Re: Interesting Research: Speedrunning as Practiced Practice
Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2015 6:19 pm
Well, in the Deus Ex example it causes you to not need to skill up your lockpicking and electronics skills. The way locked stuff works is it has a strength from 1-100%. You have a number of disposable lockpicks and multitools (one for mechanical locks, one for electronic locks) that will reduce the strength of a locked door/keypad by a certain amount based on your skill, but it does so over time. Essentially, when you use a lockpick it spends the next three seconds reducing the strength by a constant amount per second. When you open the inventory the strength keeps being reduced but the time a lockpick is active stops ticking down, so you can leave the inventory open for a good 20 seconds and open any strength lock at the weakest skill. The weakest skill reduces 10% strength per pick, second is 25%, third is 40%, and fourth is I think 70% (no one gets it because it's in a bad spot for breakpoints where you need the same number of picks for half the locks between skill three and four). So a normal runthrough would get skill two or three in both lockpicking and electronics, while if you're willing to exploit this bug you leave both at one, saving a lot of skillpoints that can be spent on other things like weapons or computers.