On July 18th, I documented my Low% route, including a
discovery I'd made. It is possible to
snipe Hedges 2
while standing on the top of the mountain. The
description of the trick included the following
picture and caption:
The panel is completely invisible because it is
blocked by the castle wall -- however, the wall
has no collision so the panel is still solvable.
This statement is false.
It was an understandable assumption to make. There's
no reason why that wall needed to have collision coded
into it, since it wouldn't be occluding anything in
normal gameplay. It's common for game developers to
cut corners in places that don't really matter. But it
remains an incorrect assumption.
I don't do speedrunning myself, but I find the act fascinating
and delightful to watch and especially to learn about. There's
an intrinsic human drive, distributed across the entire
species, to fractally explore every aspect of the world we
live in. It's what drives us to do science, it's what drives
us to understand mathematical structures, and it's at least a
part of why art speaks to us as strongly as it does. I find
speedrunning to be a particularly pure expression of this
drive, the progression from enjoying something to wanting to
enjoy it to its fullest to diving so deep into it that it
expands into a world of its own.
Hatkirby's writeup of the process of discovery and the fallout
of one particular trick in The Witness is fascinating
and at times hilarious. I recommend giving it a look if only
to discover why specifically it's called the "No-Wizzies
Snipe". I bet you won't be able to guess.
