The Gold Split Newsletter - Week #15

The Gold Split offers a free, weekly digest of news from the world of speedrunning and beyond.

This Story of the Week is all about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and was featured in this week's issue. The full post includes more news, briefly, as well as this week's top times and a fun fact. Check it out HERE.

Story of the Week

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has only been out for two weeks, but it already looks too good to ignore. Let’s take a look at what the speedruns for this game might shape up to be. One major spoiler will be indicated as such, and I did my best to avoid them wherever possible.

Basic Game Mechanics

In Echoes of Wisdom, you’re playing as Zelda, finally. But instead of using a sword, shield, bombs and other weapons, Zelda wields the Tri Rod. This rod allows you to pick up “Echoes” of items or enemies and conjure them again. You may summon a bed to rest and heal, fight your enemies with an army of Keese, use floating platforms to fly high in the air or warp to wherever you please by using signs... but we’ll get to that.

Often, the first instinct will have players stack as many objects as possible in order to try to get on top of things which present insurmountable boundaries in other top-down Zelda games, like treetops or rocky cliffs. And instead of using invisible walls to prevent you, the game will simply let you do that, which is genius. It creates the illusion of outsmarting the game, when in reality, you’re still playing within its rules. You’re granted plenty of freedom, but no sequence breaks… or are you?

Tech & Glitches

Speedrunners are infamously persistent and regularly find optimisations and new strategies for games that are decades old. For Echoes of Wisdom, it really only took a few days to blow the game wide open. Players very quickly found ways to gain more vertical height than intended and discovered ways to speed up their movement through the world. For example, holding a piece of meat, conjuring a bird and locking the bird with your companion will have the bird push you sideways and slightly upwards through the air, as in some impossible carrot-and-donkey situation.

Better techniques also soon emerged. For example, placing a bed, getting onto it and summoning a specific enemy echo on the opposite side will catapult both Zelda and the bed at high speed. You can trigger this again in mid-air, chaining multiple boosts together and travelling very quickly.

But the major one I want to focus on today, the splitter of categories, is of course: the W̵̢̋r̴̮̩͝o̵̳̓̽n̶͙̯̓͝g̷̞̒͠ ̴͉̟̾̓W̷̺͝ḁ̷̩͌͠r̸̻̍̔p̵͎̜̏̐. Wrong warping in general describes teleporting to a different point than normally possible. And often, the system that allows wrong warps in the first place can be tinkered with to get a desired result. And that’s exactly the case in Echoes of Wisdom.

All this is enabled through a glitch called Pause Storage. It enables playing the game while the pause menu, map menu or inventory menu is opened. The terms Map Storage or Inventory Storage are used as well, but I’m going to stick to Pause Storage as I believe it includes all variations.

Players can enter this glitched state by interacting with a signboard near a void-out area and quickly opening the Echo menu during the void-out. Void-out triggers are placed around areas or at heights that the developers considered too far away from where the player should be. The screen will go black briefly and place them a short distance away from the forbidden area.

Once the glitch is active, selecting a waypoint but not confirming the warp, opening a second map instance, and then confirming, the game will send Zelda to a different waypoint than the one originally selected, potentially even one that was previously undiscovered. Then, using an additional manipulation and entering a dungeon (which also has waypoints) in the glitched state before teleporting, players can teleport to a waypoint inside a dungeon with the same index as the waypoint they initially chose on the world map. In the current Any% route, this allows a Wrong Warp straight into the final dungeon of the game. Here’s a great video by @loohhoo explaining it, and this is where I’ll need to put the big fat

SPOILER WARNING

Leaderboards & Durations

The leaderboards will open TODAY. There are still a few open questions about category names, which ones will be present and some rules, but most of them are set and this is what we can expect:

• Any%: No-holds-barred and wrong warping to your heart’s content. As of now, runs are already clocking in at under 40 minutes.
• Any% (No Wrong Warp): The name might change, but the category won’t allow wrong warping, and might even be mostly glitchless, focusing on playing the game as intended. With the rules still up in the air, it’s hard to estimate a solid time for this category just yet, but around four hours might be a good guess.
• All Dungeons: Completing all dungeons. This category might be split into a restricted and an unrestricted variant, but it’s still to be decided what completing a dungeon actually means. Unrestricted runs will probably soon be faster than two hours.
• 100%: Do and collect all the things! It’ll be a long one.
• A category that will end at a rough half-way point of the game

One more thing that needs to be decided is whether or not the use of amiibos will be allowed. Amiibos can grant smoothie ingredients as well as outfits. It’s likely that the leaderboards are open by the time you read this and you’ll find the final categories as well as the rules right there.

Conclusion

With how fast speedruns are changing in the early days of a game’s lifecycle, everything I have written might already be outdated tomorrow. I still think it was worth exploring, learning about it, and giving an early overview of the situation. I expect Pause Storage and wrong warping to still be relevant in the future, so this also makes it easier to come back to it at a later point.

If you’re looking for people attempting speedruns of Echoes of Wisdom RIGHT NOW, look no further than HERE on the game’s Speedrun.com page.

Thank you for reading! If you're curious about more of this week's news or would even consider subscribing to the newsletter, you'll find the full post over HERE.

Finding new stories to cover can be challenging. I encourage you to think about what happened recently in the communities you are a part of. If there are any stories, articles, glitches, events, or other topics I should be taking a look at, go ahead and submit them here or in the Gold Split Discord! 📨