Wind Waker HD barrier skip was discovered (while recording their inputs for analysis)
TL;DR a streamer just made a huge step towards finding one of the most sought-after glitches in all of Speedrunning, which has the potential to cut over an hour from the Wind Waker HD Any% speedrun.
For those unfamiliar: Barrier Skip is the holy grail of Windwaker, possibly all of speedrunning.
See, around half way through the game you reach Hyrule Castle. At the edge of the castle is a magical barrier you're not supposed to get past until you've played through almost the rest of the game; beyond it is the final dungeon and final boss. Speedrunners have been trying for years to find a way to somehow bypass the barrier, as it would mean cutting out most of the second half of the game (two full dungeons plus several other long sequences). However, the barrier has proved remarkably sturdy; thousands of hours have been spent trying to find a glitch that can get past the barrier, but the only ones that have every worked either:
- Require inputs too fast/precise for a human to manage and are only viable on Tool-Assisted Runs
- Require items/setups so problematic that it doesn't actually save any time over just removing the barrier via the developer-intended method (i.e. playing the game normally)
- Require the use of cheats
It's so sought after, there are/were over a thousand dollars in bounties put up by various speedrunners, to be awarded to whoever can find an RTA-viable way to bypass the barrier. Not sure how many of those are still in effect and if they apply to the HD version, but either way it demonstrates how badly the Windwaker community wants this glitch to be found.
Last year someone managed to skip the barrier for the first time, but repeating it has proven problematic. No one, up to this point, has found a reliable, repeatable way to skip it (which makes incorporating it into a RTA route impossible). Now, however, for the first time, a streamer accomplished the skip while recording his inputs, meaning they can now go back and see exactly what he did to get past it. At the very least this should make it consistently repeatable in a tool-assisted run, where they can be mimicked perfectly; ideally, this will help runners understand the precise mechanism behind the glitch and refine it into a repeatable, run-viable technique for RTA. If this happens, we're going to see at least an hour cut from the currently 3.5 hour Wind Waker HD Any% world record.
This isn't just exciting from the perspective of lowering times; cutting an hour off the run makes it much more accessible to runners (since you wouldn't be committing yourself for 4 hours any time you start a run), so we would hopefully see in a big surge in the category being run.
EDIT: As someone else pointed out, the time save wouldn't be as significant as I stated due to the need for the Iron Boots in this glitch, and item you can't get until after you visit Hyrule Castle the first time. However, it would still be a significant timesave even if they had to go get the Iron Boots then come back. There's also the potential for an Iron Boots skip that would let you get them early (no clue if this has been investigated, but if not it certainly would be if Barrier Skip wound up working).
