Might & Magic VI Speedrun [32:31]

This run attempts to get the good ending, meaning I have to get the Ritual of the Void from Archibald before ending the game. It's timed RTA (Real Time Attack), otherwise I wouldn't be able to load saves, which is important for a couple of reasons I will explain below. Special thanks to Fietsemaker for inspiration, routing and advice. The very first thing that happens in the run is a version specific glitch that exploits the existence of a fifth character slot. You can swap characters by holding ctrl and clicking, however, if all of your guys are on cooldown and you try to swap then you end up swapping in a strange new character. The interesting thing about him is that his stats, conditions, inventory etc all correspond to certain memory adresses that the game uses. This lets us manipulate memory: unfortunately it isn't really useful most of the time, except for shrinking the party hitbox. When you swap a normal character into the fifth slot, it writes to memory, placing your party in the exact middle of New Sorpigal, stuck in place and with a point hitbox. In order to be able to move I have to die. I can either do this by waiting for the conveniently nearby goblins to kill me, or by swapping each of my characters into the fifth slot, which is much faster. Once I respawn I just put the nameless knight back into the fifth slot and then start a new game, because the hitbox effect persists into new games. Having such a small hitbox is incredibly useful: it lets me clip under any door that opens vertically, underneath buildings in the overworld and through some completely solid walls/floors/ceilings. It also makes it very difficult for monsters to hit me with ranged attacks. This is the main reason that this run is almost 10 minutes faster than the segmented run on SDA. Once my party has been generated, I spawn in New Sorpigal with a small hitbox and also a completely blue colour palette. Technically I could play through just fine with it, but that's dumb so I get rid of it by saving and restarting the entire game. But wait - there's more. When you swap a character out of the fifth slot, they are given a number of skillpoints equal to the current game seconds value (between 0 and 60). By timing the swap back, I can give the druid a lot of skillpoints at the very beginning of the game. Unfortunately it kills him, but that's not too bad as there's a temple nearby. There is one caveat: the 5th character slot glitch will crash your game if you have completed any quest, so it can only be used at the very start of the run. One other 'glitch' is used in Blackshire to avoid damage from the chests. If you fly upwards immediately after triggering the trap, you can completely avoid taking any damage. Unfortunately the animation for electric traps is too fast, and you cannot avoid damage from those. The spells sold by a guild are determined when you enter it for the first time. By saving before entering, I can simply reload the save if the guild isn't selling the spells I need and try again. I need Jump + Fly from the air guild, Haste from the fire guild, Town Portal + Lloyd's Beacon from the water guild and 3 Shrapmetals + Day of Protection from the dark guild. Shrapmetal is ridiculous. 5 Fragments at expert level, each doing 6 physical damage PLUS 1-6 per point of skill. At 20 points in dark, each fragment does 26-126 damage. If all 5 fragments hit the target the damage potential is 130-630 before resistances. Multiply that by 3 for the 3 characters casting it and the 1300hp Demon Queen dies pretty fast.