I mean DD2 to me is on the level of the death-less Halo 2 LASO runs, and that's what I tell people who don't know what DD2 / trackmania is. Even then I have a hard time saying that Halo 2 run is on par with DD2 right now knowing both games so well. I think they are very comparable albeit in different ways.
I think it’s comparable to a degree. Halo 2 LASO w/o envy skull, 120 stars on mario 64 blindfolded, and dark souls 5-game no-hit runs are all up there in contention for the hardest. Of those 4, I would place DD2 at the bottom for sure, but nonetheless it’s definitely one of the hardest challenges out there.
Edit: Hades on 64 HEAT is another. I feel like that may just be the one to be on par with Halo LASO for the hardest.
It's actually super interesting to watch because it has a shit ton of unique set up strats that are consistent. The main difficulty almost always seems to be knowing where you are or figuring out where you are when something weird or unexpected happens. And of course basically memorizing routes and set ups for an entire game.
As someone who has played all the From games, as well as the rest, I would agree that the no-hit runs is the closest with DD2. The Halo LASO to me is honestly so mind bafflingly hard that it’s difficult for me to think of many things more difficult in gaming period. Never tried Mario 64 blindfolded lol, but honestly it’s probably just as insane.
Halo 2 LASO is a bit of a special one. A player had to offer up a $20.000 price pool over a decade after the game was launched for this to be beat. A lot of players failed their attempts in that duration.
I always thought of myself a decent player after playing Halo 1 on legendary (hardest difficulty), but I was humbled REALLY fast once Halo 2 was released. I think I gave up months after release on the second or third map.
This challenge entails all maps, deathless, fast, with additional challenges.
What they have in common is a relentless precision requirement and many hundreds of hours of non-stop grinding to learn tech.
On top of that, not every run is the same for Halo 2; it’s not deterministic like trackmania. Some levels the enemies may spawn differently or their AI may act in a different manner depending on random old code lol. There are elements outside of the players control in Halo 2 which add that additional layer of difficulty imo.
IIRC there is an elevator section in LASO that requires specific RNG to set up a trick to basically use an enemy to go down the elevator with and without doing it, you'll just be killed before you land. So you can have a run basically die because of RNG where you basically have no control over it.
I think Halo 2 LASO deathless is a tier above. I heard it took Jervalin around 350-400 hours to complete, and he already had A LOT of practice at LASO prior to that challenge. So he already had many strats for it.
In DD2 they are playing the map without the ability to test any jumps. And it is looking like they will be able to complete it in less than 300 hours hopefully. Also, most setups in Trackmania are very consistent. Halo 2 has a lot more randomness, with the enemy spawns and fights.
So yeah, while they are both insane challenges, they are a bit different. Especially since the Halo 2 challenge allowed for training during and prior to the challenge, whereas DD2 is discovered jump by jump and no one had played it before.
Yeah I completely agree with this take. Halo 2 having the rng element of cpu AI and enemy spawns gives it that extra level of difficulty for sure. DD2 is still insanely hard ofc, even with the existence of wonky plastic here and there, trackmania is still deterministic solely dependent on the users inputs
I mean, what... ? Humans can't format a post? Wtf is with this accusation. It's just 2 games I am both interested in and thought I'd comment. Everyone has to make their first comment at some point right?
People can also just make up any shit about another person and someone will believe. THAT is terrifying. Pretty sure people were formatting posts like this long before Chatgpt existed. If you look at their comment history, they literally add nothing to any conversation. Half the comments are 2 word or less and a few are similar to this one.
To me it would be more similar if dark souls one on release had no save states and a hard requirement to finish the game in under 60 minutes.
The discovery aspect would make this challenge incredibly difficult, as the speedrun times were worked out over a long period with players allowed to explore the tech needed to achieve the time piece by piece.
Of course it also wouldve had to have been like the 5th game in the series, as players of deep dip have a lot of experience with rpg/trial maps.
I think its much more realistic that a brand new trackmania player could finish deep dip 2 in a year with full floor practise maps and a checkpointed version.
The time required to learn every dark souls game deathless or halo 2 laso is thousands of hours. There are beand new TM players who stream their runs and have made it to floor 5/6 in around 200 hours, its not unreasonable to think with full floor access they could achieve this, wheras I dont think anyone is gonna send a from soft god run even if they grinded every day for a full year. Theres so much to learn and remember and those runs take a really long time to complete lol.
This is certtainly going to be specific to the player.
idk, as a celeste player, I have seen some things comparable (but niche), but there are not enough people trying to complete those challenges for a reasonable difficulty estimate.
It’s probably best compared with deathless/no hit challenges, but that still does not include the “discovery as you go” element, which is pretty unique
Celeste max% deathless took 1600 hours for one guy to complete, despite all segments being practicable. It’s somewhat similar to Deep Dip 2 (“endurance platforming” challenge with extreme length), except the actual difficulty is (probably) much easier while the length is really long.
Maybe Celeste 9D platinum berry (i.e. deathless) would be more comparable in terms of raw gameplay difficulty and length, but no one has cleared that yet, and the one person trying (who has documented their progress) has “only” spent 1000 hours for a theoretical 2 segment clear
point is, it’s probably not the hardest, but it would be among the hardest (and certainly among the most legendary) challenges
edit to add [parrot dash’s 9D progress](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KNJ344lsZEmTU9P6eeFInckUbT5dkaWhRcxv_Yy2ZS0/edit). they are pretty much the only person trying 9DP seriously, and they make videos every one to two months about their progress. it’s been 180+ days (admittedly, it’s of on and off trying, but no one can stay sane for so long while doing one thing only lol)
they got two overlapping segments, surely that means success is imminent right (clueless)
they will beat it eventually, much like someone will eventually clear DD2 (and any tower/trial map they cook up after that). the question is, as always, “how long will it take?”
now that bren has finally cleared (at 220h for a “1 hour” map, though I didn’t see if there were any partial falls in the run), I think DD2 is definitely much less difficult than 9DP.
probably closer to something like darkmoon ruins golden, which fits better in terms of length and maybe difficulty/consistency too (though 2D platforming game difficulty is difficult to compare with car game with much more complex controls but “more leniency”)
It's a matter of definition. Just take any current speedrun world record in any game. Whenever a player takes up the challenge to get the world record, it will be insanely difficult. For me, to get a world record in any popular game would probably take at least 10.000 hours. In that sense, there are always challenges that are harder than DD2.
Even setting world records as challenges aside, there are other insanely hard challenges. For example, one could argue that Deep Fear is more difficult than DD2. There is only one player in the world (Mudda) who got the run without respawn. But then, it's not an "official" challenge and nobody knows how many people participated. But I'm sure Mudda put in more time than the top contenders for DD2 will have put into DD2.
Popular speedrun world records are special because so many people are competing against each other, not just the game itself. Speedruns also aren't really a singular challenge that is issued to players by non competitors in the same way that something like DD2 is.
Also imagine how difficult a speedrun world record of DD2 would be if it were as popular as something like Super Mario 64?
I think the relevant question is how difficult is it to just beat the "officially" issued challenge once.
I think the amount of pros or famously real good players that surrendered against DD2 is a testament of its difficulty, as well as seeing the f\*cking world champion struggling to overcome some obstacles with regularity. There are plenty of games which speedrun can be learned mechanically, without caring about the lore or really paying attention to why "input x" gives you a speed boost or something is meta to overuse to go faster.
The thing with DD2 is that even if you could possibly learn and master every technique existing in Trackmania, you would still struggle to complete it in a reasonable amount of time, because it needs precision, almost constant focus and a bit of RNG to avoid some clips and landing bugs.
But only time will tell, maybe once someone complete it, other people will start training it or use AI to check the possible inputs or easiest routes.
Yeah I think you can find truly ungodly difficult maps in Geometry Dash, ADOFAI and the variety of rhythm games that took years and tens of thousands of attempts by the best players to validate. And perhaps some speedruns and nohit runs are up there as well.
[Final Enigma](https://youtu.be/_B-1jh-uzC4) is a TM map that came out in 2017 and hasn't been beaten by anyone. I think that could be up there as well.
Also feels like the god run that happyhob did, which I think was no hit of all dark souls and demon souls and blood borne. That is another where I dk if you could do that even with 2k hours.
I'd nominate 100%ing N++ as a comparison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDAlVFNYbGY
People have been playing the series since 2005, and only 5 have gotten 100%. Clearing everything takes around 1,000 hours.
Requires deathless in every column, similar to how DD2 has no checkpoints. Plus a bunch of other hidden challenges.
Probably not as mechanically complex as DD2, but a bigger grind.
This. I am playing n since its newground days. I have put thousands of hours into it and can do a top50 run on any map relatively quickly.
The ideao of getting all gold coins in all maps is frightening to me. From time to time i'll add some finished all coins maps, but i would be amazed if i finished it this decade.
This game is - and always has been - sporting the best physics in all of platforming. Corner boosts, perfect frame jumps, hyperjujmps, you name it.
No game uses momentum like n++.
I always hated meatboy got all the fame. Until celeste came around, which is much more worthy of praise.
It would probably make the shortlist of anyone making such a list who knows about DD2, whether or not it gets near the top or not. But the main difficulty isn't just beating DD2 (as hard as that already is), it's being the first one to beat DD2. The amount of discovery that needs to be done is what makes the challenge take so long for the best players in the world. Just look at the DD1 leaderboards to see what that difference looks like.
This leaves us in a weird position where we're putting "being the first one" up against "being the best". They're fundamentally different things. Not to mention that in Trackmania alone there have been more precise tracks made that remain uncompleted due to precision and lack of monetary incentive, as well as Mudda's Deep Fear run taking far longer to achieve than a DD2 finish. And where does getting all Turbo STMs fall into this?
We also have to consider advancements in strategy when gauging speedrun difficulty, for example many of the older SM64 runs are more impressive on the basis of execution than many runs today that are faster but use much easier and faster strategies to achieve those times. There are also marathon challenges that lack moment-to-moment execution but are mentally draining in their own right. At what point do we disqualify them for being "too specific", or do we say that anything goes? How do we classify the difficulty of "streaks" in games? Is winning an E-Sports competition such as a CS Major or LCS World Championship the hardest or do we exclude those? Some may even limit the conversation to in-game trophies/achievements and not recognise user-generated content.
The question is always going to return answers based around games where the respondent has a high enough level of knowledge to appreciate what's going on, but may also leave them blind to the angles in which the achievement pales in comparison to others. Comparing accomplishments in Trackmania to Soulsborne franchise runs, Speedrun WRs, E-Sports championships, and impossibly difficult indie games such as Crypt of the Necrodancer is a fun conversation but a Sisyphean one.
But this is not to detract from the difficulty of DD2. It is a marathon challenge which has no downtime to relax. Barely anybody completed DD1 despite it being much easier. There are many players who are by all means very good at Trackmania who are unable to get more than a couple floors up. The skill ceiling in this game is far higher than most realise.
I believe it could be. Many people seems for forget that this challenge is likely far more difficult than achieving something like a no-hit/death run in Dark Souls or completing Halo LASO. The primary reason is that Trackmania is inherently a competitive game. In Trackmania, thousands of players are constantly trying to achieve the same goals, and the game's competitive nature ensures the rise of extremely skilled players. This competitive filtering process doesn't occur in single-player and non-competitive games.
While a dark souls no hit run is undeniably impressive, these type of challenges are typically attempted by a relatively small group of dedicated players. Unlike Trackmania, where a vast number of competitors are continuously pushing the limits. Consequently, the difficulty of excelling in a competitive environment like Trackmania is significantly amplified by the sheer volume and skill level of the participants.
With this in mind, to qualify as the hardest challenge in video gaming, several criteria must be met. Firstly, the challenge needs to be attempted by a large number of players. Secondly: They must have underwent competitive filtering to create talented players. Thirdly: The time required to complete the challenge also plays a significant role: the longer it takes, the harder it is.
Additionally, the challenge must be finishable. It's easy to create an unfinishable task like chaining a bunch of Kacky maps.
Honestly i cannot come up with anything else than deepdip2 that wins with these criteria right now but im also not an expert on video game record history so take that with a grain of salt:)
With regard to dark souls, I think you are correct. But Halo 2 LASO deathless with no Envy skull is harder while still meeting your criteria.
In Halo’s case, a $20,000 bounty was placed on it where thousands of players tried it at first b it only the few truly talented and dedicated pursed it, just like DD2.
What Halo’s challenge has over Trackmania is that it’s not deterministic. Trackmania can be practiced and replicated in full, even with wonky plastic bounces, as long as the inputs perfectly align, then the same results will be spit out. With Halo, there are other factors that make it so practicing the perfect run is nearly impossible. The AI behavior, the enemy spawns and even the bullet spread is not deterministic in Halo, so there’s this added element of luck, which makes the challenge harder imo because not only do you have to be perfect in your gameplay, you have to be perfect and hope that everything else works out in your favor lol. Both are insano challenges that only the best of the best can complete tho, and by no means do I disagree that DD2 is one of the hardest video game challenges ever.
I mostly agree, but want to clarify one point:
>The challenge must be underwent by a large amount of players
Volume of players is somewhat significant, but maybe not as significant as you may think. Consider that these challenges are made for skilled players, which themselves take thousand of hours to be trained. A random unskilled player (e.g. myself, and many others trying the map) cannot hope to beat it at all, and should not contribute to the difficulty rating. In the end, it will still converge to only a handful of truly skilled and dedicated players really pushing for it. Thus, I disagree that volume of players attempting the challenge should be a criteria.
The most important criteria is probably still some sort of average time taken for each player to clear (with weighting towards the faster clearers because they are likely to be more skilled). At this point, Deep Dip 2 is likely to be the hardest popular challenge, but probably not the hardest challenge in gaming history
also, regarding finishability: as long as the challenge can be theoretically completed, someone is going to try and do it just for the memes. do not underestimate them
It's taking a month for people who have 10k+ hours and are the best few players in the world to get close to finishing the map. Uh, yes, it's up there.
I still think the hardest gaming challenge ever completed is Trials of Death from Mario maker. It was only beaten by the creator (in the intended way at least), and it took them like 4000h iirc
It's not close. Averagetrey has been speedrunning Super Mario Sunshine for over a decade, so probably in the same ballpark - he recently beat a romhack for that game without save states that took nearly 300 hours. It's not foddian as it doesn't reset on death, but it's of comparable difficulty to DD2. And that was a fairly niche event that wasn't newsworthy. If it wasn't for Wirtual making the event giant (and for making trackmania not niche), most people wouldn't know about it.
I used to play destiny 2 at a fairly high level - solo wrath, 2 man prestige calus (in vanilla), 3 man petra (before shadowkeep) all took much longer than deep dip has - and all of those players had 500+ hours in the respective raid before even attempting the challenge, and all took a similar amount of time or longer. If DD2 starts to stretch towards the 1500 hour mark, I'll reconsider - but right now there's recency and popularity bias.
The only thing about DD2's challenge that is unique is dealing with the burnout. I've dealt with having to push through that before, and it usually doubles or triples the time it takes to do something - and that's for a week long grind. Take Wirtual's streams - you can know in the first half hour if he's gonna match his pb that day. While it's not as pronounced in the other runners, the time investment is likely more than double what it would normally be.
While I absolutely love trackmania and deep dip 2 to me is an unfathomably hard challenge to undertake, it is to my knowledge very, very far from being the hardest video game challenge ever.
Many video game challenges were never beaten through intended means (such as FFXI Absolute Virtue), and others took [12+ years to get beaten](https://youtu.be/dCRI69pQpY0). Deep dip 2 is a community created map, and many games (osu, geometry dash, mario maker) feature community created content meant to be near unbeatable by anything other than scripts, extremely unlikely to ever get beaten.
Volume of players is an important metric to judge the difficulty of a specific challenge, but I'd argue that the average quality of each participant is about as valid. Beating Inbachi in a legitimate 1CC run (in the link above) is a challenge undertaken by one of the oldest community in the video game space. It took 12 years for a community regrouping people who have been practicing SHMUPS for 35+ years.
Na, there is alot of stuff thats probably alot harder / takes way more time.
1 Month and like 250 or so hours is not that much in the grand scheme of things id say. Sure people have thousands of hours in TM, but thats not different in other games
But it's also kinda hard to compare, since pretty much all of the stuff at this level is super niche
Not even close. Trackmania players are not used to these kinds of maps. Some challenges in other games are only possible for genetically gifted players with thousands of hours to finish.
I remember one dude did a soulsborne no hit run, it took him years to get to that point. And similar to deep dip, one fail meant restarting a 10-20 hour run.
There is Crypt Of The Necrodancer with its cursed trophy for *beating the game 9 times in a row without missing a beat and picking up any items*. Who tf would even want to do that?
I personally don't think so, I feel like trying to get certain rare drops in MMOs outplays that just in the sense of time required. And id say that a no hit run using fist only in a dark souls game would be even more difficult or even Halo 2 LASO, but really this is completely subjective, and is gonna 100% be based on that individual strengths and weaknesses, and what you enjoy or dislike.
Like I'd personally argue that getting max rank in halo infinite multiplayer is the hardest challenge, because everytime I look at it in my steam library, all I think is "wtf happened" so it's already a challenge to just reinstall it.
No, pro players spend years and years on some challenges in some games. Pro players are gonna beat this before 2 months. It’s hard, but it’s nowhere near the toughest in all of gaming.
Hell even in just TM there are some Trackmania maps out there that are still unbeaten and people don’t even want to hunt them due to the challenge.
Idk hardest challenge in video game history to me is Old School RuneScape's collection log. Having to get on rate for every item in the collection log you have to get at least 78000 master clues which are 4-5/hour. So on the low end of time it's 15600 HOURS just to go normal drop rate, imagine going dry by 1% LOL
No
There are Plenty Trackmania Maps out there wich is even harder, so even inside of Trackmania there are more difficult challenges then DD2, these maps are just not that popular.
This one for example: [https://trackmania.exchange/maps/130817/trial-defiant](https://trackmania.exchange/maps/130817/trial-defiant)
noone finished it yet \^\^
I don't think it is the hardest. There are a lot of trackmania tracks and I believe of them is similar length of time as deep dip but requires continuous driving.
This feels like one of those old arcade games where if you die once you have to re-start from the beginning of the game.
I can't think of any real comparison in modern gaming. There are plenty of hard challenges but anywhere else you can just practice a trick over and over and then put it all eventually in a single run.
In DD2 I have seen players put in 40hours to even TRY a new jump 3 or 4 times.
I agree with you, I feel like I am watching something historical.
I don't even think it's the hardest challenge in Trackmania.
To this day only 1 player managed to finish deep fear with no respawn and it didn't take 1 month.
This was already mentioned, but Mudda completed DF in TMNF in 800 hours and then the remake in TM2020 in 10 hours. Not because he hadn't perfectly learned the map in the first 799 hours, but because of all the damn landing bugs in TMNF which he didn't have to deal with in TM2020. He 100% had the skill and knowledge to beat the map probably 200-300 hours in.
I mean that doesn't say much though does it? It's not surprising that he did the second time much faster.
Regardless, the random landing bugs were indeed part of the difficulty, just like the random plastic bounce fails are are inherent part of Deep Dip 2 difficulty now.
I mean DD2 to me is on the level of the death-less Halo 2 LASO runs, and that's what I tell people who don't know what DD2 / trackmania is. Even then I have a hard time saying that Halo 2 run is on par with DD2 right now knowing both games so well. I think they are very comparable albeit in different ways.
I think it’s comparable to a degree. Halo 2 LASO w/o envy skull, 120 stars on mario 64 blindfolded, and dark souls 5-game no-hit runs are all up there in contention for the hardest. Of those 4, I would place DD2 at the bottom for sure, but nonetheless it’s definitely one of the hardest challenges out there. Edit: Hades on 64 HEAT is another. I feel like that may just be the one to be on par with Halo LASO for the hardest.
120 stars on Mario 64 blindfolded sounds like the dumbest challenge ever
Lmao I couldn’t agree more, but lo and behold, people are out there doin it
It's actually super interesting to watch because it has a shit ton of unique set up strats that are consistent. The main difficulty almost always seems to be knowing where you are or figuring out where you are when something weird or unexpected happens. And of course basically memorizing routes and set ups for an entire game.
Starting from 0, I would say DD2 is way harder than the no hit From games, don't really know about the others.
As someone who has played all the From games, as well as the rest, I would agree that the no-hit runs is the closest with DD2. The Halo LASO to me is honestly so mind bafflingly hard that it’s difficult for me to think of many things more difficult in gaming period. Never tried Mario 64 blindfolded lol, but honestly it’s probably just as insane.
Halo 2 LASO is a bit of a special one. A player had to offer up a $20.000 price pool over a decade after the game was launched for this to be beat. A lot of players failed their attempts in that duration. I always thought of myself a decent player after playing Halo 1 on legendary (hardest difficulty), but I was humbled REALLY fast once Halo 2 was released. I think I gave up months after release on the second or third map. This challenge entails all maps, deathless, fast, with additional challenges. What they have in common is a relentless precision requirement and many hundreds of hours of non-stop grinding to learn tech.
On top of that, not every run is the same for Halo 2; it’s not deterministic like trackmania. Some levels the enemies may spawn differently or their AI may act in a different manner depending on random old code lol. There are elements outside of the players control in Halo 2 which add that additional layer of difficulty imo.
IIRC there is an elevator section in LASO that requires specific RNG to set up a trick to basically use an enemy to go down the elevator with and without doing it, you'll just be killed before you land. So you can have a run basically die because of RNG where you basically have no control over it.
64 Heat Hades is 90% raw luck for an unseeded run, 110% skill for completing the run for what is admittedly a VERY hard game
I think Halo 2 LASO deathless is a tier above. I heard it took Jervalin around 350-400 hours to complete, and he already had A LOT of practice at LASO prior to that challenge. So he already had many strats for it. In DD2 they are playing the map without the ability to test any jumps. And it is looking like they will be able to complete it in less than 300 hours hopefully. Also, most setups in Trackmania are very consistent. Halo 2 has a lot more randomness, with the enemy spawns and fights. So yeah, while they are both insane challenges, they are a bit different. Especially since the Halo 2 challenge allowed for training during and prior to the challenge, whereas DD2 is discovered jump by jump and no one had played it before.
Yeah I completely agree with this take. Halo 2 having the rng element of cpu AI and enemy spawns gives it that extra level of difficulty for sure. DD2 is still insanely hard ofc, even with the existence of wonky plastic here and there, trackmania is still deterministic solely dependent on the users inputs
The comment you are replying to is chatgpt formatted and user has no history. 🤖
I mean, what... ? Humans can't format a post? Wtf is with this accusation. It's just 2 games I am both interested in and thought I'd comment. Everyone has to make their first comment at some point right?
wtf that’s terrifying. I’m used to bots copying comments, but that’s another level. Thanks for pointing it out.
People can also just make up any shit about another person and someone will believe. THAT is terrifying. Pretty sure people were formatting posts like this long before Chatgpt existed. If you look at their comment history, they literally add nothing to any conversation. Half the comments are 2 word or less and a few are similar to this one.
Doesn't look GPTous to me
To me it would be more similar if dark souls one on release had no save states and a hard requirement to finish the game in under 60 minutes. The discovery aspect would make this challenge incredibly difficult, as the speedrun times were worked out over a long period with players allowed to explore the tech needed to achieve the time piece by piece. Of course it also wouldve had to have been like the 5th game in the series, as players of deep dip have a lot of experience with rpg/trial maps. I think its much more realistic that a brand new trackmania player could finish deep dip 2 in a year with full floor practise maps and a checkpointed version. The time required to learn every dark souls game deathless or halo 2 laso is thousands of hours. There are beand new TM players who stream their runs and have made it to floor 5/6 in around 200 hours, its not unreasonable to think with full floor access they could achieve this, wheras I dont think anyone is gonna send a from soft god run even if they grinded every day for a full year. Theres so much to learn and remember and those runs take a really long time to complete lol. This is certtainly going to be specific to the player.
idk, as a celeste player, I have seen some things comparable (but niche), but there are not enough people trying to complete those challenges for a reasonable difficulty estimate. It’s probably best compared with deathless/no hit challenges, but that still does not include the “discovery as you go” element, which is pretty unique Celeste max% deathless took 1600 hours for one guy to complete, despite all segments being practicable. It’s somewhat similar to Deep Dip 2 (“endurance platforming” challenge with extreme length), except the actual difficulty is (probably) much easier while the length is really long. Maybe Celeste 9D platinum berry (i.e. deathless) would be more comparable in terms of raw gameplay difficulty and length, but no one has cleared that yet, and the one person trying (who has documented their progress) has “only” spent 1000 hours for a theoretical 2 segment clear point is, it’s probably not the hardest, but it would be among the hardest (and certainly among the most legendary) challenges edit to add [parrot dash’s 9D progress](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KNJ344lsZEmTU9P6eeFInckUbT5dkaWhRcxv_Yy2ZS0/edit). they are pretty much the only person trying 9DP seriously, and they make videos every one to two months about their progress. it’s been 180+ days (admittedly, it’s of on and off trying, but no one can stay sane for so long while doing one thing only lol)
parrot will suceed. they're so consistent
they got two overlapping segments, surely that means success is imminent right (clueless) they will beat it eventually, much like someone will eventually clear DD2 (and any tower/trial map they cook up after that). the question is, as always, “how long will it take?”
honestly once parrot becomes more calm post sunrise running we will start to see runs that will make it very close to the end
now that bren has finally cleared (at 220h for a “1 hour” map, though I didn’t see if there were any partial falls in the run), I think DD2 is definitely much less difficult than 9DP. probably closer to something like darkmoon ruins golden, which fits better in terms of length and maybe difficulty/consistency too (though 2D platforming game difficulty is difficult to compare with car game with much more complex controls but “more leniency”)
It's a matter of definition. Just take any current speedrun world record in any game. Whenever a player takes up the challenge to get the world record, it will be insanely difficult. For me, to get a world record in any popular game would probably take at least 10.000 hours. In that sense, there are always challenges that are harder than DD2. Even setting world records as challenges aside, there are other insanely hard challenges. For example, one could argue that Deep Fear is more difficult than DD2. There is only one player in the world (Mudda) who got the run without respawn. But then, it's not an "official" challenge and nobody knows how many people participated. But I'm sure Mudda put in more time than the top contenders for DD2 will have put into DD2.
Mudda put 800 hours into deep fear I think
Popular speedrun world records are special because so many people are competing against each other, not just the game itself. Speedruns also aren't really a singular challenge that is issued to players by non competitors in the same way that something like DD2 is. Also imagine how difficult a speedrun world record of DD2 would be if it were as popular as something like Super Mario 64? I think the relevant question is how difficult is it to just beat the "officially" issued challenge once.
I think the amount of pros or famously real good players that surrendered against DD2 is a testament of its difficulty, as well as seeing the f\*cking world champion struggling to overcome some obstacles with regularity. There are plenty of games which speedrun can be learned mechanically, without caring about the lore or really paying attention to why "input x" gives you a speed boost or something is meta to overuse to go faster. The thing with DD2 is that even if you could possibly learn and master every technique existing in Trackmania, you would still struggle to complete it in a reasonable amount of time, because it needs precision, almost constant focus and a bit of RNG to avoid some clips and landing bugs. But only time will tell, maybe once someone complete it, other people will start training it or use AI to check the possible inputs or easiest routes.
Yeah I think you can find truly ungodly difficult maps in Geometry Dash, ADOFAI and the variety of rhythm games that took years and tens of thousands of attempts by the best players to validate. And perhaps some speedruns and nohit runs are up there as well.
[Final Enigma](https://youtu.be/_B-1jh-uzC4) is a TM map that came out in 2017 and hasn't been beaten by anyone. I think that could be up there as well.
Nice Wirtual gave up on this map even faster than DD2
Dude seek help.
Also feels like the god run that happyhob did, which I think was no hit of all dark souls and demon souls and blood borne. That is another where I dk if you could do that even with 2k hours.
Dinossindgeil did a no hit God run + sekiro... Without levelling his character.
I'd nominate 100%ing N++ as a comparison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDAlVFNYbGY People have been playing the series since 2005, and only 5 have gotten 100%. Clearing everything takes around 1,000 hours. Requires deathless in every column, similar to how DD2 has no checkpoints. Plus a bunch of other hidden challenges. Probably not as mechanically complex as DD2, but a bigger grind.
This. I am playing n since its newground days. I have put thousands of hours into it and can do a top50 run on any map relatively quickly. The ideao of getting all gold coins in all maps is frightening to me. From time to time i'll add some finished all coins maps, but i would be amazed if i finished it this decade. This game is - and always has been - sporting the best physics in all of platforming. Corner boosts, perfect frame jumps, hyperjujmps, you name it. No game uses momentum like n++. I always hated meatboy got all the fame. Until celeste came around, which is much more worthy of praise.
It would probably make the shortlist of anyone making such a list who knows about DD2, whether or not it gets near the top or not. But the main difficulty isn't just beating DD2 (as hard as that already is), it's being the first one to beat DD2. The amount of discovery that needs to be done is what makes the challenge take so long for the best players in the world. Just look at the DD1 leaderboards to see what that difference looks like. This leaves us in a weird position where we're putting "being the first one" up against "being the best". They're fundamentally different things. Not to mention that in Trackmania alone there have been more precise tracks made that remain uncompleted due to precision and lack of monetary incentive, as well as Mudda's Deep Fear run taking far longer to achieve than a DD2 finish. And where does getting all Turbo STMs fall into this? We also have to consider advancements in strategy when gauging speedrun difficulty, for example many of the older SM64 runs are more impressive on the basis of execution than many runs today that are faster but use much easier and faster strategies to achieve those times. There are also marathon challenges that lack moment-to-moment execution but are mentally draining in their own right. At what point do we disqualify them for being "too specific", or do we say that anything goes? How do we classify the difficulty of "streaks" in games? Is winning an E-Sports competition such as a CS Major or LCS World Championship the hardest or do we exclude those? Some may even limit the conversation to in-game trophies/achievements and not recognise user-generated content. The question is always going to return answers based around games where the respondent has a high enough level of knowledge to appreciate what's going on, but may also leave them blind to the angles in which the achievement pales in comparison to others. Comparing accomplishments in Trackmania to Soulsborne franchise runs, Speedrun WRs, E-Sports championships, and impossibly difficult indie games such as Crypt of the Necrodancer is a fun conversation but a Sisyphean one. But this is not to detract from the difficulty of DD2. It is a marathon challenge which has no downtime to relax. Barely anybody completed DD1 despite it being much easier. There are many players who are by all means very good at Trackmania who are unable to get more than a couple floors up. The skill ceiling in this game is far higher than most realise.
DD 2 isn't even the hardest challenge in TM. The super solo campaign from TM Turbo is definitely harder or finishing all of the kacky maps.
Minecraft half heart hardcore all advancements no f3?
Have you ever played The Lion King…
No
Crash bandicoot 1 was wayyy harder
no.
I believe it could be. Many people seems for forget that this challenge is likely far more difficult than achieving something like a no-hit/death run in Dark Souls or completing Halo LASO. The primary reason is that Trackmania is inherently a competitive game. In Trackmania, thousands of players are constantly trying to achieve the same goals, and the game's competitive nature ensures the rise of extremely skilled players. This competitive filtering process doesn't occur in single-player and non-competitive games. While a dark souls no hit run is undeniably impressive, these type of challenges are typically attempted by a relatively small group of dedicated players. Unlike Trackmania, where a vast number of competitors are continuously pushing the limits. Consequently, the difficulty of excelling in a competitive environment like Trackmania is significantly amplified by the sheer volume and skill level of the participants. With this in mind, to qualify as the hardest challenge in video gaming, several criteria must be met. Firstly, the challenge needs to be attempted by a large number of players. Secondly: They must have underwent competitive filtering to create talented players. Thirdly: The time required to complete the challenge also plays a significant role: the longer it takes, the harder it is. Additionally, the challenge must be finishable. It's easy to create an unfinishable task like chaining a bunch of Kacky maps. Honestly i cannot come up with anything else than deepdip2 that wins with these criteria right now but im also not an expert on video game record history so take that with a grain of salt:)
With regard to dark souls, I think you are correct. But Halo 2 LASO deathless with no Envy skull is harder while still meeting your criteria. In Halo’s case, a $20,000 bounty was placed on it where thousands of players tried it at first b it only the few truly talented and dedicated pursed it, just like DD2. What Halo’s challenge has over Trackmania is that it’s not deterministic. Trackmania can be practiced and replicated in full, even with wonky plastic bounces, as long as the inputs perfectly align, then the same results will be spit out. With Halo, there are other factors that make it so practicing the perfect run is nearly impossible. The AI behavior, the enemy spawns and even the bullet spread is not deterministic in Halo, so there’s this added element of luck, which makes the challenge harder imo because not only do you have to be perfect in your gameplay, you have to be perfect and hope that everything else works out in your favor lol. Both are insano challenges that only the best of the best can complete tho, and by no means do I disagree that DD2 is one of the hardest video game challenges ever.
I mostly agree, but want to clarify one point: >The challenge must be underwent by a large amount of players Volume of players is somewhat significant, but maybe not as significant as you may think. Consider that these challenges are made for skilled players, which themselves take thousand of hours to be trained. A random unskilled player (e.g. myself, and many others trying the map) cannot hope to beat it at all, and should not contribute to the difficulty rating. In the end, it will still converge to only a handful of truly skilled and dedicated players really pushing for it. Thus, I disagree that volume of players attempting the challenge should be a criteria. The most important criteria is probably still some sort of average time taken for each player to clear (with weighting towards the faster clearers because they are likely to be more skilled). At this point, Deep Dip 2 is likely to be the hardest popular challenge, but probably not the hardest challenge in gaming history also, regarding finishability: as long as the challenge can be theoretically completed, someone is going to try and do it just for the memes. do not underestimate them
It's taking a month for people who have 10k+ hours and are the best few players in the world to get close to finishing the map. Uh, yes, it's up there.
Clearly this guy never tried to beat the level on COD WAW when you have to storm the reichstag on veteran difficulty. Fucking raining grenades. /s
I don't think so. It's definitely very hard, but a lot of speedrunning goals were A LOT harder to achieve.
I still think the hardest gaming challenge ever completed is Trials of Death from Mario maker. It was only beaten by the creator (in the intended way at least), and it took them like 4000h iirc
It's not close. Averagetrey has been speedrunning Super Mario Sunshine for over a decade, so probably in the same ballpark - he recently beat a romhack for that game without save states that took nearly 300 hours. It's not foddian as it doesn't reset on death, but it's of comparable difficulty to DD2. And that was a fairly niche event that wasn't newsworthy. If it wasn't for Wirtual making the event giant (and for making trackmania not niche), most people wouldn't know about it. I used to play destiny 2 at a fairly high level - solo wrath, 2 man prestige calus (in vanilla), 3 man petra (before shadowkeep) all took much longer than deep dip has - and all of those players had 500+ hours in the respective raid before even attempting the challenge, and all took a similar amount of time or longer. If DD2 starts to stretch towards the 1500 hour mark, I'll reconsider - but right now there's recency and popularity bias. The only thing about DD2's challenge that is unique is dealing with the burnout. I've dealt with having to push through that before, and it usually doubles or triples the time it takes to do something - and that's for a week long grind. Take Wirtual's streams - you can know in the first half hour if he's gonna match his pb that day. While it's not as pronounced in the other runners, the time investment is likely more than double what it would normally be.
While I absolutely love trackmania and deep dip 2 to me is an unfathomably hard challenge to undertake, it is to my knowledge very, very far from being the hardest video game challenge ever. Many video game challenges were never beaten through intended means (such as FFXI Absolute Virtue), and others took [12+ years to get beaten](https://youtu.be/dCRI69pQpY0). Deep dip 2 is a community created map, and many games (osu, geometry dash, mario maker) feature community created content meant to be near unbeatable by anything other than scripts, extremely unlikely to ever get beaten. Volume of players is an important metric to judge the difficulty of a specific challenge, but I'd argue that the average quality of each participant is about as valid. Beating Inbachi in a legitimate 1CC run (in the link above) is a challenge undertaken by one of the oldest community in the video game space. It took 12 years for a community regrouping people who have been practicing SHMUPS for 35+ years.
Na, there is alot of stuff thats probably alot harder / takes way more time. 1 Month and like 250 or so hours is not that much in the grand scheme of things id say. Sure people have thousands of hours in TM, but thats not different in other games But it's also kinda hard to compare, since pretty much all of the stuff at this level is super niche
Posted by someone who hasn't tried to finish Stunt Car Racer with no holes 😅
Not even close. Trackmania players are not used to these kinds of maps. Some challenges in other games are only possible for genetically gifted players with thousands of hours to finish.
1 health terraria on getfixedboi in master mode hardcore. (Every hit you take does at least 1 damage)
I remember one dude did a soulsborne no hit run, it took him years to get to that point. And similar to deep dip, one fail meant restarting a 10-20 hour run.
Happyhobbit was his name I think
There is Crypt Of The Necrodancer with its cursed trophy for *beating the game 9 times in a row without missing a beat and picking up any items*. Who tf would even want to do that?
I personally don't think so, I feel like trying to get certain rare drops in MMOs outplays that just in the sense of time required. And id say that a no hit run using fist only in a dark souls game would be even more difficult or even Halo 2 LASO, but really this is completely subjective, and is gonna 100% be based on that individual strengths and weaknesses, and what you enjoy or dislike. Like I'd personally argue that getting max rank in halo infinite multiplayer is the hardest challenge, because everytime I look at it in my steam library, all I think is "wtf happened" so it's already a challenge to just reinstall it.
No, pro players spend years and years on some challenges in some games. Pro players are gonna beat this before 2 months. It’s hard, but it’s nowhere near the toughest in all of gaming. Hell even in just TM there are some Trackmania maps out there that are still unbeaten and people don’t even want to hunt them due to the challenge.
Idk hardest challenge in video game history to me is Old School RuneScape's collection log. Having to get on rate for every item in the collection log you have to get at least 78000 master clues which are 4-5/hour. So on the low end of time it's 15600 HOURS just to go normal drop rate, imagine going dry by 1% LOL
No There are Plenty Trackmania Maps out there wich is even harder, so even inside of Trackmania there are more difficult challenges then DD2, these maps are just not that popular. This one for example: [https://trackmania.exchange/maps/130817/trial-defiant](https://trackmania.exchange/maps/130817/trial-defiant) noone finished it yet \^\^
I don't think it is the hardest. There are a lot of trackmania tracks and I believe of them is similar length of time as deep dip but requires continuous driving.
This feels like one of those old arcade games where if you die once you have to re-start from the beginning of the game. I can't think of any real comparison in modern gaming. There are plenty of hard challenges but anywhere else you can just practice a trick over and over and then put it all eventually in a single run. In DD2 I have seen players put in 40hours to even TRY a new jump 3 or 4 times. I agree with you, I feel like I am watching something historical.
I don't even think it's the hardest challenge in Trackmania. To this day only 1 player managed to finish deep fear with no respawn and it didn't take 1 month.
This was already mentioned, but Mudda completed DF in TMNF in 800 hours and then the remake in TM2020 in 10 hours. Not because he hadn't perfectly learned the map in the first 799 hours, but because of all the damn landing bugs in TMNF which he didn't have to deal with in TM2020. He 100% had the skill and knowledge to beat the map probably 200-300 hours in.
I mean that doesn't say much though does it? It's not surprising that he did the second time much faster. Regardless, the random landing bugs were indeed part of the difficulty, just like the random plastic bounce fails are are inherent part of Deep Dip 2 difficulty now.
No lol