Speedrun of Titanfall 2 (SPEEDRUN EXPLAINED - Any%)

Hey everyone, my name’s tomatoanus, also known as the human equivalent of a wet band-aid, and this is a segmented Any% speedrun of Titanfall 2. This run is performed by my friend bryonato, who holds the world record for this run, and also helped make this video to make sure I didn’t goof any of the info about the run. As always, links to this run without commentary and also Bryon’s record are both in the description if you’d prefer to watch either of those. The setup for the story of Titanfall 2 is pretty straightforward. We play as Jack Cooper, a rifleman in the Militia, and are being trained by a dude named Captain Lastimosa to become a Pilot. Pilots operate Titans, which are mech-styled robots. So we’re being trained by Captain Lastimosa to become a Pilot, and we’re in a war against the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation. Over the span of 15 missions, we’ll see Jack’s story play out, and the goal of the speedrun is to get through all of the missions using any tools at our disposal. With that being said, let’s get into the run. What up, I’m Gavin Chainsawhands, I have a 42” vertical, and this video is sponsored by Manscaped. Manscaped sells the Perfect Package 3.0 which contains: the Lawn Mower 3.0, Crop Preserver Ball Deodorant, Crop Reviver Ball Toner, the Shed Travel Bag, and anti-chafing boxer briefs. I’d show you the boxer briefs but I left them at your mom’s house. The Lawn Mower 3.0 also has Advanced SkinSafe Technology which reduces nicks and cuts, so you can make your tree stand taller and stay safe doing it. Don’t know what I mean by that? Here’s a dramatic reenactment. Get 20% off and free shipping and two free gifts when you use promo code TOMATO20 at manscaped.com. Your balls and body will thank you, and so will your girlfriend, and tell her I said hi, and tell her she forgot some of her clothes at my place last weekend, and tell her to answer my phone calls, and tell her sh- I hope you’re ready, because this run has a lot of movement tech that builds and compounds upon itself. Up front, we play in Mandarin because this game has a lot of dialogue in it and Mandarin has the shortest dialogue by about 36 seconds. Also, we included Bryon’s input display on screen to help visualize the inputs required for the movement in this run because it’ll get pretty complicated at times. Included below the inputs is a speedometer for our movement speed so you can see how various pieces of tech help build and maintain our momentum. The normal running speed in Titanfall 2 is 22 kilometers per hour, so keep that in mind throughout the run as you occasionally look at the speedometer to see how fast we’re going. So as you’ll see right at the start, the movement in this run isn’t lame like the movement in the Fallout 4 speedrun where you just hold W and run straight towards your destination. There’s a lot going on here, like, a lot, and there’s not a good way to present all the info at once for how this movement works and all the parts that go into it, but by the end of this video you’ll have an understanding of how it all works… hopefully. Until then though, the information will be a bit piecemeal. For this mission, in short, Bryon is making their way to the shooting range, and along the way, they’re waiting for certain audio cues from Lastimosa to progress, and also going so quickly that we skip some dialogues with Lastimosa before he has a chance to appear near us. When Bryon arrives at the shooting range, they’re going to wall climb up to quickly grab a hidden EPG-1, which is a rocket launcher, before respawning and grabbing a rifle and clearing out the targets. Let’s get into movement though, one of the most fundamental pieces of movement tech in this speedrun is something called “slideboosting.” Once you build up enough running speed and meet a certain speed threshold, if you crouch, then you slide on the ground, giving you a slight speedboost. Another piece of movement tech that you see Bryon doing now are damage boosts, which are super common in gaming and don’t require too much explanation. One thing worth noting though is that you can’t die in this mission, so we’re much more liberal with our damage boosts, whereas later in the run they’re much more risky. We use the EPG and some grenades we snagged to damage boost in this time trial, which saves about eight seconds compared to not using them here, so you can imagine how the timesave builds up over the run from frequently damage boosting. After Bryon finished the time trial, they kept moving to start another time trial as if they were going again, but immediately slowed down and exited the gauntlet, skipping some dialogue with Lastimosa. After skipping his lines, it becomes a waiting game, where we listen to him talk about some stuff and things and stuff, and once he stops then we get transported to an open field where he’ll talk about more stuff and things and stuff. While the dialogue goes on, let’s get into the next piece of movement tech, “slidehopping.” Slidehopping is what Bryon was largely doing earlier when they were zigzagging at the start of the mission. So remember that slideboosting is when you run above a certain speed threshold and couch, you slide and get a slight speedboost. If you’re moving and jump, and then crouch as you land, you still get your slideboost. However, if you crouch as you land, and then jump again, you still get the speed from the slideboost, but you’ll have jumped again rather than slide. You can then continue to crouch and jump as you land over and over again, maintaining the speed from the slideboost, keeping us moving at high speeds. This is slidehopping: the chaining-together of jumping repeatedly and holding crouch as you land, which keeps us moving at high speeds. So, there are a lot of cutscenes in this game and we actually have time for another explanation of basic movement tech. If you’re unfamiliar with Titanfall 2, it may come as a shock to you that it runs on Valve’s Source engine, which is the same engine that games like Portal, Half-Life, and CS:GO run on. A big piece of movement tech in this engine, with Titanfall 2 being no exception, is what’s called “air strafing.” The Source engine has a speed limit on how fast your character can travel when you hold ‘W’ to move forward. This is to prevent your character from constantly accelerating and eventually becoming faster than light, where they’d then have to live in darkness. Valve didn’t put this speed limit on movements performed when you’re holding either A or D to move sideways. So by turning the camera and using our strafe keys, we can move in our desired direction through the air, circumventing the speed limit imposed on our character, letting us travel faster than intended. One thing worth mentioning now though is that the air acceleration in Titanfall 2 is much lower than other Source games meaning that we can’t turn super fast in air without losing a ton of speed, but we have ways around it and we’ll get to that later on. Now, there’s still some cutscenes left in this stretch, but if you’re like me then you watch things for the plot, so if you’re trying to keep up, we’re being deployed to a battle in territory controlled by the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, IMC for short. We got pulled out of our training with Lastimosa where he was training us to become a Pilot, so this battle better be worth it. While we wait on the plot to develop some more though, let’s get back into tech. We’ve explained both slidehopping and air strafing, but a quick reminder even though I just explained them, slidehopping is the chaining together of jumping and crouching to keep up high speeds, and air strafing is circumventing the forward speed limit by instead moving sideways in the air and steering by turning our camera. What I haven’t told you yet though is that slidehopping and air strafing are actually combined throughout most of the run. Air strafing while slidehopping is key to fast movement in Titanfall 2 runs, and if you watch Bryon’s input overlay, you’ll see that they often will be using the A and D buttons to navigate while slidehopping rather than just holding W. Additionally, because the shortest distance between two locations is a straight line, we want to stay on as straight a line as possible where applicable. Air strafing doesn’t lend itself well to straight lines since it causes you to move horizontally in one direction, but Bryon counteracts this by just following up some air strafe slidehops with an air strafe in the opposite direction, meaning that for a lot of the speedrun, we’re pretty much slalom skiers. When we gain control at the end of this cutscene, Bryon will combine these two pieces of movement tech to quickly get across the battlefield and trigger another cutscene. Again, if you watch Bryon’s input display during the upcoming movement, you’ll be able to see that they’re typically just strafing by holding only A or D while performing all of the slidehops. Give me a moment to catch my breath and relieve your ears of my nasally accent while we watch an example of slidehopping and air strafing in action. Once we’re across the battlefield and trigger the cutscene, we’ll be immediately knocked to the ground and are going to almost be curb-stomped by an enemy Titan before we’re rescued by Captain Lastimosa. This cutscene is also pretty long, but that’s good for us because we can cover more movement tech that you should know about before we get any further in the run. Now, I can guarantee that there are some people who scrolled down and left a comment when I explained slidehopping earlier, saying something along the lines of, “slidehopping is just bunnyhopping, call it what it is.” OOOOOOOOHHHHH boy, that’s where you’re wrong, because slidehopping, as described earlier, is not bunnyhopping. Bunnyhopping is its own thing, and is used in niche situations throughout the run. As I mentioned earlier, slidehopping requires you to slide to get a speedboost, and then chaining jumps together where you remain crouched as you land each time. Bunnyhopping is much more simple than that. For bunnyhopping, you remain standing and you just jump as soon as you land. They’re similar, yes, but bunnyhopping is just moving forward and jumping as you land, slidehopping has a bit more going on to it. Bunnyhopping has its benefits, like you jump much higher, which comes in handy at times, and also lets you take corners a lot tighter. With bunnyhopping though, the timing on when you have to jump is much narrower, so overall it’s typically better to just slidehop. Some of you may be asking though why Titanfall 2 runners can’t just use the scroll wheel for jumps to hit bunnyhops perfectly every time. The answer to that is that you’re not able to bind the scroll wheel to jump, but also slidehopping as a whole is much more versatile and forgiving. Anyways, I don’t want to overload you with a bunch of tech at once where I’m explaining it and there aren’t any examples of it happening in the run as I explain, so let’s talk about some less intense tech. So, as you may have been able to tell, in Titanfall 2 you can run on walls. Normally, if you run on or grab a wall, then you can’t then run on or grab the same wall without first running or grabbing onto a different wall, or spending an extended amount of time in the air. Pretty much the game just doesn’t want you to be able to just infinitely run on the same wall with no breaks. This wouldn’t be a speedrun though without a workaround or exception to the rule. Some walls in the game are curved, and this rule about grabbing onto the same wall doesn’t apply to sections of the same wall that are separated by a curve. This means that we can pretty much zig-zag our way up a wall if there’s a curve in it. This zig-zagging is also pretty niche so it’s not something to really keep in the front of your mind like slidehopping or air strafing. So getting back to the cutscenes, Captain Lastimosa was injured in the battle last night when coming in to save us. It seems like he’s okay though so we can continue working by his side for now. Okay, nevermind, Bryon just killed him. Well, now with Lastimosa experiencing his Lastimoments, Bryon changed the course of the story of the game, and Lastimosa will now transfer his Titan, BT-7274, over to us, so we’re now officially a Pilot. Unfortunately, BT is kinda gassed from the fight last night, so we need to get him some new batteries, but luckily there’s some nearby that we can go retrieve. When this cutscene eventually ends, Bryon will begin holding S so we can move backwards once we gain control. This is because there’s a wall behind us and by walking back and doing a quick jump off of it, we start out with a bit more speed than if we had began walking after the cutscene as you normally would. First though, we’re going to build a nice little rock pile. Near the beginning of our movement, Bryon will pick up a shotgun for clearing out some enemies in the level, and will build up some speed using a combination of slidehopping and air strafing. Again, look at the input display as Bryon performs this movement, and notice how when air strafing during each jump, they’re only holding either A or D, and also notice that they’re holding down the crouch button, since we have to be crouching when we land and jump to perform slidehops. Bryon makes this movement look silky smooth, but it’s not as easy as it seems, especially on this level because we only have one jump, no double jump for us quite yet.. The movement has been thoroughly routed to optimize lines while minimizing things like collisions and climbing up ledges, like right here where Bryon skips a wallrun we were supposed to do by jumping super late to clear a gap without having to mantle on the ledge. Also, remember just a little bit ago when I mentioned the fact that you can re-grab a wall if there’s a curve in it? Well right here’s a brief example where Bryon does a quick zig-zag up a wall with a slight curve so that we can get to the intended upper pathway a little quicker. Bryon then takes out a few enemies so they don’t get in our way, and makes their way to a difficult open area referred to as “Death River” with a lot of enemies and a river that kills you if you fall in, but Bryon is able to easily clear it and head into a cavernous area. In these caves, there’s a sloped surface that we run up at one point, which the fact Bryon is able to do smoothly is super impressive, due to the fact that there are a ton of rocks on the surface that are big enough for us to climb up onto like they’re a ledge. Once we make it out of the caverns then we’ll be approaching a crashed ship which is where the first Titan battery we’re retrieving is located. When Bryon eventually has the battery in their hands, they’ll make a bee-line back to BT, throwing a grenade as we arrive to clear out some enemies and load up the battery into BT. BT is a thirstyboi though so we’ll have to go get another battery, building up just a stupid amount of speed in the process thanks to the previously discussed tech, in addition to some stuff we haven’t gotten to yet, so let’s take this moment to talk shop some more. Leaving the ship, Bryon holds crouch as they land on a slant, accelerating us from 25 to 60 km/h the instant we touch the ground, which is a piece of tech called a “slant boost.” So another thing worth mentioning is that our double jump gets refreshed whenever you run along a wall or touch the ground. Sometimes though, we don’t want to touch the ground for any of a handful of reasons, and getting into a wallrun may throw off our angle if we’re on a sick line. It’s in these cases that we can use a piece of tech called a “wall bump.” Wall bumps are super straightforward, where if you’re in the air and crouch and collide with a wall, then your double jump gets refreshed. Wall bumps are a bit more niche but they can help out in tight spots and we also don’t lose any speed by performing them. Let’s get into something more important though. So while slidehopping may be the single most important piece of movement tech in this game, a close second is something called a “wall kick.” If you begin a wallrun, and jump off of the wall within five ticks of beginning the run, then you get a slight speedboost. This is a wall kick. At its basics, it’s very simple, but there are several factors that play into how “good” of a wall kick you get. The two things that most affect the quality of a wall kick and the speedboost you get is the angle that you approach the wall from and the angle that you look at in relation to the wall when you jump off to perform the wall kick. The rule of thumb is that the smoother your approach, and less drastic/more parallel you approach the wall from, the more speed you’ll have coming off of the wall kick, and similarly, the more forward you’re looking when you perform the wall kick, the more speed you’ll have. This makes sense if you think about it, because obviously if you approach the wall by gently gliding into it, you’ll preserve and gain more speed than if you slammed into the wall like Spider-Man in training. The idea of approaching a wall from an angle that’s approaching zero may sound difficult, and honestly it is if you’re not practiced, but thankfully we do have air strafing in our movement toolbox which helps in the process and lets us correct our angle gracefully while maintaining breakneck speeds. The name of the game in Titanfall 2 speedruns is momentum preservation, and wall kicks are a huge part of that. Try to keep an eye out for them, look for when Bryon ends a wallrun pretty much as soon as they start one, it’s likely a wall kick. Back to the run, when Bryon arrived at BT they tossed a couple nades to take out some enemies that were dropping by to say “sup.” After then loading up BT with the battery, we hop inside to begin the combat training sequence for operating BT. Overall the upcoming training segment is very straightforward, just mowing down enemies as they spawn, so let’s talk about more tech. Another piece of movement tech worth mentioning is something called “edge boosting.” If you’re wallrunning and during the wallrun you run out of wall, like the wall has an end to it with a sharp corner, then by jumping off of the wall during the short window as you pass the corner, you get a speedboost similar to if we had performed a wall kick. So that’s edge boosting, jumping off the wall after you run out of wall and run past the edge of it. A very similar sounding but entirely different piece of tech to edge boosting is something called “end boosting.” When you wallrun, if you perform the full wallrun without jumping off, then the game will eventually try and push you off of the wall to end the wallrunning animation. If you perform a jump off the wall as the game is pushing you off of the wall, then you get a similar effect to a wall kick or edge boost. This is much more niche than wall kicks or edge boosts though. However, there is a way to force an end boost to occur that’s used all throughout the run and unsurprisingly called a “forced end boost,” but we’ll explain that a bit more in-depth later. So to again summarize these three most recent pieces of tech: wall kicks are when you jump off a wall right when you start a wallrun, which gives you a speedboost, edge boosts are when you are performing a wallrun and then run out of wall to run on, and as you pass the edge of the wall, you jump off, which gives you a speedboost, and lastly is end boosting, where you let your wallrun play out to completion, and as the game has you begin to drop off the wall, you jump off, which gives you a speedboost. They all have pretty similar results, but different executions. They’re all used frequently in one form or another though, and I’ll try to call out some instances of them throughout the run. So after we take out our first enemy Titan of the run in a moment, we’re then going to begin transitioning into the third mission of the game, Blood and Rust, where we’ll start out the mission still piloting BT. So when we’re controlling BT in this game, we have two little boost dashes we can use to launch us forward a little bit, and they recharge over time after use. In this game if you have a lot of speed, you lose the most speed when you’re touching the ground. For this reason, it’s most optimal to use our dash boosts when we’re on top of ledges or bumps like rocks as you’ll see Bryon do at the start of the third mission in a moment, because that way we’re boosting from an elevated position and will have more time at our boosted speed since we’re in the air for longer. Additionally, there’s a small piece of tech called “crouch dashing” where after we use a dash from a raised surface, we hold crouch to stay in the air slightly longer. As we make our way down this aqueduct looking stretch, Bryon will perform a fun little thing called “Tone slide,” where there’s an enemy Tone, which is a smaller Titan, and the top of their head is about even with our feet when we boost. If we line things up correctly, then boost and crouch as we pass over the Tone, we kinda just grind on their head briefly, preserving our speed for a little extra distance. Once we make it inside the nearby building, Bryon is going to ditch BT so that we can travel on foot. As fun as BT is to party with, if it’s possible to travel by foot, then for the most part we’re going to choose to do so for the sake of speed. After a quick damage boost in a moment, we’ll be skipping a large chunk of platforming by performing an end boost on a pipe to be able to reach a wall above us that we can wallrun on to reach the control room, where we open a Flow Regulation Gate and split up from BT for a chunk of the level. After BT finishes his line here, Bryon takes that as a cue to begin moving, beginning an absurd stretch of movement throughout the level that capitalizes on a lot of the things we’ve previously discussed, including the easy to see things like slidehopping and air strafing, but also things like wall kicks, which again are when Bryon exits a wallrun within five ticks of starting it to get a slight speedboost. One thing that Bryon also does that’s often overlooked by people unfamiliar with Titanfall 2 speedruns is something called the “wall jump arc.” The wall jump arc is the most optimal way to gain speed and distance after jumping off a wallrun. When you jump out of a wallrun, air strafing back towards the wall you jumped off of results in the greatest amount of speed gained, in addition to distance travelled. While at first listen this may not sound super helpful, because you typically can’t wallrun on the same wall twice in a row, keep in mind that we aren’t always going to be running on walls, so performing the wall jump arc at the end of a wallrun sequence is often the most efficient way to gain additional speed when returning to solid ground, or even get extra distance on our jump to span large gaps. Something else that you might have noticed throughout the run so far is that we’re able to turn invisible for short stretches of time. If you haven’t played Titanfall 2, this is an ability called Cloak, and Bryon is mostly using it in areas with high enemy density so that we can get by unscathed, and it will also get a lot of use throughout the run. So throughout most of this level we’ve been separated from BT, but coming up we’re going to perform a skip called “Sludge Skip” to skip a sizable combat arena. As we go through a tight corridor with yellow pipes, we’ll see BT standing behind a fence across the way. So normally what happens then is we go into the next big area, activate the sludge pumps, and then fight off waves of enemies before we can progress. As we enter this area, BT is talking to us, and normally after we finish our dialogue with him, then BT will move from behind the fence where we saw him. For sludge skip though, after activating the sludge pumps here to begin the combat encounter, Bryon does some tight platforming to get to the fence from where BT is talking to us, and enter BT the moment that we finish our dialogue with him. This is a bit trickier than it sounds because the timing on it has to be just right, where we need to make it to BT before the dialogue is over, but we need to actually respond to BT when he talks to us, because if BT doesn’t go through all of his lines by the time we enter him, then the game softlocks. It’s for this reason that we have to enter BT the moment we finish dialogue with him, because if we’re too early then the game softlocks, but if we’re too late then we won’t be able to enter him because he won’t be behind the fence anymore. We’ve now entered the end-of-level boss fight against an enemy Titan operated by Kane, who’s the mercenary in charge of the IMC forces in this area. If you haven’t played this game, it’s good to know that there are different Titan loadouts with different weapons and abilities that you unlock throughout the game. Right now we have two loadouts available, the base one and the Tone loadout, which Bryon swapped to right before the fight began so that we can use the 40mm cannon for this fight. To quickly take out Kane, Bryon is going to hit him with three rounds of our 40mm, followed by unloading barrages of the Tracking Rockets ability, and then rinsing and repeating, with a use of our Salvo Core ability which launches missiles thrown in for good measure. One thing that you see Bryon do here, as well as throughout the rest of the run, is a tech called “swap reloading.” By quickly swapping our loadout to a different one and then swapping back, it fully reloads our 40mm without having to actually reload, saving about three quarters of a second per reload. Swap reloading works with all the different Titan weapons that you reload, but is most effective with the 40mm. After we take out Kane, then we quickly hop out and take the communications unit from his helmet, which lets us eavesdrop on IMC transmissions, after which BT will identify a shortcut that we’ll take to reach Major Anderson quicker, which leads into the next mission. While we listen in and the mission ends, we have a moment of waiting, so Bryon decides to kill the time by sending you all a message at home, and I’ll take this moment to send a message as well. First, I hope you’re doing well. If you watch most of my videos, you’ll have heard me say this before, but it bears repeating: no feeling is final. No matter how hard things may be at this moment and how difficult life may be, how you feel right now is not conclusive or definite. Feelings of dread, hopelessness, or despair do not define the rest of your life, and things will get better. There is a tomorrow, you will be here for it, and the world is a better place with you in it. So, getting back to the run, as Bryon runs out of time to send their message, we’re brought into mission four, titled Into the Abyss, which opens with a long section where we play as BT. Near the start of the level, we actually pick up a large object on the ground that is a new loadout for us to use that’s called the Scorch loadout. Coincidentally the Scorch loadout is the same loadout that Kane used in the previous level. We’re going to use it later on in this level for a fight so you’ll see its abilities then, and we also use it a ton throughout the run when we have to actually fight enemy Titans because Scorch has really high DPS, so it makes for a super important loadout in the speedrun. So in this mission you’re going to notice a lot of moving machinery and walls around us. All this stuff doesn’t operate on a global cycle. Instead, the moving pieces are activated by triggers that we hit as we move through the level. At one point, we’re going to turn and run down a long corridor, and while we’re running down it, Bryon is going to save up their two dashes. This is because near the start of the corridor, we hit a trigger that activates these huge moving walls at the end of the corridor that move in the direction we need to go. The walls are timed so that right when you reach the end of the corridor, the last one should pass right in front of you before you drop out of the corridor and run to the left. Instead, by holding onto their two dashes and then using them near the end of the corridor, Bryon is able to beat the final wall to the corridor exit, and actually get in front of it, riding it to the left where we need to go. This is called “wall boost,” and saves around nine seconds. Alright, so after performing wall boost and topping off our health, we switch to the newly acquired Scorch loadout to fight against three Titans that are behind a big door that opens up. Bryon launches out some Incendiary Traps followed by laying down a Firewall to explode them, then soaks up and deals some damage with the Heat Shield ability, followed by using our ult, Flame Core, to clean up all three Titans. After the encounter, we collect the Brute loadout, then hold crouch and forward as we disembark from BT, which gives us a bit of extra speed that Bryon fully utilizes to cross the large gap to make our way to the cargo lift controls. After being sneaky with the Cloak ability and calling the cargo lift, we make our way back towards BT and jump straight to the arriving cargo lift, activating it as we land on it, followed by leaping “into the abyss,” which actually hits the end of level trigger two seconds faster than just riding the lift. Despite the upcoming loading screen, this isn’t the end of the mission Into the Abyss, rather the mission is split into three parts, so we’re now entering part two of Into the Abyss. This part of the mission is going to come out of the gates hot, so I’ll let you just soak in the high speeds and wall kicks for a moment, commentary free for 12 seconds. It’s worth mentioning that this level is an autoscroller, and it doesn’t matter how fast we move here. Here Bryon tries to 360 no-scope a dude walking in the other direction, but clearly isn’t MLG enough for us and has to hard scope the dude like a total scrub. After sliding through some air vents like Luke in Cloud City, Bryon will take out a dude chilling with his homies so that we can pick up his Spitfire, which is an LMG that we’ll use later in the run. We then hop onto a moving platform, which after a moment will move in a way that we can take advantage of to get a massive speed boost, which Bryon is going to chain into a gentle Spartan kick. Bryon is now going to skip a lot of the intended play area by performing an edge boost to reach a rock ledge, where we’re going to roleplay as a mountain goat for a bit by strictly platforming on rock ledges. This stretch is a great example of where end boosts, edge boosts, and the wall jump arc can get you. Speaking of end boosts though, now would be a good time to talk about a variant of them. Earlier I talked about end boosts and how we get big speedboosts by jumping off your wallrun at the end of the wallrun animation. I also mentioned the existence of forced end boosts, which pretty much lets us perform them on command, so let’s talk about forced end boosts now. When you’re performing a wallrun, if you press the directional key to move in the opposite direction of the wall you’re on, then after a brief moment, you’ll stop your wallrun and be removed from the wall. This brief moment after you press the opposite directional key and before you fall off the wall, you’re still sort of attached to the wall, and is an example of what’s referred to as “coyote time.” This is a fairly common term in gaming so I won’t fully explain it, plus I’ve covered it in both our Sekiro run and SpongeBob run, so you all should know what this means. If during this coyote time period you jump off the wall, then you get a big speedboost, which is the forced end boost. It’s the same thing as an end boost, but we have greater control over when we want to use it. Additionally, the later in the coyote time window that you jump off the wall, the bigger the boost you’ll get. So back to happenings on screen, we’re currently waiting on a platform to move across the level, so after clearing out most of the enemies, Bryon is going to have some fun by making one of the robtis turn coat. We’ll refer to the friendly turncoat robit as the blue one and it’s going to fight a remaining enemy robit that we’ll refer to as the red one, and we’re going to sit here and watch the gladiatorial combat between these two brave warriors. Red vs blue, leave a comment for which of the two combatants you’re pulling for. Looks like it wasn’t a long fight, with the blue combatant immediately going in for the choke grab and just crumpling the red combatant, and Bryon is visibly distraught since they clearly were pulling for the red robit. The platform is almost here, so we’re going to mess around for another moment before hopping on for a long ride across the level. While we wait and end up going on this ride, let’s cover another piece of tech. It may not seem like it, but most of the tech we’ve covered so far are the basics for fast movement throughout the run. If anything, the most recent tech we covered, forced end boosts, was our first step into higher level tech, and from here on out most of the movement tech we’re going to cover will be advanced, so be sure to take notes. So something that’s everywhere in this speedrun that should be name-dropped is the term “strafe lurch.” Strafe lurching itself is a pretty intuitive piece of movement tech. Strafe lurch when you press a movement key within a half second after jumping, and you slightly lurch in the direction that was pressed. The sooner after the jump input that you strafe, the stronger the force of the lurch will be, and you can even stack multiple lurches. This piece of tech of course adds to our navigational ability, but it also allows for a key piece of advanced tech called “tap strafing.” It cannot be stressed how important tap strafing is to this run. As I mentioned near the start of this video, Titanfall 2 has much lower air acceleration than other Source games, meaning that if you want to turn quickly while strafing, you’re gonna lose pretty much all of your speed which is where tap strafing comes in. So if you’re strafing in a direction and then jump or double jump, by tapping W in the window for lurch to happen, you lurch in the direction that you’re already strafing. You still lose a bit of speed due to incurring lurch, but we’re able to continue to turn and maintain speed thanks to lurching in our turning direction, rather than just twist ourselves in the air and stop moving as would normally happen by attempting to air strafe and take a tight corner. Tap strafing allows for things like instant 90° turns with minimal speedloss, which is impossible otherwise. If you watch Bryon’s inputs while they air strafe and turn, you’ll notice that they tap W a lot, and this is when Bryon is tap strafing to lurch in the direction we’re turning. I hope you got all that because there will be a quiz later. Anyways, Bryon just utilized the moving platform to launch themselves up to a catwalk which is a difficult trick called “dome launch” that required tight timing on some inputs and skipped a lot of platforming. So right now we’re trying to get to Major Anderson but need to reunite with BT first and get through a combat simulation in a simulation dome where we perform a skip called “Dome Skip,” which fun fact, used to be performed a different, slower way, but a dev at Respawn hinted to the speedrun community that there was a faster way to do it, which led to the current method of it being discovered. So as the platform we’re on is rising, Bryon is going to jump towards the boundary of the dome and hold crouch while they’re in air. This brings us to the ledge where there’s a small gap in collision that we can crouch through. Once out-of-bounds, Bryon is going to slidehop their way over to the opposite corner of the dome and stand in a specific spot on a ledge and wait. By standing in the specific spot that we’re going to stand in, then once the arena finishes assembling and the dialogue finishes, this part of the mission just ends, fully skipping the dome combat segment. The reason why this works is that once the dome is finished being assembled, the lights go off briefly and we’re teleported to a different dome where the combat actually takes place. The location we position ourselves at in relation to the dome being assembled lines up with the end of level trigger for the dome we’re teleported to, so once we’re teleported, we’re standing in the end of level trigger, instantly skipping the combat segment. In the meantime, you get to enjoy the hall of mirrors effect as Bryon threw a nade and wiggled the camera to mess with the flight-trail, and also aim around to get a big reticle. After the screen fades to black, we’re be brought into part three of the Into the Abyss mission, where we’re now in the depths of the facility and pretty close to reuniting with BT. While traversing through some caves with low ceilings, Bryon is going to spam jump to keep up our speed while sliding, and we get to listen in on Blisk, the main antagonist, scolding Ash, the enemy Pilot who tried killing us with the combat simulation, for playing around with her food and not taking us out when she had the chance. In a moment we’re going to ride on a honeycomb centrifuge to build up some speed, which is a trick called “Cylinder Skip” that skips a lot of platforming. We’ll then do some quick wallruns to get on top of a ledge where we’ll do a quick damage boost as Ash begins the self-destruct sequence for the facility to try and take us out. Bryon is then going to jump over the fence from Jurassic Park, and do another damage boost off of the moving wall to get us enough lateral speed to be able to reach the simulation dome that BT is in, aided by a quick wallrun. Once we get inside BT, we’re going to immediately begin making a beeline towards the end of the level where we’re supposed to have our big showdown with Ash. Rather than fight her though, we’re going to perform something called “Ash Skip.” The name may not be super intuitive, but Ash skip is a skip where we skip Ash. So after running past and taking out some enemies so they don’t get in our way, we’re going to come to an area where there’s another simulation dome on the right side of the screen. Rather than entering the dome, Bryon will use the Hover ability in the Brute loadout to fly on top of a large pipe running along a wall on our left. Once we’re on the pipe and past a specific union fitting, Bryon is going to crouch and hop out of BT, bringing both us and BT out-of-bounds. This brings us out-of-bounds because when we disembark, the game relocates us to the closest location where both Cooper and BT can be standing, and because we had to be crouched to be on top of the pipe, BT couldn’t stand there. So once we got out-of-bounds, Bryon immediately turned around and hopped back into BT, and now runs along specific lines avoiding invisible walls and a cutscene trigger, followed by dashing into the void, but we’re actually landing on an invisible platform right next to an invisible wall that we need to get through, and to do that all we need to do is disembark from BT again to clip us through the wall, and then hop back inside to bring BT to our side of the invisible wall. We now just Hover to get on top of the nearby tunnel and run to the exit to hit the end-of-mission trigger, rounding out Into the Abyss, and completing Ash skip which again is a skip where we skipped Ash. This brings us into the next mission, Effect and Cause, which seriously, if you’ve never played this game, is one of the single coolest video game missions I’ve ever had the chance to play, and it was so well received that this mission alone has its own Wikipedia page. In the speedrun, it’s a pretty straightforward mission for the most part but it does have its moments. So in the story of the game we’re still in search of Major Anderson and upon arriving at the rendezvous coordinates, we find ourselves at an old research facility. We split up with BT at the start to cover more ground, and right away we have sporadic encounters where it appears that we’re in the facility while it was in operation. So what’s actually happening in the game is that we’re jumping back in time and there’s a bunch of time anomaly stuff going on because of the research that was going on at this place back in the day. Bryon will eventually make their way to the location of Major Anderson’s body who has somehow gotten himself stuck in concrete, which it turns out was done by him jumping through time at the wrong time, which has caused for the two halves of his body to be in separate locations in the facility. We’ll then secure Major Anderson’s helmet which we’ll listen to the contents of with BT, who is then going to inform us that because Major Anderson is dead, we’re now in charge of all Militia forces on the planet due to the chain-of-command. While Cooper processes the fact that we’re now the leader of a group project where we’re the only ones doing the work, let’s talk about the downside of this mission in the speedrun, which is that it involves a lot of waiting. Like, a lot. For a lot of this waiting I’m going to be speeding up the footage just so we aren’t sitting here twiddling our thumbs while we wait. Right here though, Bryon climbs up to a specific ledge to wait for Major Anderson’s briefings to play out. This is because after the briefings wrap up, BT is going to hurl a streetlight into the building we’re on, and we’re supposed to ride the electrical line like a zipline. It’s a lot faster to start riding the zipline halfway up though, which is why we’ve taken perch up on this building, because once BT raises his arm like he’s about to throw the light like a handegg, Bryon will wallrun and do a leap of faith to the flightpath of the light and give themselves a ton of whiplash by beginning to zipline up despite having momentum in a totally different direction. Once we’re inside the building, we have to wait a moment and a time shift cycle before a robit is going to pry open the nearby doors and we’ll run through them, and then we’re going to perform a skip called “Faster Than Light.” So behind laser doors in the next room, there’s a long hallway bridge that normally takes several time-shift cycles to get through. Normally you have to walk through the hallway and slowly wait for each time-shift because in the present time the bridge is collapsed and we have to navigate it in the past. What Bryon is instead going to do is stand in the laser doorway in the present where the lasers aren’t spawned, and position themselves just on the hallway side of doorway so that when the game time-shifts us to the past and the lasers spawn, we get shot out of the collision with the lasers at high speeds. Bryon then maintains the speed with slidehopping and air strafing, letting them clear the distance of the bridge all in one go in the past, meaning that we don’t have to wait for time-shifts along the distance of the bridge to cross safely. Once we reach the end of the hallway, we hit the trigger to transition into the second part of the mission, where the loading screen shows Major Anderson’s better half. When we load in, we’ll immediately interact with Major Anderson’s rump to take his time-shifting device off of his wrist and put it onto ours, which gives us the ability to shift through time at our own leisure. As we equip the device, Bryon looks towards the wall on the left to align themselves for the first wallrun once we gain control. Most of this mission from here on out is just a pure display of Bryon’s smooth movement in addition to time-shifting at just the right moment to be able to progress through the level while still maintaining high speeds. There’s also several spots throughout this level where we have to wallrun across large gaps and it’s intended that you jump from one wall to another, which we technically do, but we’re sure to jump off of them immediately in order to perform wall kicks for the speed boost. For as much of this level as possible, Bryon plays in the present time because there are fewer enemies to worry about running into or taking damage from, but because of how fast they’re travelling, Bryon is for the most part playing in whatever time they need to be in to get through the mission. After doing eight consecutive wall jumps here to climb up to the next floor, Bryon is then going to do a bit of waiting and artistic renderings of the Joker, then a bit of platforming, and then a lot more waiting, so let’s take this time to talk about movement mechanics a bit more. So earlier we talked about tap strafing, which lets us preserve a bit more speed than normal when making tight turns while air strafing thanks to tapping W to lurch in our strafing direction. While lurching is used to our benefit with tap strafing, it’s worth repeating that you always lose speed when you incur lurch, even if you’re performing tap strafing, because again, tap strafing just causes us to lose less speed than normal when taking tight air strafe turns. However, one way that losing speed due to lurches can be remediated is with a piece of tech called the “no lurch double jump,” or NLDJ for short. So say you're air strafing and would like to perform your double jump while maintaining your strafe without incurring lurch. By continuing to hold down the button for the direction you're strafing, and then pressing both the opposite directional button and space at the same time, then releasing one the strafe buttons after the jump, you'll continue to air strafe and perform your double jump without losing any speed. This mainly allows for us to get the extra distance from double jumps without lurching, and can also be used to switch our air strafe direction if needed. If you watch Bryon’s inputs when they’re slaloming about, you can see them pressing down the opposite directional keys while jumping to change what direction they’re strafing without lurching and losing speed. So an upcoming big open room is referred to by runners as Hell room, and it has a zipline in it that you’re supposed to ride, but Bryon is going to perform a strat called “Hell Room Zipless” where by building up enough speed with some grenade damage boosts, they can clear the entire zipline gap without having to actually ride it. Hell Room Zipless is one of the, if not the hardest strats in the whole game. As we exit Hell room we perform a trick called “Snuggle Slide” that causes us to gain a ton of speed, and it’s best if we let Bryon explain this one. So, in Titanfall 2 when you land on a moving surface, when you land on it you don’t just catch the platform instantly, it’ll give you some compensation in the opposite direction of the platform to more accurately simulate what it would be like landing on a moving platform. And because this platform is moving so fast, and so quickly, and we’re sliding on it, that calculation, I think, might be happening multiple times in the span of a second. As well, the platform is just moving really fast so the compensation just slings you in the other direction. Thanks Bryon, everyone say “thanks Bryon” in the comments and make sure you spell it right, also I rewound a moment so we can actually process Snuggle Slide as it happens here. Now that we’re actually out of Hell room though, we’re going to enter a dirty hole and try to avoid any burns that may occur due to our speed. After we land and fully regain our clarity, we’re just a little bit of platforming and one door-opening-robit away from the end of Effect and Cause part two, which leads us into the finale of this mission, Effect and Cause part three. In part three, Bryon’s going to perform an incredibly fascinating glitch called “timestop.” Up front, timestop does two things: freeze enemies in place and make it so that we can clip through walls. Effect and Cause has both the present and past maps existing at the same time in the game and they’re stacked vertically with one very high in the sky and the other very low, and you’re transported between them when phasing through time. In a moment Bryon will both phase through time and interact with a panel to progress the mission at the same time, which breaks where the game sends us in the other timeline map, and instead of bringing us to the same location in the other map, puts us way up in the skybox. This allows us to clip through walls like right here, because when we phase through time with our momentum, rather than running into walls in the other map, we’re in the skybox where there are no walls so we can pass through where a wall would be before switching back to the other timeline. After playing around on frozen enemies and getting flashbanged, time is now frozen for story reasons and not because of the timestop glitch, and we’ll be platforming on debris frozen in air, and at one point Bryon is going to perform a skip called “Ship Skip'' where they do a wall kick off a super small piece of debris, saving two seconds if performed successfully, and losing 17 seconds if failed. So, what’s happening in the story right now? Well, we sort of broke time because we destroyed this superweapon called the Fold Weapon that the IMC was going to use to destroy Militia planets. The Fold Weapon utilizes time-displacement technology to destroy things, which explains why time was all wonky near it. When we destroyed it just now, time froze for a moment, and we take this moment to scan the power source to learn more about it. From this scan we learn that there’s actually an even bigger Fold Weapon and it’s powered by a piece of alien technology called the Ark, which turns out to be the glowy thing we just scanned, so now our main goal in the game is to destroy the other Fold Weapon to save Militia planets. Once done with the scanning, we’re brought back into the present time and welcomed home by BT before being brought into the next mission, The Beacon. Now the start of The Beacon is easily Bryon’s favorite part of the speedrun and they have zero contempt for it. One of the reasons why they love it so much is that after we rock climb with BT and hop off of him, we have to try and get past BT to run in front of him right away. This is because BT is slow and will block us, and if we can get ahead of him then we can book it to our objective. This is easier said than done though, and it looks a lot easier than it is, because while it seems that Bryon just does a quick wallrun around BT, the angle on it is pretty tight and the terrain is super awkward and it’s very easy to bonk or mantle on something and just fall behind BT and lose time. After Bryon successfully does that though, they’re in the clear to make their way to link up with some members of the Militia that are hunkered down so we can send a distress beacon to the Militia fleet and get assistance with taking down the Fold Weapon. This is all actually setup to a big dialogue skip, whereby passing BT and getting to the Militia base and clearing out the enemies there, then returning to BT before his dialogue with the Militia begins, we end up skipping over 45 seconds of dialogue because all of the gameplay triggers are met by the time the game does the first check for them. Now while Bryon sets up this skip and slaloms through a big fart cloud, I think it’s worth mentioning that if you have any interest in learning this game as a speedrun, or would just like to watch more in-depth content breaking down the movement and routing of this run, then Bryonato has an incredibly detailed tutorial on their YouTube channel. The tutorial is all collected in a playlist they’ve made, and spans 22 videos and over nine hours of watchtime. Bryon breaks down all the lines you should take through the levels and even goes over the fine details like what parts of terrains to avoid if you want to keep up speed and also breaks down their inputs to a higher level. So if you want to check that out, there’s a link to their YouTube channel in the description, and the tutorial playlist is featured as a panel. Additionally, you may want to check out SwayLouie’s tutorial series that I’ve linked in the description as well. Louie’s tutorials are a bit more brief and direct if that’s what gets your rocks off, but are super informative all the same. Back to the run, we’re now in the little Militia base, and on our way to here with BT we picked up and equipped our next loadout which is the Ronin loadout, and is easily the coolest loadout in the game because it has a big sword. We now have to sit and listen to the leader of this group talk about how if we had an Arc Tool, they could reactivate the Beacon to send the distress signal, but they don’t have an Arc Tool, however we can find one deep down in the Beacon’s power grid, which is where we’re going to head after this conversation to enter the Beacon part two. During this dialogue, something cool to mention is that one time someone accidentally clipped out of the room we’re in and was able to then get out-of-bounds and just run to the mission end trigger, fully skipping this mission, but it hasn’t been recreated since, and it’s suspected that it may have occurred because the person was playing on pirated software. So after the chit-chat comes to an end and we exit part one of the Beacon, we’re coming to the part of the run that wins the award of “what you’re most likely to see Bryonato practicing if you tune into one of their Titanfall 2 streams.” It’s such a movement heavy segment that this two minute stretch of gameplay has a 69 minute tutorial in the tutorial playlist I mentioned a moment ago. Additionally, while Bryonato dislikes The Beacon part one, part two is their favorite part of the entire run because of how fun it is to play. After a wall kick off of a railing to continue to build up speed, we head into our first narrow wall kick corridor where after three quick wall kicks, Bryon takes a hairpin turn without ever touching the ground. At the end of this quick wall kick straightaway, we pick up the Softball, which is a sticky grenade launcher, and then Bryon tases himself on the wall to deathwarp back to the checkpoint to perform a skip called “Kill Room Skip.” By wallrunning on a vertical pipe to reach a wall where we perform both an edge boost and a damage boost, and then performing the wall jump arc, we get just enough distance to reach the other side of the gap, fully skipping a kill room where we’d have to kill six enemies to progress, saving about ten seconds. Kill room skip is incredibly difficult to perform because it not only relies on getting an edge boost as we did, but you also have to shoot the Softball in the right spot to get a good damage boost, where ideally the Softball is as close to the edge as possible and also slightly below you so you get lifted up slightly by the blast. Here we destroy the robit holding the Arc Tool that we came down here for, and we can now begin making our way back to the entrance of this area. So the Arc Tool fires a laser that activates and deactivates turbines and switches, and the movement throughout the rest of this mission is just so freaking smooth, utilizing the turbines for extra speed where possible, and is just very satisfying to watch. At one point Bryon is going to perform one of the more difficult skips in the game which is called “Heat Sink Skip.” Bryon uses a visual cue to pull a frag here and throw it at a specific spot and jump from a rail as it explodes, allowing them to reach a bridge on the other side of a room we were supposed to go through where we would raise a bunch of walls to block a turbine, saving around 15-20 seconds. With Heat Sink Skip taken care of, I’ll let you enjoy the last ten seconds or so of this fast paced movement commentary-free. So once we’ve exited the bowels of the Beacon, we begin part three of the mission, which opens with a bit more waiting before we can actually use the Arc Tool to power up the Beacon. Also, fun fact, part three of the Beacon has one third of all the timesave that Mandarin gives us, saving about 12 seconds overall. While we wait, let’s talk about another more advanced piece of movement tech. Back to lurches, another place where lurches can occur and result in speed loss is when you’re wallrunning and want to convert your wallrun into an airstrafe in one of the horizontal directions. Intuitively, this would require you to jump off the wall, and then begin strafing once you’re in air, which would result in a lurch and a decrease in velocity. By instead holding forward and a strafe direction while wallrunning, then jumping and releasing the forward input and beginning the strafe in the held direction, you begin your strafe immediately without incurring lurch. This is called a “no-lurch wall jump,” or NLWJ for short. The common theme around no-lurch tech is that you're releasing keypresses to strafe, rather than inputting them, since the input is what causes lurch in the first place. So it looks like Bryon had no issue with powering up the Beacon, and there’s actually going to be even more waiting now, so let’s cover one more piece of movement tech that is kinda like the cherry on top. So I know that the movement tech that we’ve explained so far is already really complicated, so let’s make it even a little more complex with a piece of tech called “strafe kicks.” Alternatively called a “no-lurch wall kick,” strafe kicks are pretty essential to being a top runner of Titanfall 2, and there are several ways to perform them. In essence though, a strafe kick is a variation of a wall kick, which as we talked about earlier, is jumping off the wall within five ticks of getting on it for a slight speedboost. The thing that makes strafe kicking unique, is that when you go to perform the wallrun, you need to hold both W and one of the side directional keys as you enter the wallrun. Then, as you begin the wallrun and go to perform the wall kick, you let go of W and begin strafing immediately as you come off the wall. This allows us to get the speedboost we normally would from a wall kick and transition into strafing without any lurches. Alright, I think that caps off most of the individual pieces of movement tech that we’ll be covering throughout the run. While running towards the big structure, Bryon switches to the Brute loadout, which is the one with the Hover ability, in preparation for a glitch called “moon boots.” When they run up to the door in front of us, Bryon is going to Hover and disembark from BT while we’re in the Hover animation. Disembarking while hovering is unintentional, and we’re only able to do it here because we wedge ourselves under an outcropping on the doorway, and doing this makes it so that our gravity as Jack Cooper is reduced by about 15%. You can see we get a bit more hang time with each jump right now. This leads into what’s probably the coolest and most well-known trick and skip in this speedrun, Super Fastball. Normally, we have a bonding moment here with BT where we perform the Fastball maneuver where he throws us to the hanging wall across the gap where we’re supposed to wallrun and then traverse a giant play area on foot towards an object we want to yoink to repair a satellite dish for our beacon to get out. With Moon Boots activated and by holding space while we’re being thrown, Bryon is able to get extra height on the throw, letting us fly over the intended path, opening the door to skipping this entire area. If you watch Bryon’s movement and inputs, you’ll notice a few NLDJs in this stretch here, which if you remember from earlier is where Bryon is able to change the direction they’re air strafing when performing a double jump by holding both side directional buttons at once before releasing one. As we approach the end, Bryon is going to throw a grenade called a Gravity Star to a specific location ahead of us with precise timing so that as we pass the Gravity Star, it detonates, allowing us to damage boost all the way to the good Uplink Module. The reason we need the module is that when we powered up the Beacon, the satellite dish that we’re using to send the distress message didn’t fully align and activate due to a damaged Uplink Module, and the failed activation will alert the IMC to our position so that’s not good. With the replacement module secured, Bryon starts making their way back to BT by first chucking another Gravity Star out in front of themselves to get a giant boost in speed once they cross paths with it. The Gravity Star boost is followed by Bryon having to nail the strafing and wall kicks in this section, which allows for us to end up skipping having to grab the zipline at the end of this stretch, which is unsurprisingly called “zipless,” which saves 15 seconds. As Bryon completes the zipless strat and approaches the platform BT is on without riding the zipline, they throw two quick Gravity Stars to damage an enemy called a Reaper that just dropped in because it turns out the IMC did indeed hear our distress message and wants to mess with us. Bryon is now going to clear out all the enemies that are spawning which consists of mostly throwing haymakers over and over, shooting some rockets here and there, and gunning down infantry units that spawn. We don’t have to clear out all the enemies here before being able to progress, but it’s much faster if we do. This is because we need to install the replacement Uplink Module, and the panel that we interact with slowly lowers over time, and by clearing out the enemies it becomes reachable much faster. While Bryon clears out the enemies, it’s time for a quiz! I hope you’ve been paying attention, and I even gave you a warning earlier that this was coming, but here we go. The question is: tap strafing, what is it? Is it: A. A method of tapping W to build up speed from a standstill. B. A method of tapping A or D while air strafing to build extra speed from our strafe. C. A method of tapping W while strafing to make tight turns. Or D. Tap strafing isn’t a thing, I made it up just for this question and lied about mentioning it earlier. 5 seconds on the clock, leave your answer in the comments. If you said D. then congratulations, you’re the worst, the actual answer is C! Alright so after clearing out all of the enemies, Bryon needs to make their way up to the satellite dish on top of this structure to install the new Uplink Module, and normally you’re supposed to do another Fastball maneuver with BT to get up there. Instead, Bryon did a shimmy with a series of wall jumps to skip the Fastball and reach the top quickly which is a skip called “Dish Climb,” saving close to a minute. Bryon reached the top just as the panel with the Uplink Module came into range so we can install it, but we kinda forgot that the module will cause the satellite dish to move again, and causes us to slide off and need to be saved by BT, but it leads to one of the cutest character moments in gaming. We can now make our way back to meet up with the Militia that are holed up in that makeshift base we were in a little bit ago, but as we approach it we’ll be ambushed by several enemy Reapers that will drop in, and this is when we get to bust out that big sword I mentioned earlier that comes with the Ronin loadout, turning this speedrun into a Gundam anime. Bryon will take out the first two Reapers with the sword right as they drop in, and after taking them out, Bryon will control where the next batch of Reapers will spawn and drop in by looking at a specific spot. By charging up an Arc Wave while looking in the specific spot, the Reapers will drop in as Bryon unleashes the Arc Wave, allowing them to chop the two of them up quickly before cleaning up the last one with our shotgun. Bryon then looks to a specific spot to control where the next two Titans will spawn in, and Bryon prepares them a welcome gift by switching to the Scorch loadout and laying down some Incendiary Traps. Bryon also lays down a Firewall and baits the Titans into standing on it while Bryon throws up their Thermal Shield to soak up and deal damage. We then switch back to the manga build and blast the distant Titan with the shotgun to lead into the big boss battle against an enemy Pilot named Richter. So because we’re in our anime loadout, then after Richter spawns in and we get a free sword swing on him, then we have to stand there and let Richter reveal himself and give a quick speech even though we could totally just end the fight right now when Richter is outside of his suit. And to think if we weren’t in anime mode then this trope could be avoided. Right when the fight actually starts, Bryon throws out an Arc Wave, shoots Richter once, and then uses the sword again as our Sword Core ability becomes available, which increases our melee damage by 75%. Richter then uses his nuke eject ability to self-destruct his Titan and ejector seat himself, but his seat malfunctions and he’s caught up in the blast, ending the fight. So this brings us to the end of the mission, where we re-enter the control room and BT has a conversation with the adults while Bryon plays with grenades. So this time when we attempt to contact the Militia fleet, it succeeds thanks to our efforts in repairing the satellite dish. This makes the screen fade to black, and it’ll fade back in as BT is having a conversation with Sarah Briggs, who’s one of the commanders in the Militia. BT lets Briggs know about Lastimosa’s death and how we were linked to BT because of the circumstances and Briggs says that she’ll transfer BT a new pilot. BT rejects this idea though because of all we’ve accomplished together, and if the game weren’t currently in Mandarin, you’d hear BT say, word for word, “yo teach, that’s wickity wack, you should see the shit that Coop do, he jumped through time and shit and then also turned into a baseball.” It’s because of this line that Briggs displays visual confusion and decides to keep us linked with BT because she figures BT is defective and not worth an actual Pilot. We then all mount up and leave for the next mission, which is the beginning of the all-out assault on the Ark to destroy the superweapon that the IMC has. This next mission, Trial by Fire, opens with another cutscene, and it’s at this point that you’ve likely realized that this run consists of a lot of cutscenes. If you think this run is cool and would like to watch other runs of it but without cutscenes, it’s worth mentioning that there is an Any% No Cutscenes category that is about 24 minutes faster than the standard Any% run. Bryon holds the record in that too, so feel free to check it out on their channel. So once we stick the landing in our deployment to the battlefield, Bryon switches to the Ronin loadout and dashes up the battlefield while blocking with the sword which reduces 70% of the damage we take, and also uses the Phase Dash ability to make up some more ground without taking damage, just proving how differently the Normandy Beach invasion could have been if the Allies had recruited weebs. Once Bryon waltzes through the enemy structure that has no collision because it’s a segment of the wall that gets destroyed in the next sequence, they wait for the onslaught of bullets to stop, then switch to the Scorch loadout and throws up the Thermal Shield once a bunch of enemy Titans spawn. Bryon has to clear out a certain number of Titans that spawn in two waves to progress the mission, which they’ll do pretty handedly with a combination of the Thermal Shield, throwing down Flamewalls, and using our Flame Core ult whenever possible. This loop repeats itself as Bryon needs to clear out a couple more Titans in this open combat area, before they’ll then switch back to the Ronin loadout and head inside to take out some more enemy Titans. Our one-person army charge continues, and many of you may be asking why we have to take out all these enemies and why we can’t just run to the next objective. The reason is that we’re performing this charge with Sarah Briggs, the person from the last mission that BT spoke gracefully with, and the first half of this mission is an escort mission with her. The location that we’re running to with Briggs is an elevator, and once we get on the elevator, we have to wait for Briggs. Briggs is straight up bloodlusted though, and will get distracted by any enemies in her way, so we have to be sure to clear out all of the enemy Titans so that once we finally arrive at the elevator, Briggs won’t get distracted by anything and will come straight to the elevator with us. In the case of this run, we end up getting a bit ahead of Briggs so when Bryon arrives at the elevator we still have to wait a little bit, but something worth mentioning is that while Bryon may be using their core abilities that are our ults like Flame Core and Swore Core throughout most of the mission so far, they hold onto their last core that they charge up before the elevator in anticipation for after the elevator ride. This is because the Ronin core ability, Sword Core, not only increases our melee attack damage, it also greatly reduces the recharge time on our dash. This comes in handy big time in a moment because we don’t need to worry about Briggs after the elevator ride and we can run just straight to the end of the level. So we’ve finally made it to the elevator I keep mentioning, but Briggs is spending some time galavanting about, forcing us to wait just a little bit for her to arrive at the elevator and begin our ride up. Bryon is visibly distraught by this timeloss. As the elevator approaches the top, Bryon will use the Hover ability in the Brute loadout to fly to the top slightly before the elevator reaches it to save a few seconds, and then swaps to the Ronin loadout and immediately uses Sword Core so they can spam dashes with the reduced recharge time and essentially Naruto Run through the rest of the level. The Phase Dash ability comes in handy during this segment as well because there are a couple moments where there are enemies that like to block our path, but Bryon can just Phase Dash to get past them with no issue. If you watch the circular gauge in the bottom left corner you can see how much of our core we have left, and we ran out a moment ago, so here Bryon shifted their focus from moving through the level to building back up our core by attacking some enemies to fully get our core recharged. After using Sword Core again to start Naruto Running, we’re brought into the final stretch of the level where we just run straight to a cutscene trigger where we’re going to see the Ark being loaded onto a ship, meaning that we didn’t make it in time and the Ark is being brought to the superweapon for use. You’d think that if we weren’t forced to stop in our tracks every time there was a little cutscene like this that we could’ve made it into the ship with them, but it is what it is I guess. After Bryon expresses their anger and disgust with BT, we’re then brought into the penultimate mission in the game, The Ark. The start of this mission has us standing in place with a missile launcher as we make our way towards the Fold Weapon, and we have about a minute of waiting here before any action, so while Bryon takes out their frustrations on Sarah Briggs by doing some target practice with emphatic nodding or shaking of their head for each success or failure of their shot, I’d like to take this minute to just say thank you to everyone who continues to support the channel on Patreon. I know that this video took a long time to make, and I apologize for that, but you Patrons continue to choose to support this channel monetarily month to month and that means more than you can imagine, so again, thank you. If you want to support the channel monetarily, Patreon is the best way to do so, and for as little as one dollar a month you get access to videos early, and occasional updates on videos as they’re being made. It’s entirely unnecessary to do, and by no means required, but thank to those of you who do it anyways. So back to the run, in like thirty seconds an enemy Pilot named Viper is going to show up and destroy a bunch of our ships, causing us to fall, and after we eventually stop falling and land on a ship, Bryon is going to perform a really tricky trick called “Barker Skip.” Bryon is going to align themselves on a specific part of the ship we land on, and then at a specific audio cue will pull a grenade and then throw it, followed by then jumping off the ship and using the grenade to damage boost themselves over to a nearby ship that’s called the 6-4. Once Bryon lands on the 6-4, they have to run around in circles for a moment or two because the game may register their movement as falling due to how the 6-4 moves, and the way the game checks to see if you fell off a ship is based on how far you fall, so if you don’t run around, then the game may think you’re falling, and might just kill you randomly. Once the 6-4 moves to a more opportune position, Bryon can then make the jump to the nearby big ship that we would eventually have been brought to, which is something called “6-4 Skip,” and in conjunction with Barker Skip, saves around 45 seconds. Inside the ship, Bryon slidehops across the room they’re in to get to an elevator that’s opening, taking out a couple enemies along the way for safety, and then cloaks as the elevator opens so they can sneak past those enemies and ride the elevator up safely. As the elevator goes up, we stand in the back corner so that we can build up a little bit of speed as the doors open to have momentum going into the next area, where our goal is to take out the enemies manning the ships Medium Turrets. We’re supposed to take out all three sets of turrets, but we only need to clear the third one to advance. The clearing out of enemies at the turret is pretty straightforward with one charged grenade and a couple shotgun shots doing most of the work, but one of the enemies survives the initial shots, upsetting Bryon, and causing them to pull an Antonio Margheriti on the enemy’s body. We then have to wait a moment for the crew of the 6-4 to zipline in after we did all the hard work, so while they do that, Bryon positions themself on a nearby railing and looks down forebodingly at a ship piloted by Sarah Briggs that’s way below us. Once the ship begins to rise, Bryon begins to fall to land on the ship and jump into the nearby hangar-looking area. This strat of dropping onto the ship skips having to wait for Briggs to fly the ship all the way up where we’d then wallrun on it. So in this upcoming hangar there’s a bunch of enemies that we have to clear out, but we only really have to clear out specific ones because the 6-4 is coming in behind us and they can take care of certain enemies on their own, so Bryon goes through this area taking out only as many enemies as they have to. Once we’re done with all the enemies down here, then Bryon will head on up to the top floor of the walkways where they’ll have to wait for one straggling member of the 6-4 to slowly waddle their way up to where we’re at before we can progress. Waiting for the member of the 6-4 takes awhile, so while we wait I want to say again that I hope you’re doing well. I know that I said this closer to the start of the video, but seriously, I hope you’re doing well. I often talk about how feelings of despair don’t define you, and that’s mostly because there was a point in my life where hearing that would have helped a ton, and I want to help out anyone who may be in a similar situation now, but heavy stuff aside, I hope the little things are good for you too. And if you don’t have a ton to complain about but still had a rough week, like you got a flat tire or something, it’s totally okay to talk with people about that and say you had a rough week. It’s totally normal to talk about how you feel with people and please remember that expressing your feelings does not make you a burden to others. Also, I’m giving you all the homework assignment of calling or messaging a friend or family member and just asking how they’ve been. I call my grandma every day to just chat and it increases quality of life by 250% Back to the run, once our standoff with these enemies comes to a conclusion, Bryon will immediately run inside the cockpit and run up to the control panel where they use their knife to disable this ship’s Heavy Turrets and also steer the ship we’re on to be behind the Draconis, which is the ship with the Ark on it. With the Heavy Turrets taken out, BT is now able to be dropped onto our ship and we’ll be reunited with our buddy by him depressurizing the cabin before we embark. As BT depressurizes the cabin, Bryon stands away from the window because if we stand by the window, then because we did Barker Skip, the game will crash. Once we get in BT, we’re ready to board the Draconis and retrieve the Ark, but instead we get interrupted by Viper, the Pilot that took out all the ships earlier, and a boss fight ensues. To start the boss fight, which is against Viper and two Scorch Titans, Bryon is going to focus their fire on the Scorches, firing at them as they hop onto the ship to get some early damage in, and then firing pop shots at them to get them to activate their Thermal Shield abilities to get it out of the way. Once Bryon gets the Titans’ health low enough, they deliver the finishing blows via a left jab, with the second Titan falling into the depths like Mufasa. For taking out the actual boss though, Bryon switches to the Ion loadout and uses the Laser Core ability, which allows them to quickly melt through all of Viper’s health. That’s totally the last we see of Viper, won’t be seeing them again, and after a brief moment of dialogue, we prepare to perform another Fastball maneuver with BT. Oh no, it’s Viper, who could have ever seen this coming, not me that’s who! We have to sit for a moment and watch Viper and BT tussle, but once we gain control, Bryon will slidehop up the ship to where Viper will rip off BT’s arm and stumble backwards, after which Viper jumps back at BT and we double jump because otherwise we get knocked down, so double jumping skips that animation. Viper’s chassis then opens up and we’re able to unload on them to actually get rid of them for good this time, and that’s something worth celebrating as Bryon does here. We still have to get the Ark though, and BT just doesn’t have any sense of urgency as we wait at the hatch to enter the ship, and BT just drunkenly stumbles over, which is just pathetic, like you’ve got no excuse dude. Once we’re down in the ship, we’ll be in a hallway and make our way down to the end where the Ark is located, and then after waiting for BT to finally make his way to the room, we’ll watch a cutscene of us securing the Ark in the chest of BT for safe keeping, but that doesn’t last very long as the Draconis is crashing, and BT shields us from the impact. We’ll then be captured by the main bad guy of the Apex Predators, Kuben Blisk and taken to a facility near the Fold Weapon for interrogation, finishing off this mission and leading into the final mission of the game, The Fold Weapon. There’s a lot of cutscene here though so we’re going to fast forward through this, and the next mission also opens with a pretty lengthy cutscene and some dialogue so we’ll be fast forwarding through that as well, because otherwise we’d be sitting here in silence for a bit because it’s always hard finding things to talk about near the end of a run where there are big set-pieces without much actual player input and most things have already been explained. So the final mission opens with us being interrogated and we’re nearly executed, but BT attempts to save us but that just results in the enemy securing the Ark and destroying BT’s chassis. There is one small timesave to explain here though that saves about five seconds. Once we gain control, we’re supposed to walk up to BT and talk to him, and normally he doesn’t start talking for a moment, but by immediately holding S to walk backwards when we gain control and walking far enough back so that we go into a nearby fire and then walking forward, we activate BT’s dialogue early. BT then uses his final bit of energy to rip his face off to give us his AI core, along with a survival kit that contains a new Data Knife and also a Smart Pistol which I’m a bit upset we couldn’t have used throughout the rest of the game. While we may have a Smart Pistol, which is just straight busted, this intro segment after we gain control is a bit tricky because if you mess up and die, then the game softlocks. Once we get moving, Bryon mashes space while going up stairs to get up them a bit quicker, and then will perform several wall kicks in a row to get moving down the corridor as we progress through the level, using the Smart Pistol to take out enemies when necessary to prevent them from getting in our way. Once we’re outside, Bryon’s going to do some slidehopping and air strafing to bring us to a zipline that we’ll ride before heading back inside. Back inside, we’ll be in a white hallway with a couple tight corners, and instead of spamming wall kicks through this stretch, Bryon tries to move straight forward as much as possible, using wall kicks to change the direction we’re heading at the corners, giving us more optimal lines. This next area consists of Bryon performing three wall kicks to span the distance that’s supposed to be covered by like six wallruns. This will bring us back to outside where we’re going to pretty much skip a bunch of enemies and combat by going over them thanks to our speed and a wall kick off of some big pipes on the right side of the area. Once we make it to the other side, Sarah Briggs sends down an empty chassis for us to put BT’s memory core into for us to be reunited with our pal as we make our way to the Fold Weapon to stop Blisk and his sidekick named Slone. After we enter BT quickly from behind, several enemy Titans will show up nearby. We don’t need to kill them, but we do have a bit of distance to cover before we reach our objective so we’re going to popshot some of these Titans while moving through them to build up our core meter, so we can then switch to Ronin and use Sword Core to get the fast charging dash so we can get to our objective quickly. When we eventually get to where we’re done running, we’re going to perform a skip called “Door Skip.” So normally what happens near the end of this running stretch is there’s an area with a bunch of Titans that you have to clear out, and then a door will open for you to progress. The thing is though is that there’s a gap in the collision just above the door that will open, so by positioning ourselves in generally the middle of the door and then disembarking from BT, we can fling ourselves just above the door and through the gap, skipping all that combat. We now will slalom down a hallway with Bryon weaving left and right to avoid enemies that are running into the hallway from rooms on the side. There are a ton of them and if you don’t avoid them properly, there’s a good chance of experiencing the downside of mortality. After running up a ramp, Bryon performs an edge boost off a wall on the right side, followed by a wall kick on the left to clear a railing without mantling. We’re in the home stretch of this movement spree, and once we arrive at the door at the end, we’re brought into a cutscene of Blisk and Slone, after which we’ll be put back into BT since we were supposed to be in BT when we started the cutscene. After the cutscene formally introducing us to Slone, Bryon will immediately switch to Ronin and throw out an Arc Wave, followed by emptying our shotgun rounds into her. This will be followed by thoroughly routed combat using the Brute loadout to build our core meter, and using the Scorch loadout to do loads of damage to Slone and other enemy Titans, followed by some more Ronin use, and then finishing her off with the Scorch loadout again. So these strats we’re going to use to kill off Slone are so fast that we’ll finish her off ahead of the scripted dialogue that’s playing over the PA system, and by interacting with the Ark Injector before the PA says the dialogue where it says 97%, we skip waiting for the Fold Weapon to charge up, saving around 11 seconds in a skip that’s called “PreCharge.” PreCharge leads into a major skip though, the biggest one since Super Fastball was discovered in 2017, “AndyShot”. Bryon will charge up their Sword Core as they’re killing Slone, and by using Sword Core the moment that they interact with the Ark Injector, what happens is that we still have our core active and therefore a weapon active as we head into the cutscene. This means that the game gives us a weapon for the cutscenes that we’re not supposed to have out, and when BT powers back up, our weapon switches to our big weapon. So, we’ll have out our big Titan weapon out during the cutscene and be able to use it. Later in this cutscene then, Blisk will appear, hop out of his Titan, and land on BT to talk to us about joining the Apex Predators. Bryon will take that opportunity to fire our big weapon to headshot Blisk, instantly killing him and skipping 33 seconds of dialogue. This means that AndyShot officially makes Apex Legends no longer canon. At the end of this cutscene, we load ourselves inside of the BFG 10000 to launch ourselves into the Ark to destroy the Fold Weapon, but not before doing one final Fastball maneuver for old-times sake to save us. This leads into the final gameplay stretch of the run, where we navigate all the stuff that’s flying around as everything is getting destroyed and melting down. Right away, we do a quick wall kick to gain speed, and then after a wallrun we just jump forward without running on anything else because by just flying forward and air strafing, we eventually hit the trigger to fall to the next platform. There we land in a slide, leading into some sliehops and a wall kick on the flying rubble. After some more air strafing, we make a huge leap with an NLDJ thrown into the middle as we air strafe for what seems like an eternity before making our final leap and flying out into the end of mission trigger where we lose control of Jack Cooper and begin the cutscene where we’re rescued, officially ending the run. So, if you’ve made it to the end of this video, thank you so much on behalf of both myself and bryonato. I do apologize for how long it took to make, but I’ve been talking with Bryon about making this video for over a year now, and I just wanted to get it right, and I’m really glad we were finally able to present this awesome speedrun to you. Titanfall 2 is a great example of how deep the movement in speedruns can get, and even though some of the strats are hard to notice, all the tech just stacks on one another to flesh out one of the deepest movement toolboxes in speedrunning, which is why I’m such a fan of it as a speedrun. Additionally, Bryon’s an incredible person and I can’t recommend their stuff to you all enough, so please do check out their socials, links are in the description. That’s all for this video though, let me know your thoughts in the comments or join my Discord and let me know there, link is also in the description. This was an Any% speedrun of Titanfall 2, I’ve been tomatoanus, and I hope you have an above average day.

Channel: tomatoanus

Views: 1,690,937

Keywords: titanfall 2 speedrun, titanfall 2, speedrun, bryonato, speedrun explained, world record speedrun, titanfall 3, any% speedrun, heavy commentary, world record, speedrun fails, games done quick, gdq, heavy commentary speedrun, bloodthunder titanfall 2 speedrun, fps, respawn, apex legends

Id: 23_1uqeLCGE

Length: 76min 25sec (4585 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021