Awesome Games Done Quick is the speedrunning equivalent of the Olympics, only more frequent and featuring way more pizza. But what happens when a speedrunner has the equivalent of a loose shoelace?
Semanari was due to complete a tricky Divinity: Original Sin 2 speedrun on Friday, January 11, with an estimated time of 19 minutes on the schedule to complete the game using an old patch.
17 minutes in, Semanari had faced quite a bit of bad luck already, with enemies not dying when they were supposed to, or teleporting away from his attacks. To top it off, he also didn’t have a couch behind him — the usual speedrunner’s companion of fellow runners and people who know the game or his specific run well enough to comment and help out. According to Reddit, his friend couldn’t get a ticket in time, and there wasn’t anyone else available who knew the run.
The Divinity speedrun heavily relies on one thing: Deathfog. In the game, Deathfog is a poisonous gas that kills everyone except skeletons, who are already dead. If you play as a skeletal character, you can carry barrels full of Deathfog with you, dropping them at strategic points to skip battles that might otherwise take too long.
Semanari was one barrel short at 17:50. He couldn’t complete the run without it. But he also didn’t have an earlier save that he could load — he’d saved over all of them to pull off a glitch moments before.
“Uh oh.” Semanari realised his mistake quickly, but there was no way to rectify it without restarting completely — losing his 18 minutes of progress. But there wasn’t time. AGDQ is measured so precisely that the schedule often has games starting at 7:02 and 5:58. GTA: Vice City was up next. There just wasn’t time.
“I would do literally five perfect runs in a row, and then as soon as I’m on the camera I have to restart the game, every single time,” Semanari said on the stream. Luckily, AGDQ is a wholesome place, and the crowd cheered him on even as he berated himself.
“I never had troubles with that area [before],” he wrote on Reddit after his run. “I just didn’t think about making a safety save at the time.” Other commenters were quick to reassure him, saying that being at the mercy of RNG —the Random Number Generation that determines certain events in a game, something a speedrunner can’t control — was “just the nature of speedrunning.”
Speedruns are great when they’re pulled off in their entirety, but even the speedruns that fail are still testaments to the runner’s skill.
Comments
8 responses to “This Failed Divinity: Original Sin 2 Speedrun Is Heartbreaking”
It would be great to be given a timestamp from the video you post. But I guess that’s a lot of work.
Press the button on the left of play, will give a chapter select for each run, otherwise the timestamp is 34:47:00.
His comment was more aimed at the article author, who was apparently too busy to take 2 minutes to give us a timestamp or a direct time link so instead expects us to search through a 44 hour video to find it ourselves.
yeah, i understood the statement clearly, but i still presented the information for ease for others.
And I appreciate your help. I was able to see the clip only because of you. It would be nice if the author would take the time to even say what you did. Not all of us know how GDQ/twitch works.
over dramatised.. the guy looks for a save file that isnt there, pulls plug.. next game is brought in after 1 callout from the audience and 1 drawn out back-pat by the host..
This article could have been better if the focus was on failed speedruns, not just this one speedrun that frankly, was near forgotten almost immediately
props to the speedrunner for presenting their craft infront of an audience. unfortunate result, but like the comentator points out – these things happen from time to time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To make it even worse is the fact that having a speed run fail at GDQ automatically bans you from ever running at the event again.
That’s news to me, is that rule written somewhere? I had a search but couldn’t find anything.
Don’t know if it is publicly written anywhere, I heard it mentioned on twitch once from a speed runner whose done GDQ a few times. Maybe they were joking though, who knows?