Joined: 1/4/2011
Posts: 16
Location: Mysterious Cities of Gold
So I was watching some TAS videos on YouTube and I was wondering something. How come in all games that have a difficulty setting, why does the TASer always go and mess with that setting by putting it on the hardest level? Doesn't that do nothing but add un-needed frames to your overall TAS by having to go into the options menu and mess with the difficulty and then have to exit the menu?
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
You have to forgive rog as he sometimes tends to give extremely brief information. Allow me to explain: since we are using a lot of tools to overcome various obstacles in a game such as frame advance, lag counter, lua, rerecordings and whatnot, we are therefore recommended to play on the hardest difficulty. However, there are obviously cases where playing on the hardest difficulty does not bring anything new to the table. In those cases, playing on regular/normal difficulty should not be a problem. But in general, it's recommended that we tas on the highest difficulty.
Edit: For instance if you play on the highest difficulty in Mega Man X5, the levels are then designed to be harder to overcome. Which brings us to a greater task to find creative solutions.
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So I was watching some TAS videos on YouTube and I was wondering something. How come in all games that have a difficulty setting, why does the TASer always go and mess with that setting by putting it on the hardest level? Doesn't that do nothing but add un-needed frames to your overall TAS by having to go into the options menu and mess with the difficulty and then have to exit the menu?
<pedantic> Because that's usually the only way of choosing the hardest difficulty level. If there were a way of choosing it without going to the difficulty setting screen, the TASer would certainly do that instead... </pedantic>
(If you intended to ask "why do you almost always use the hardest difficulty level in TASes?", that's a different question altogether, and answered by AngerFist.)
That being said, it can be the case that the hardest difficulty level doesn't provide anything interesting for the TAS. In such cases, it can be ignored.
Most games don't default to hardest difficulty, and a TAS input file has to be able to recreate everything on a newly bought cartridge with clean saves. That includes going into the menu to change the difficulty. You don't meet the usual category requirements if you don't, so it's not actually wasting any time; there's no way to avoid spending that time, so it's not a waste.
Note that you typically have to go into the options menu anyway to change other settings (text speed is a common one), so the difficulty change tends to hardly cost any frames anyway.
I think it's the influence of unassisted speedrunning. In the same vein as limiting arcade TASes to 1 coin, it's supposed to make movies more impressive for casual audience.
