Hello yall, after some interest in the recent WotW discord, i would like to start a discussion thread for help making the "All Wisps" category a thing, here are some points.

Just to establish some basics, "All Wisps" would consist in getting all the 5 main wisps of the game (making them fuse into Seir), and then beating the game. Of course this is subject to change as all the propositions below, since thats the whole point of this topic, to discuss about this CAT overall.

First of All, we need runners (obviously), so please tell in the comments if you would/is interested in one of the following variants.

1- OOB and/or Glitched = Would consist in getting all the wisps using any "non intended" means necessary, skips, sequence breaks, glitches, wrong warps, flying thro planes etc.

2- No OOB = Would consist in getting all the wisps but never going "out of bounds" with Ori, skips and sequence breaks would be up to discussion. NOTE: if you became interested in this one, please tell us which one (skip, glitch etc) you think might be considered or not OOB and if it should be allowed.

3- NMS (No Major Skips) = Would consist in getting all the wisps but without doing as the name says, major skips, for example, sequence breaks or not fighting a boss main story boss/ warping out a escaping sequence would qualify as a major skip.

4- Fusion of other propositions together, example: "No-OOB NMS".

5- Other variants such as All Bosses or Glitchless (that would include banning sentry jumps).

Thats just the raw draft so we can start the discussion, please feel free to give opinions and share if you interested in participate of grounding the cats and rules for All Wisps!

Thank you for your attention in advance.

Extremely interested in all wisps/no major skips, if we're careful about what counts as a "sequence break." As long as all the required content gets completed (spirit bosses, etc) a sequence break wouldn't seem to.... go against that?

Just for reference as a "sequence break" I have in mind something like Hollow Knight's Any% shade skip, which is fiendishly clever routing that lets you get the dream nail & into a map area earlier than the game expects, but doesn't really skip anything important like the major bosses (Dreamers), which are the heart of the category. You still do all three Dreamers, kind of like piecing together Seir, before going to a final boss fight. It's in-bounds, but it certainly is a sequence break. You aren't supposed to get into that part of the map that way.

Now... I'm not really following the skip-hunting going on in Ori right now, since I'm not interested in a glitched category at all, NMG gang etc. So I have no idea what's in the conversation right now as far as sequence breaks go. This whole concern may be nothing at all. And I'm definitely on board for "warping out of an escape is a Major Skip" for no other reason than I love those set pieces and would hate to see them go <3

Anyway. Just wanted to pitch in and say hi! I want this category! Would run w/o major skips! It would be on the longer side but so satisfying! Regardless of what ends up on the leaderboard, this is ultimately how I will be running the game. Hoping to see submission rules I can make work for me!

Several of us have been routing and running All Bosses, No Early Quests, Inbounds (Normal) for the past few days. It's been really fun so far and I highly recommend giving it a shot. (There would definitely be a subcategory for each difficulty, so just play on whichever suits you best.) This qualification lets you still go to areas early if you don't complete them, such as sequence-breaking into Luma Pools to get Water Dash before Silent Woods, but you still have to complete all of the main questlines, collect all the wisps, and beat all the bosses. If you want to see some examples, check the VoDs of the following people for recent streams:

• RooseSR
• ogNdrahciR
• Grimelios
• madinsane_
• SmashySR
• me

Thanks for the reply guys, and would love to hear from those runners you mentioned too Hobz, would appreciate if they give some voice to this thread.

In my personal opinion of the matter, i would love something along with "All Wisps/Bosses (so no beatle skip), no-OOB", its what i have been doing pretty much for fun too and having a blast, on the the difficulty topic, would separate for Easy, Normal and Hard as the others, so no problem there for me.

Also loved the "No Early Quests" that Hobz mentioned, would still allow some sort of sequence break on some areas like the example of Luma Pools, for routing freedom without skipping the main questline, that for me is the main purpose of the All Wisps category, but that would open the Early Launch discussion, with again, in my personal opinion, should be a special rule (i dont find it fun tbh), would be open to try it tho, if the majority wants it.

If I'm not mistaken, getting Launch early is disallowed by "No Early Quests" because investigating the Willow completes a quest out of order. (It's pretty much why we added the rule, lol.)

If you are interested in the category and don't want to dig through VODs, the current runs on the Any% Normal leaderboard for ogNdrahciR and myself are actually All Bosses No OOB No Early Quests.

I'm also running the category Hobz talked about. Another distinction is that bosses don't necessarily have to be done in order, just the quests. Hornbug, for example, can be skipped and done later with more equipment without getting quests out of order and without going out of bounds. Not sure if we'll find any other cases though.

Yeah for the No Quests Early rule, that covers the Wisps. I'm really enjoying playing through that category, I think that it's pretty fun and covers what I want to in a category - I know that I wanted to visit all of the areas and do all the bosses for Ori 2, I'm not particularly interested in skipping most of the game with Any%.

I'd like a leaderboard for it, but if there isn't one, we've still been having fun playing it, which has been nice.

I've been doing a lot of running and routing for the above mentioned category and I can't recommend it highly enough, it's a great category that gets to see a sampling of most areas of the game and highly emphasizes just being good at the basic movement in Ori 2. By playing on Normal, it makes being good at the bosses highly valuable and fighting them on low health is extremely tense.

In terms of length, a few of us have gotten around the 1 hour 45 minute range with plenty of mistakes and deaths still to improve so I believe with time and practice we can absolutely be getting this into the 90 minute range or even better.

I'll be running all wisps no OOB for now; whether or not that gets added to the leaderboard is fine. The progression is pretty much identical to the first 40 minutes of any% normal no OOB, and then you just TP out of willows end to clear out the other 3 areas. The nice thing about all wisps especially, is you need to do each of the escape sequences as well as every boss except for 1 (Hornbug the beetle). There is a skip for the Winswept Ruins escape, however you don't get the inventory progression of having Seir as tracked by the game until the very end of the escape. My thoughts right now would that All Bosses or All Wisps is the go to category, both have their ups and downs. Another alternative is All cells, which requires all bosses and adds in some extra collection aspect to help differentiate from the first 2/3 of the run being nearly identical to any% no OOB.

Each of the three different types (as well as some boss based category) are all pretty similar and identical; what is also discussed though is a form of progression constraint, which can be reasoned and applied in different ways/reasons.

No OOB is a clear flag that is used frequently, as to what it removes currently is an extremely precise end game trick to skip destroying all but 1 of the hearts in Willow's End, an early sequence break to get to Silent Woods, and an early game boss skip and chase sequence right at the start of the run. The No OOB flag would probably ban these, and other future sequence breaks that require going OOB to get through.

NMG or selected restrictions or whatever you call it is a subjective list of sequence breaks people just don't want to deal with, or ban certain sequence breaks because feel like the execution to do them removes more interesting movement elements in the game. This is a decent way of trying to ban as many sequence breaks and 'glitches' as possible, but will be subject to change as the opinions and reasoning of what to ban changes over time.

Story based progression constraint to force people to follow a linear path at certain sections, which can be decent if you want to restrict some component of end game that would effect most of the run. For WotW, this is a discussed option due to gating when you can acquire the skill Launch as well as access silent woods, baur's reach, luma pools, mouldwood depths, willows end, windswept wastes, etc. This is to prevent sequence breaks such as Silent Swim (poison swim to get to silent woods on easy difficulty skipping wellspring depths) as well as restricting the portion of the run when you can get launch (normally about 40-50 mins into the run on normal difficulty, would shift to about 20 minutes later) and force more tech of mid-air sentry jumps etc.

Other restrictive modes might look to remove current sequence breaks such as feather/ku skip, poison water swims, sentry jumping, feeding grounds skips, wrong warping, escape based sequence breaks, etc. There are A LOT of constraint based options beyond unrestricted based categories, and right now it's important to play around and test stuff out before we take a step to add those in. Mainly because this won't just affect the Any% category, but also upcoming mid-range categories and multi-hour collection based categories which I imagine will be brought on.

For me right now just based on my subjective experience, I have been doing a lot of All Wisps - Normal - No OoB which has been the most enjoyable to me. Gating Launch by 20 extra minutes doesn't change much of the route for me, due to just replacing them with multiple applications of a near frame-perfect trick all over the place. No OOB is also nice on normal, because no poison swim to silent woods, and feather skip is a bad idea due to a heart in willows end. If I were to guess what would be added for constraint based sub categories, it would be Unrestricted (anything goes), No OoB with some other wrong-warp or other displacement glitch removed, No Early Quests (which is the story based progression constraint) or some other "Selected Restrictions" based element.

Looks like the "no early launch" is popular among us that run All Wisps already, so thats relief to say the least.

Gathering you guys opinions and my own, looks like so far the most desired one would be "All Wisps/Bosses No-OOB, No Early quests". JHobz point of it nullifying early launch already got my attention, since sentry jumping optimazation on the movement is far more interesting to me, along with the luma pools sequence break example (without fighting the boss early), also loved the hornbug argument by Phant where you can skip it to save time but come back to kill it later while Ori is stronger, could even do it on the way to Mouldwood for semi-optimal route since the closest shrine is right over there, fits the category, and makes even more options to play on it overall. At the moment, the mix of those is the most appealing to me.

I think this has huge potential to became a official category, i personally don't think that a NMS rule would be necessary if we go the no early quest mode, we could just add some specific Selected Restrictions as needed overtime, since Muffin had some really good points about it aswell and i agree with pretty much everything.

What you guys think? Give it some more time? In the meantime i'm already running this cat for fun too just fyi.

Also forgot to mention, the runs that SeaAverage and ogNdrahciR did on theyr any% normal vods are pretty much what i was looking for on this Cat, so thank you!

I personally would be more partial to having a route where I can do wisps and skills in any order that I choose. As someone who is a fan of glitches categories, I see no problem with sequence breaks and, for example, having resources like launch before doing the Wellspring. It adds a unique way of playing the game that further separates the speedrun from a normal play through of the game.

I do, however, understand the appeal of NMG and NMS categories and I certainly respect anyone who enjoys running them. I would appreciate if there should be a separate No OoB, or whatever is decided upon, and a No Restrictions All Wisps on this leaderboard.

I agree with Yote that there's no reason to attach All Wisps to a specific glitch/skip restriction. I've been running All Cells with no restrictions and it's very fun, early launch especially opens up routing and movement options a lot.

Personally I think a NMS or NMG subcategory would be a good way to combine no OoB and no early quests rules together, since NOoB would still allow early launch and NEQ would allow howl skip and willow skip.

I think one discussion to be had is also to decide what categories we would actually want. There are several variations possible:

• All Wisps: That allows you to get the wisp and skip the challenge that comes with it if it's possible.
• All Wisps/Escapes: People who actually want to complete the escapes but who might not be interested by boss fights. This might also get silent swim out of the way since you would need to complete the mill escape.
• All Wisps/Escapes/Bosses: That forces to complete pretty much every main objective in the game (including the Howl Boss and the Beetle boss).

I think at least people have shown interest in each of these rulesets. The thing is, I don't think everyone would agree on 1 category, and I don't think having all 3 on the leaderboard would be a good idea either. Maybe making a poll would be interesting.

My opinion on this is, I think (assuming each of these categories get approximately as much interest): Have "All Wisps" and "All Wisps/Escapes/Bosses" categories. People who are interested in "All Wisps/Escapes" could still play "All Wisps/Escapes/Bosses" in easy mode since Kwolok and Mora would not be a issue (at the moment you would need to beat them anyway in an "All Wisps/Escapes" so one more reason to not split them, for now at least) and Howl and Beetle Boss wouldn't be either.

I agree, a pool for it would be nice, are you going to include OOB or No-OOB on it Greez? Also there is still the option that people mentioned above to include the No Early Quests or something in the NMS side of things.

In my opinion, the poll would (and should) not be about the restrictions (at least not in the first place). Restrictions are a whole different story and they will probably be the subject of subcategories. I agree with the idea of having 3 levels of restrictions (No Restriction, No OOB, and NMS/No Early Quest/Main Quest Order/whatever you call it) but I think we should first agree on the category/ies goals and the rules (even implicit ones, that we don't append to the category name) we need to add to make the category/ies we want. This might seem obvious to us now, because we know what we want run, but we will need to write the rules down at some point and make sure that it describes the category/ies well. It's not an easy task and the discussion that happened in Discord earlier today raised some critical points: what do you do about "quick boss kills" (like the shriek one discovered recently) and escape strats like the worm one (where you start the escape but skip all of it and get the worm's death cutscene).

From what I've read, these are the rules that made the most sense to me.

Wisps: I actually have no suggestion besides: "collect the wisp", as I'm not aware of any strat that gives you a wisp that you're not supposed to have

Escapes: That's a hard one because of the worm escape.

• "complete the escape" ? which is vague since you have to define what "complete" means. If "complete" means "get the escape end cutscene", afaik you get it when you perform the worm escape skip, even if you've skipped all of it.
• "you can't go oob during the escape", which adds an OOB restriction in the category goal and overlap (by limiting) the potential OOB subcategory ruleset

Bosses: Quoting Xeph "all phases need to be finished with combat damage", someone also suggested that you'd need to stay in the boss arena (again, overlapping OOB rulesets)