Hey everyone. I'm kinda new to the whole speed running thing and was a little confused on a few things. If I could get them cleared up, that would be really helpful. :)

I looked at the difficulty settings on the submitted runs and it seems like it doesn't really matter if you pick easy (tell me a story) or harder options. I did see the comments in a thread talking about that a little but I just want to verify that.

I also wanted to check on NG+. It looks like almost all the submitted runs are new but there is one that says in the description it's a NG+. Unfortunately, I can't see the twitch vid to check. Is it okay to use a NG+? I thought it wouldn't be allowed but was thrown off by the submitted one.

Thanks in advance for the info :) Again, I'm really new to all this and really appreciate anyone taking the time to reply. :3

Thank you for the reply. I was a bit worried because I saw that no one is really doing this anymore. :) I was talking more about glitchless runs than glitched.

The NG+ one is the 2nd place run by KuuCullen. I can't see the video (the channel is actually gone, I think :x ) but the description says NG+. I would think that an NG+ could change a few things and make it easier (since items carry over) so I wasn't sure if that would be right to use it.

As for the difficulty, I haven't looked at a lot of the glitched runs so I'm not sure on that part but on glitchless, I would have thought that easy would be too easy but that's fine. :)

Coolsvilla, me and Dr were around when the game first came out and both of us routed the game, you have access to all the skills you need almost from the start of the run when you unlock skills, you can stealth past a lot of sections and use the Icarus dash/sniper exploit to skip even more sections of the game. This being said, Dr is right when he said NG+ is a pretty bad idea for a category since there is nothing gained from it, same for playing on a higher difficulty since you skip combat 95% of the run. Glitchless is fine since there is a decent amount of exploits to run without them but the time difference is only around 10 minutes for either optimized route so even then it's not as popular.

My last run I did before I got distracted with irl stuff and started running others games is basically a glitchless run minus the skip near the very end so the link below is basically what an optimized glitchless run would look like.

Oh no, I definitely don't want a NG+ category or anything. I was just wondering why there was one listed because I would have thought that it wouldn't be allowed and wanted to make sure since I'm new to all this that I was following the rules.

And I also get that there isn't much of a time difference. I simply enjoy playing the game and, since I'm personally not a huge fan of glitched runs (there is no problem with them and I can totally see why people love/like them though!), figured that I would finally start trying to do speedruns with a game I really enjoy playing (even though people view it as boring and I can see that too). I do see what you're saying though about skipping- I didn't realize till I was playing more and more looking for routes that you can skip a large portion of things. :|

I appreciate you guys taking the time to clarify on the rules though :) I will keep that in mind and hopefully have something to submit at some point. :3

No problem, cardinal rule of speedrunning, only run what you truly enjoy playing even if others don't always agree with it. I've seen plenty of frustration of people running a game they don't enjoy or at least don't enjoy anymore :)