so ive been reading in the forum for splinter cell and other various games that allow both quick save and quick load. some people are for it and others are against it. i think its okay but there should be a category for QS/QL and one category without it to please both sides of runners. In my own opinion im against it because you can have an almost perfect run without trying too hard. but if its allowed there should be categories to seperate the two. i just started running this game but havnt posted my times yet. i dont quick save and quick load so my times will not stand up too well to the current times and would like the addition of the categories mentioned above. if not thank you for taking the time to read this. ill still be posting my time eventually lol ;)

The main concern the community has had is that due to having a relatively small amount of numbers, adding to many categories for specific niches would fragment the community to an extent.

Though if you're interested in no QS/QL, chaos theory does actually ban QS/QL in all of its RTA categories.

Also having QS/QL doesn't actually make it that easy to get a perfect time. Because to do that you need to not need it in the first place, since QL doesn't give you the time back.

The great thing about Splinter Cell is that there are numerous ways to run the game: -Hard Difficulty -No Alarms -13 Missions Nothing is preventing you from running any of the categories with any sort of stipulations or allowance. In fact, I was thinking about picking up a new category or two later this year. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the leaderboard may accommodate the category but only if multiple people want it. Otherwise, this would be a "leaderboard" for a personal category (much like how there is no category for the 13 Missions as it would just have my run).

That being said, are you aware that you can simply manual save instead of QS/QL, correct? I hypothesize that no QS/QL simply puts you on the hook for listening to most of the dialogue and some of the more outlandish tricks will possibly be removed, but wouldn't necessarily detract from "an almost perfect run without trying too hard". If you were to have no loading/saving at all in your category, then you would just have the Autosave function set to the beginning of the chapter. This would turn most of the current run into "safety strategies" with a two minute penalty for significant missteps or, more likely, just a lot more resets for higher end runs, given how random the game is at high level play. If you disallow the ability to load Autosave function, good luck.

i get what you all are saying. thank you for clearing it up for me :)

This is an issue that plagued the series from the beginning, in particular Double Agent: Giant lists of categories with 0-1 run(s) per category, most with zero. Even if all the category ideas are perfectly valid, it creates the impression of a ghost town leaderboard and hides runs from newcomers who might not bother to click through all of the categories.

Better to have a shorter list with a decent number of runs to create the impression of an active and participating community for an aging game series with limited numbers of runners.

So I'm just starting to get into speedrunning, with Splinter Cell being one of the first games of choice. While a lot of categories for a game can make for multiple empty leaderboards, a "no QS/QL" category is a popular category, splinter cell or otherwise. As of this post, the no QS/QL category for Chaos Theory is more than the normal any% category. Maybe it wasn't always the case but still, it shows that runners are willing to try out that kind of category.

And of course the stipulation of not being able to quicksave/load may lead to a more "safe" speedrun, but, this is a matter of adding a category rather than replacing it. It's like the hardcore version of speedrunning, which is not for everyone, especially the casual speedrunners. I'd be lying if i said that i don't get annoyed when I see speedrunners of any game having high dependability on quicksaving/loading for certain shortcut strategies, since the repeated re-loading of a save is less about skill and more about trial and error, as all that's happening are slight incremental changes to a player's speedrunning movements/animations/actions/timing/etc. (example that comes to mind is the 2nd level of Splinter Cell 1 in the burning building where you carefully line up your jump wit ur pistol to wall jump over the fire to the person, gurgenidze, that's trapped by debris)

But again, as mentioned in prior post(s), a clutter of categories, whether they are ridiculous, common, very specific or otherwise, can be harmful to a game's leaderboard since most categories might only have 0, 1, maybe 2, submitted runs. Hence, my solution would be to wait for AT LEAST 1 person to submit a run for a category that is yet to exist BEFORE actually making it official; maybe even wait for at least 2 people to submit a run for an unofficial category before actually creating it and making it official.

For me, I just recently became the first person (on this website at least) to complete an Xbox console run (Xbox one specifically) for the first Splinter Cell game. However, it wasn't just a normal run; I went for a No-Alarm + No-Saving/No-Loading unofficial category run. Since version 1 has only been speedrun'd on PC, I imagine that's why the non-main categories (like No-Alarm and No-Damage) don't have their own console/xbox filter. That being said, I think it would be valid in making the type of speedrun I did into an official category for the game, as new categories that pop up with at least 1 person on the leaderboard could garner attention and interest, since the traditional and long-time categories probably contain times by runners who have already studied and practiced the speedrun strat metas which leads to leaderboards with players with all very close times. New categories might be ripe for new strategies/approaches for runs, maybe even new discoveries that could be used for other categories.

So yeah, not trying to re-ignite/continue the arguing within the community or anything, I'm just giving my 2 cents of perspective on speedrunning :)

Hi everyone. I've been following the state of Splinter Cell speedruns since I started running in 2018 and I am now a mod for multiple Splinter Cell games. Let me share my view of things. First of all, let us talk about Chaos Theory to clear some stuff up. There are more No QS/QL runs in there because of the simple reason that it was the default Any% category back in the day and QS/QL was outright banned from the beginning. After I started running the game, I pushed for the change to make QS/QL become a thing. It is now the more popular category by a big margin (except for ILs, where people still prefer No QS/QL). The new Any% was created some time in 2022 if I am not mistaken, so it is still very young.

Now let us get back to Splinter Cell 1. The Splinter Cell 1 community has grown by a lot over the last years and while the community is still tiny, it seems that slowly more and more people are starting to get interested. I pushed for a couple of active runners to get modded (and also became a mod myself at some point) so that some of the rules and categories could get updated for the better. There have been quite a few positive changes very recently and the work is still ongoing. For No QS/QL as a category, I have been in favor of it for quite a while. We are finally at a point where enough runners have expressed interest in it to reasonably allow it to become a separate category. That being said, the active mods have already given the green light to add the category when I talked to them about it. So the good news is that it WILL be added. Just give us a few days (maybe a couple of weeks) to formulate some rules for it so we can introduce it officially. We are quite busy people and some things just take a bit of time. :)