unexplored until now but I'd love to one day take a crack at the multiplayer 112 run maybe I'll sit down with one of the other top Runners and grind one out at some point if people want to see that I don't know could be interesting however this all isn't to say that it hasn't been explored before I'd like to refer you to Exhibit C yar's two player happy couple tool assisted speedrun and honestly this might just be yar's most impressive task yet two perfectly tuned tool assisted speedruns running simultaneously through a pretty long sporadic route with insane attention to detail and optimization impressively cutting the runtime of the category in half if you'd like to see what a proper two person Hollow night run would look like then this is the thing to watch shout outs I've kind of stopped doing task reactions on my channel because uh I don't know it's it just feels kind of lazy to take someone else's really hard work and just like talk over it and then upload it um anyway yck actually has his own commentary on his tases now so uh you should go watch those anyway now how do I connect this to the next segment in a world where speedrunners demolish video games in mere minutes one multiplayer speedrun stands out Above the Rest get ready to test your IQ over 48 mindboggling puzzles because Portal 2 is a very cool video game game oh hey thanks msushi I appreciate that well now you know that Portal 2 is a very cool video game while Hollow Knight's two-player runs explicitly break the intended single player experience that's not the case for every multiplayer speedrun in Portal 2's Co-Op campaign the puzzles are intricately designed to require two Portal guns to complete what I find really interesting about portal speedruns in general is that it's usually a very very strong back and forth between completely breaking a level and just doing it the intended way really quickly both sides of that Spectrum somehow feature the same amount of depth it's a masterful exercise of navigating three-dimensional space sometimes through maintaining momentum with intricate precise bunny hopping and air strafing and sometimes by attaining Zero Gravity by glitching the Excursion funnels and simply flying to the next elevator or shooting a precise portal through a crack that wasn't really intended not to mention all the out of bounds Shenanigans this sort of crazy back and forth is perfectly demonstrated in the portal to co-op speedrun you go from doing the introductory stage in a mostly intended fashion aside from the crazy movement of course to skipping to like the fifth level in the menu and just like jumping over half the game it's great now granted this is only done in the % speedrun the all main chapters one is a bit more more popular uh I just think this one is funnier all of these groundworks stay the same in the co-op campaign of course but what is perhaps most mesmerizing is the level of synchronization that is required between the two players almost every single part of every single puzzle is designed around a back and forth cooperation between player one and player two to do it quickly both players must always be matching each other's Tempo placing portals for each other and most importantly doing cute emotes together while waiting for the optimal moment to enter the end of level elevator to skip dialogue if one person messes up even a little bit it bottlenecks the team's Pace drastically for me portal speedruns hit that perfect Mark between just being entertainingly broken while still being somewhat comprehensible maybe I've just watched too many msushi videos though sometimes however there is an interesting phenomenon that occurs when a multiplayer speedrun becomes so cool and interesting that it simply transcends itself how do I introduce this next game oh I got [Music] it Mario Odyssey is a cool video game let's go wow I mean uh thanks for at this point Mario atis has become a bit of a staple in the speedrunning community at least on the YouTube side of things and for this video I'm interested at looking at one particular run the co-op run you see in Mario Odyssey there is a two-player co-op mode where one person controls Mario and one person controls Kappy in a practical sense this allows for some slightly more advanced and quick movement techniques that are not available in the single player mode since both players have the joint goal of moving that sweet sweet beautiful Italian plumber to the moon or something I don't actually know I haven't played this game I don't own a switch or anything uh this is once again the type of run where coordinated timings between two players is key however you don't always need two players if we look down past the first place spot on the leaderboard we can see a lot of singular names these players are controlling Mario with their hands and controlling Cappy with their feet now I'm not going to show a random Mario Odyssey speedrunner feet on my YouTube video uh and luckily it does not seem like you need a foot cam to submit your run cuz that would be really weird uh I just think it's really funny and it turns out most of the runs on this leaderboard are singular players so we have a multiplayer category that is not run in multiplayer it's uh quite well I don't know what that it's interesting 100K on YouTube for Blu Sr Mario Odyssey footcam reveal thank you for watching

Channel: BlueSR

Views: 92,146

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Id: o_zUuGqqfo8

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024