Dark Cloud has and always will be one of my favorite games and speedruns ever, but I’ve basically had to stop running it due to the detrimental health effects it has on my body since the game has little to no downtime to allow breaks mid-run. Back when I was running any% glitchless a few years ago I was still somewhat able to deal with what essentially amounted to a 8+ hr run without meaningful breaks, but no more.
These days I deal with chronic back pain and a bladder that definitely isnt what it used to be when I first started speedrunning longer games 4-5 years ago. What I’m proposing is a discussion to allow breaks during longer categories where you are allowed to pause the timer to take a stretch or restroom break. Not only is this better for all of our health but it will also make the longer categories more accessible and appealing to others.
An example would be that no excessive pausing would be allowed and any points in the run where you choose to take such a break should be clearly timestamped in the run description.
Maybe we allow 1 minute per hour of your run time (so 6 hrs and you get 6 minutes of “pausing” or maybe a set 5-10 minutes to use as you see fit. Maybe have a second timer in your livesplit that displays how much break time you have taken or only display it during an actual break.
Idk, maybe I’m just speaking for myself here but as we all get older I find it harder and harder to find the ability to do runs of this game, and maybe implementing something such as an allowed break rule will rejuvenate peoples ambitions to start or continue running this game. Thoughts?
While I do understand the desire to take breaks in longer runs like these, I personally am not in agreement with allowing breaks in an RTA run. Including breaks with paused timer would basically mean that the runs submitted with breaks would leave the conventional rules of RTA and become segmented runs, due to the timer being stopped and started again. Allowing breaks that don't count against your time also sort of sets the current times on the leaderboard at a disadvantage, since they were all set without that rule to benefit their runs.
You can always take breaks during a run of course, but I personally feel it should count against your time.. After all, it only makes your run arbitrarily faster for pauses during breaks, since the same amount of time passes irl regardless.
I feel that preparation and time management are another important part and skill demonstrated during these longer RTA runs, and I feel that that skill will also not be able to be properly represented without being disadvantaged if breaks were made not to count against your final time. I also believe there's plenty of places to take decent stretch/quick bathroom breaks. There's a 49 second break in Brownboo after Matataki, a 55 second break from entering the submarine for the first time in queens, and a 3 minute break after Sun and Moon temple where cutscenes play with no prompts to mash text. Basically after each dungeon there's a decent opportunity for a quick breather.
Saving time and in turn ultimately having less time needed for breaks in dark cloud is just highly dependent on weapon RNG in the first two dungeons/the route you chose to run with, if you reset to get the bandit slingshot within those two dungeons it shaves hours off of the run and can make a run on average an hour or more shorter in most cases.
As much as I understand and wouldn't mind having breaks myself during such a long game such as this one, I also agree with Glitchedd on it turning into segmented runs and no longer RTA. Plus the unfairness to the current runs on the leaderboard as they had to do the full runs with only the breaks the game provides, making them liable for more mistakes during the run in comparison.
This sort of thing would have been one of those topics that had to be discussed prior to the leaderboards being created. Once runs get uploaded and rules have been established, it's very hard to approve such big changes like this one without creating even more categoris/sub categories.
