41 thoughts on “Hollow Knight – Speedrunner vs. 4 Hunters for TRUE ENDING”
For the full credits, please see the description!
*Post-game Discussion (spoilers)*
People have been requesting a Speedrunner vs. Hunters True Ending run since this became a series in early 2021. Why did it take so long? Well, there are two reasons: first off, I'm inexperienced at the TE route. Second, I wasn't convinced it would make for a great game without developing the rules and mods further. We needed a lot to be done to make TE with other players even remotely viable, and it turns out we needed just a little a bit more than what we had this game, as there were a few technical issues.
Gates were obviously a problem. Due to how multiplayer works and its interactions with our modpack, some gates are closed when they shouldn't be. In these cases, we've always used noclip to allow players to clip past the gates, but in small arenas such as Lost Kin where I'm spamming spells, odds are the player gets hit while they're activating / deactivating noclip to get in. So the hunters understandably opted not to bother doing so, which made some parts awkward. I even did the same at one point. Since this run, I commissioned an additional module for TheHuntIsOn to allow players to simply walk through gates, and a rule that you can only do so when the gates are incorrectly closed, which is a much better solution. People may have also noticed hunters mention skip platforms missing (most notably at Hornet 2), White Palace gates being improperly closed, and Soul Tyrant being inaccessible. I don't know how all of this slipped through my testing. Regardless, it's all been fixed. Huge shoutouts to Korz for taking on the work.
Overall, I'm glad we did the run and I think it was decent content, but I prefer Any% for sure. True Ending SVH with the ruleset I've built has a couple major problems. First, objectives are scattered throughout a much larger portion of the map, and there are many more of them. The speedrunner can basically go anywhere at any time and make progress, meaning they're virtually impossible to predict. Thus, the strategy simply becomes: see a hunter, go somewhere else. This is why I started toying with the audio hints in the first place, since I knew they would eventually be needed for TE. Turns out, the audio hints still weren't really enough while stags were also in play. Stags absolutely add to the problem of the speedrunner being too difficult to track, but they're sort of necessary to save time. Even with stags, the run took 4.5 hours. Without them, I don't want to imagine, and I probably would have just thrown due to exhaustion at some point, which I almost did anyway.
A second problem with TE is that the game generally has to be balanced around its toughest challenges, such as White Palace, dream bosses, Traitor Lord, The Radiance, etc. How to balance hunter power levels versus speedrunner power levels is something we've basically figured out for Any%, because the level of challenge is fairly consistent throughout the run's mid to end game. In True Ending, that level of challenge is present throughout 3/4 of the game, then the final 1/4 is like, twice as hard. By the mid-to-end game, even with +2 masks, the speedrunner is so stacked that it's pretty tough to do much outside of at the places I previously mentioned, like White Palace. I'm still convinced White Palace is basically impossible if the hunters decide not to play nice. In this case, I was able to just stay ahead of them, so it wasn't so bad. In fact, we cut out a lot of White Palace because a lot of it was just basic platforming. Anyway, you can't really balance TE SVH without a ton of weird rules, like "don't do this, this, or this in White Palace", or "be nice to me in the end game", or allowing for deaths in dreams, which is a rule I really didn't like but felt was important given the length of the game and how quickly you can die in certain areas. But that's okay, it was still fun enough.
Some improvement to the rules is definitely possible. We're experimenting with a PlayerTrail mod made by TheMathGeek which leaves a visible trail behind the speedrunner, which is configurable to last for different durations. The trail doesn't have a direction which creates a bit more ambiguity. This could definitely be used to balance out rulesets which require the use of stags, because otherwise it's just impossible to track where the speedrunner went.
People have always requested trying different win conditions, but TE was by far the most requested. I enjoyed trying it, and might revisit it with some of the issues being sorted. It definitely had some good moments, but it also fell a little flat at times. So the direction I see this series taking is moreso with exploring other win conditions (other speedrun categories), randomizers (we just tried one today, it was really neat), and gimmicks (such as superpowers, or using other mods). We're also tentatively organizing a run where other players try being the speedrunner while I'm a hunter, and we see who can get the furthest. Because this series has been kept pretty basic/vanilla for such a long time, and we've just been solidifying the ruleset and improving the experience for players, I think there's still a ton of potential in making fun rules and trying new things. We have a pretty good foundation to work with. I'd also love to see other people try it as well, as all the mods we use are now public.
Overall, I'm super proud of where this series is at. And we did it without a single run being scripted. As I mentioned in the video, this has only been possible thanks to all the other people who have been involved over the years: the modders, hunters, editors, and artists who have helped out. I appreciate everyone involved a lot.
TL;DR: This isn't the end of the series by any means. There's more to come! That's all. Thank you for reading and for watching!
i dont often watch these crazily advanced HK videos outside of Skurry so it's crazy to see this level of movement and mindgames as a casual player just getting into their first 112% Steel Soul run
That was amazing. On both parts. I have never seen such mastery : map knowledge, timings, combos, pathing, everything was so cool to watch. And the hunters did their job amazingly well. Thank you for sharing such a cool concept.
For the full credits, please see the description!
*Post-game Discussion (spoilers)*
People have been requesting a Speedrunner vs. Hunters True Ending run since this became a series in early 2021. Why did it take so long? Well, there are two reasons: first off, I'm inexperienced at the TE route. Second, I wasn't convinced it would make for a great game without developing the rules and mods further. We needed a lot to be done to make TE with other players even remotely viable, and it turns out we needed just a little a bit more than what we had this game, as there were a few technical issues.
Gates were obviously a problem. Due to how multiplayer works and its interactions with our modpack, some gates are closed when they shouldn't be. In these cases, we've always used noclip to allow players to clip past the gates, but in small arenas such as Lost Kin where I'm spamming spells, odds are the player gets hit while they're activating / deactivating noclip to get in. So the hunters understandably opted not to bother doing so, which made some parts awkward. I even did the same at one point. Since this run, I commissioned an additional module for TheHuntIsOn to allow players to simply walk through gates, and a rule that you can only do so when the gates are incorrectly closed, which is a much better solution. People may have also noticed hunters mention skip platforms missing (most notably at Hornet 2), White Palace gates being improperly closed, and Soul Tyrant being inaccessible. I don't know how all of this slipped through my testing. Regardless, it's all been fixed. Huge shoutouts to Korz for taking on the work.
Overall, I'm glad we did the run and I think it was decent content, but I prefer Any% for sure. True Ending SVH with the ruleset I've built has a couple major problems. First, objectives are scattered throughout a much larger portion of the map, and there are many more of them. The speedrunner can basically go anywhere at any time and make progress, meaning they're virtually impossible to predict. Thus, the strategy simply becomes: see a hunter, go somewhere else. This is why I started toying with the audio hints in the first place, since I knew they would eventually be needed for TE. Turns out, the audio hints still weren't really enough while stags were also in play. Stags absolutely add to the problem of the speedrunner being too difficult to track, but they're sort of necessary to save time. Even with stags, the run took 4.5 hours. Without them, I don't want to imagine, and I probably would have just thrown due to exhaustion at some point, which I almost did anyway.
A second problem with TE is that the game generally has to be balanced around its toughest challenges, such as White Palace, dream bosses, Traitor Lord, The Radiance, etc. How to balance hunter power levels versus speedrunner power levels is something we've basically figured out for Any%, because the level of challenge is fairly consistent throughout the run's mid to end game. In True Ending, that level of challenge is present throughout 3/4 of the game, then the final 1/4 is like, twice as hard. By the mid-to-end game, even with +2 masks, the speedrunner is so stacked that it's pretty tough to do much outside of at the places I previously mentioned, like White Palace. I'm still convinced White Palace is basically impossible if the hunters decide not to play nice. In this case, I was able to just stay ahead of them, so it wasn't so bad. In fact, we cut out a lot of White Palace because a lot of it was just basic platforming. Anyway, you can't really balance TE SVH without a ton of weird rules, like "don't do this, this, or this in White Palace", or "be nice to me in the end game", or allowing for deaths in dreams, which is a rule I really didn't like but felt was important given the length of the game and how quickly you can die in certain areas. But that's okay, it was still fun enough.
Some improvement to the rules is definitely possible. We're experimenting with a PlayerTrail mod made by TheMathGeek which leaves a visible trail behind the speedrunner, which is configurable to last for different durations. The trail doesn't have a direction which creates a bit more ambiguity. This could definitely be used to balance out rulesets which require the use of stags, because otherwise it's just impossible to track where the speedrunner went.
People have always requested trying different win conditions, but TE was by far the most requested. I enjoyed trying it, and might revisit it with some of the issues being sorted. It definitely had some good moments, but it also fell a little flat at times. So the direction I see this series taking is moreso with exploring other win conditions (other speedrun categories), randomizers (we just tried one today, it was really neat), and gimmicks (such as superpowers, or using other mods). We're also tentatively organizing a run where other players try being the speedrunner while I'm a hunter, and we see who can get the furthest. Because this series has been kept pretty basic/vanilla for such a long time, and we've just been solidifying the ruleset and improving the experience for players, I think there's still a ton of potential in making fun rules and trying new things. We have a pretty good foundation to work with. I'd also love to see other people try it as well, as all the mods we use are now public.
Overall, I'm super proud of where this series is at. And we did it without a single run being scripted. As I mentioned in the video, this has only been possible thanks to all the other people who have been involved over the years: the modders, hunters, editors, and artists who have helped out. I appreciate everyone involved a lot.
TL;DR: This isn't the end of the series by any means. There's more to come! That's all. Thank you for reading and for watching!
1:12:11 The True Knight fight begins!
To make it a little easier on the hunters there should be a cool down for the stags that fire can use
Bro is just dream of hollow knight at this point
That bwomp nearly killed me🤣🤣🤣
Imposters run where all 5 of you run the same skin and constantly have to figure out which one is the speedrunner XD
1:17:35 Fireb0rn: “we’re at 4:20:00”
Me: “420 what you smoking?” Or “420 blaze it!”
That moment when Fire went back to kill Herrah and all the hunters were just dumbfounded had me rolling XD
Unless I'm missing something, we should keep in mind that he did this without nail upgrades
Though tbf he was purely a Descending Dark merchant
this generation’s Dream (the minecraft guy) is PEAK
"If anyone could, it would be Fire" gives the same energy as "He was the fastest sorcerer alive, except for Satoru Gojo of course."
I've probably said it before, but it's worth saying again: I'll never get tired of these videos. It's peak HK content.
Edit: Jesus fuck, that skip to get to Isma's without going through the waterways was nice. Don't think I've ever seen that one before somehow.
why is sporeshroom, dashmaster, etc of the charms banned some of those dont make sense to me
"He didn't pick up dream nail" As he picks up dream nail, perfect timing
Dude I thought the radiance legitimately ended ur run until i remembered about the three dream deaths
Now you add a 1 Hour timer💀
cool
Can fireborn hear the hunters in the discord call or is he deafened?
Is that fucking sonic 06 music I hear lol
I went play Hollow Knight after a long time after watching your video, and all my skill is GONE. I mean, I died to hornet (1st form) in the Pantheon…
"He did not pick up Dream Nail…"
Fire, at that EXACT SECOND: picks up Dream Nail.
Speedruner vs hunters godhome ending
You know
… A Platform fighter Hollow Knight game sounds amazing seeing this
20:07 “he did not pick up dream nail so. . .”
Fire: *Picks up dream nail
Gets Herrah
“What?”
“What?”
“Wat?”
“What?”
1:13:43 you underestimate the god gamer
"he did not pick up dream nail" which was said whilst fire was mid dreamnail
That climb out was amazing.
I genuinely think this was the best Hunter vs speedrunner
That death to Radiance was rough. Could've actually cost you the run if things went even a bit worse, since you almost died a second time too.
Fireborn truly was born in fire or idk
I just realized how good sharp shadow would be for this
That's mad impressive but why tf would you even think of putting yourself through that
Not going for godmaster true true ending? Week
bro I'm already having trouble beating this game on my own and this guy does it with 4 maniacs rushing at him. wtf
i dont often watch these crazily advanced HK videos outside of Skurry so it's crazy to see this level of movement and mindgames as a casual player just getting into their first 112% Steel Soul run
Tnx fires editors
DUDE HOW WHAT THE HELLLLLLLL
What music plays at 1:03:34
I looked in the description and can’t tell because I’m dumb
I got inspired by you and i tried to speed run hollow night for the first time …..im trash😂
That was amazing. On both parts. I have never seen such mastery : map knowledge, timings, combos, pathing, everything was so cool to watch. And the hunters did their job amazingly well. Thank you for sharing such a cool concept.