3 ms·

Think of every location in the game as accessible only after certain events or items are acquired. You can create a directed acyclic graph (how build systems fi

Think of every location in the game as accessible only after certain events or items are acquired. You can create a directed acyclic graph (how build systems figure out dependencies!). You can randomize all the locations of items, as long there is still a way to get from the starting node to the ending node.

echelon 1y ago
That's great! Now does the DAG make sense to humans? Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? How out of sequence can the game get? Is Master Quest just the moral equivalent of a single static random roll of the Randomizer? Someone should do this with Majora's Mask, but in a way that can somehow combine the two games.
- squigz 1y ago
  > Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? I haven't played this OOT randomizer, but with the Wind Waker randomizer I've been playing, you can configure things like that - so dungeon keys could spawn in their own dungeon only, or literally anywhere in the world, or just other dungeons. It also has settings that allow you to talk to an NPC to get hints where game-progressing items are.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  >Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? It can be configured with options as to how items are distributed. But yeah, in general anything can be anywhere. Without clues: sometimes there are clues, those silly gossip stones in OoT can output a message about the general location of a thing, but you check everything you can. You learn which items open up each logic path and then open every chest, do every quest, etc. >How out of sequence can the game get? Completely. There are randomizer settings that require glitches and sometimes if the logic is wrong (it is sometimes) there are unwinnable seeds. > Someone should do this with Majora's Mask, but in a way that can somehow combine the two games. Someone did: https://ootmm.com/faq https://ootmm.com/faq There are a few multi-game randomizers out there. Some of them even run on real SNES hardware
  - mikepurvis 1y ago
    The Super Metroid / Zelda LTTP one is pretty famous, including having been played live at GDQ: https://youtu.be/yWNGWrZ8wec?si=-d65Db2DySL9js0E https://youtu.be/yWNGWrZ8wec?si=-d65Db2DySL9js0E
  - a_t48 1y ago
    I have somewhere a branch that allows for "sharing" items between games as well. One could do an Oracle of Seasons+Ages game where your inventory is "the same" between both games, where possible (or extend to other games for group fun).
    - colechristensen 1y ago
      my favorite are the coop randos where 2+ runners are grabbing items for eachother and having a good timetime roasting eachother
- vintermann 1y ago
  From what I've seen of YouTube runs, it can make zero sense (think going into a random cave out in the wild puts you into the queen's bedroom etc.). I guess it must be most fun for people who've played the game so much it's already just a DAG to them. Or maybe they enjoy the surrealism.
- pred_ 1y ago
  I don't know about OoT, but in the case of Super Metroid Map Rando (https://maprando.com/ https://maprando.com/), the logic is also quite detailed – see e.g. https://github.com/vg-json-data/sm-json-data/blob/master/region/brinstar/pink/Big%20Pink.json https://github.com/vg-json-data/sm-json-data/blob/master/reg... for one room – and comes with information about the difficulty of the tricks necessary to get from one place to another with a given item loadout, health, runways from connecting rooms etc.; having that, it is possible for the user to specify a desired difficulty, and one of several game modes then effectively ensures that the "next" item is located in a particular location, access to which has only been made possible by the current loadout and doing tricks of the given difficulty, so that players sufficiently familiar with the logic (and the tricks) can quickly narrow down the set of possible locations. Other game modes will be less strict in how items are placed, which in practice can mean that the game becomes "easier" by giving you a more powerful item loadout but "harder" in that figuring out where to go becomes less straightforward; and as a result, you end up with games that feel completely different just by having a different focus on the exploration and execution aspects. I've find that it becomes quite an interesting spectator sport too, since people will compete on completing a given random map as quickly as possible, effectively having to perform difficult platforming tricks while also having to solve a non-trivial constraint satisfaction problem to understand the map layout, and different speedrunners have evolved different probabilistic heuristics for how to do that. Some good showcases: - The AGDQ 2025 finale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it_xbTZHan8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it_xbTZHan8 - The grand finals of a recent tournament: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2485240928 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2485240928

echelon 1y ago

That's great! Now does the DAG make sense to humans? Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? How out of sequence can the game get? Is Master Quest just the moral equivalent of a single static random roll of the Randomizer? Someone should do this with Majora's Mask, but in a way that can somehow combine the two games.

squigz 1y ago
> Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? I haven't played this OOT randomizer, but with the Wind Waker randomizer I've been playing, you can configure things like that - so dungeon keys could spawn in their own dungeon only, or literally anywhere in the world, or just other dungeons. It also has settings that allow you to talk to an NPC to get hints where game-progressing items are.
colechristensen 1y ago
>Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all? It can be configured with options as to how items are distributed. But yeah, in general anything can be anywhere. Without clues: sometimes there are clues, those silly gossip stones in OoT can output a message about the general location of a thing, but you check everything you can. You learn which items open up each logic path and then open every chest, do every quest, etc. >How out of sequence can the game get? Completely. There are randomizer settings that require glitches and sometimes if the logic is wrong (it is sometimes) there are unwinnable seeds. > Someone should do this with Majora's Mask, but in a way that can somehow combine the two games. Someone did: https://ootmm.com/faq https://ootmm.com/faq There are a few multi-game randomizers out there. Some of them even run on real SNES hardware
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  The Super Metroid / Zelda LTTP one is pretty famous, including having been played live at GDQ: https://youtu.be/yWNGWrZ8wec?si=-d65Db2DySL9js0E https://youtu.be/yWNGWrZ8wec?si=-d65Db2DySL9js0E
- a_t48 1y ago
  I have somewhere a branch that allows for "sharing" items between games as well. One could do an Oracle of Seasons+Ages game where your inventory is "the same" between both games, where possible (or extend to other games for group fun).
  - colechristensen 1y ago
    my favorite are the coop randos where 2+ runners are grabbing items for eachother and having a good timetime roasting eachother
vintermann 1y ago
From what I've seen of YouTube runs, it can make zero sense (think going into a random cave out in the wild puts you into the queen's bedroom etc.). I guess it must be most fun for people who've played the game so much it's already just a DAG to them. Or maybe they enjoy the surrealism.
pred_ 1y ago
I don't know about OoT, but in the case of Super Metroid Map Rando (https://maprando.com/ https://maprando.com/), the logic is also quite detailed – see e.g. https://github.com/vg-json-data/sm-json-data/blob/master/region/brinstar/pink/Big%20Pink.json https://github.com/vg-json-data/sm-json-data/blob/master/reg... for one room – and comes with information about the difficulty of the tricks necessary to get from one place to another with a given item loadout, health, runways from connecting rooms etc.; having that, it is possible for the user to specify a desired difficulty, and one of several game modes then effectively ensures that the "next" item is located in a particular location, access to which has only been made possible by the current loadout and doing tricks of the given difficulty, so that players sufficiently familiar with the logic (and the tricks) can quickly narrow down the set of possible locations. Other game modes will be less strict in how items are placed, which in practice can mean that the game becomes "easier" by giving you a more powerful item loadout but "harder" in that figuring out where to go becomes less straightforward; and as a result, you end up with games that feel completely different just by having a different focus on the exploration and execution aspects. I've find that it becomes quite an interesting spectator sport too, since people will compete on completing a given random map as quickly as possible, effectively having to perform difficult platforming tricks while also having to solve a non-trivial constraint satisfaction problem to understand the map layout, and different speedrunners have evolved different probabilistic heuristics for how to do that. Some good showcases: - The AGDQ 2025 finale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it_xbTZHan8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it_xbTZHan8 - The grand finals of a recent tournament: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2485240928 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2485240928