The Witness was released on January 26th of 2016 at 5pm UTC, and by the end of the day, it had already been patched twice. It would, in fact, receive another 7 patches before the week was up. None of these updates changed the content of the game, of course. They were all about fixing bugs.
This is not uncommon when it comes to video games in the modern era. No matter how much you test software before release, there are always issues that quality control misses. Sometimes this has to do with the different technical environment that release puts your game in, and sometimes it has to do with gameplay bugs that only a wider audience can reveal for you.
Speedrunners have an interesting relationship with game updates. A game is usually updated in good faith, with the goal of bettering the casual player's experience. Stuff like lag reduction and increased leniency in difficult portions of the game are generally considered positive by everyone. But there are some changes that are beneficial to casual players which hinder speedrunners: most notably, the removal of useful glitches.
Today, on the nine year anniversary of its release, I will be talking about how The Witness has changed for speedrunners over time, and the history of New Version vs Old Version.
Disclaimer as per usual that this post contains a lot of spoilers for The Witness, including major mechanic reveals and also some full puzzle solutions. It's also long; I'm talking 13,000 words long. It got so long I had to widen a database column and split part of it into a separate post. Have fun!
I'm mostly going to be talking about the Windows release, although I'll talk a bit about macOS near the end. I won't really be talking about console versions at all, since they are inferior to the PC/Mac releases when it comes to speedrunning, and I don't know very much about them.
A lot of the early changes have to do with things like crashes when playing on certain operating system versions with certain graphics cards, or minor bugfixes for puzzles. I won't go through all of these, because they aren't really relevant to speedrunning. There's a post on Steam that documents some of them, although it curiously does not tell the whole story.
The first noteworthy bug that got patched is one that seems like it would be important in speedruns, but I'm not really sure it is. Day one players began talking about a glitch with the boat where you could get accidentally get off of it near Symmetry Island. It was a problem because if the boat was moving when you got off of it, you wouldn't be able to get back on and you'd be softlocked, with no recourse but to start a new file.
This was determined to be due to some incorrect collision geometry in that area that made the "surface" of the out-of-bounds area too close in height to the floor of the boat. One of the game devs actually made a video explaining it:
Softlocks are pretty bad, so they got a fix out for this quickly, in the first of two updates on January 28th. But I think it's still worth talking about, since it is possible to downpatch to a version that has the bug.
OOB in The Witness is strange because the walls are double-sided. There aren't many known ways to get out of bounds in this game, but most of them are useless because if you don't also have a way to get back into bounds, you're just stuck there. The fact that you can stop the boat in this specific location, get out of bounds to potentially do something, and then get back in bounds is interesting.
The OOB area here is pretty big. You can't get very close to Symmetry Island because the walkable surface ends, but you can explore quite a ways in the other direction. You can go all the way around Desert, and then carefully climb around the rocks to get into Quarry. The hard stop appears to be the back wall of Boathouse.
You can't solve puzzles through the backs of walls, but if you're standing somewhere such that your feet are out of bounds but your head is in bounds, you can usually still snipe things. And since you can also end up in a position where you're looking out underneath the island, it might be possible to do a through-walls snipe. I'm not convinced that there's absolutely no use for this glitch, but as of now I don't know any. Alas, you only have a quarter of the island's coast to explore out-of-bounds using this method. And the render distance isn't that long so you can't really see what's in the distance very well. And also it got patched out.
Moving on, a quick-but-very-relevant update hit the scene in the first of two updates on January 30: they increased the player's acceleration from stop. This always has an effect on speedruns because, well, getting to full speed faster means you're moving faster. It's kind of jarring how slowly the player accelerates in the initial versions, considering the fact that the acceleration wasn't that great after the change either.
There's another out-of-bounds-ish bug that got fixed in the early days, but it's of a completely different nature. It turned out that by pressing Shift and period at the same time, you could enable a "dev mode" that got left in accidentally. That would enable various other hotkeys, although most of them were useless. Pressing M, though, allowed you to detach from the ground and fly around, including through walls. Noclip wasn't used in speedruns because it was obviously cheating, but it was useful for traversing the game for routing purposes. And then they patched it out on February 4th.
It actually turned out, much later, that noclip still existed in the game, and that all the developers had done was disable the key sequence that enables dev mode. darkid's Witness Trainer mod can enable noclip mode even in the latest version of the game, using memory hacking. It's still very useful, especially when searching for snipes.
It's also useful for goofy category extensions, such as "Noclip Any%"!1
February 4th, 2016 #2
After that, there were a handful of updates focused on one thing: reducing motion sickness. This was a major problem for The Witness in its early days, with Jenna Stoeber from Polygon stating "The Witness made me vomit after 20 minutes and I will never, ever forgive it." It's a common problem when it comes to 3D first person games, but most have features built-in to help out with it. The Witness did not, at the start.
The first thing they did (besides completely disabling view bobbing) was add an FOV slider. The game was originally locked to a 84 degree field of view, and a lot of people can feel sick when the field of view is too low. The FOV slider was added on February 4th (in a later update than the one that removed noclip), and it allowed the player to choose any value between 60 and 120. This was interesting to speedrunners for completely the opposite reason from what it was intended for. While the feature was added to allow people to choose a higher FOV for motion sickness reasons, there was some utility in lowering the FOV.
The reason for this is panel sniping. If you haven't read my post about through-walls snipes, an interesting feature of The Witness is that you are able to solve panels from any distance, as long as they are within your field of view and not occluded by anything solid. An unoccluded puzzle can be solved even if it is so far away that it isn't rendered. Speedrunners make heavy use of these snipes; 7 Lasers (the main competitive category) uses one in particular to turn the slowest level in the game into the second fastest.
Panel sniping requires a degree of precision though. You have to click on a very small target and then accurately move your mouse through a grid you may not even be able to see. One thing we do to help with this is to position the camera such that the panel to be sniped is in the corner of the screen. The camera's fisheye effect makes things in the corner appear bigger, which can help a lot. Another thing we do is play on the lowest possible field of view, because while a lower FOV reduces how many things you can see at once, it makes the things you can see bigger. So, for speedrunners, having 60 FOV as an option made tricks in 7 Lasers like Town Snipes and Swamp Snipe more consistent.
However, it seems like 60 FOV was a bit too extravagant for Thekla. The very next update, on February 15th, changed the lower bound of the FOV slider to 80 degrees. This is probably because the puzzles at the end of 7 Lasers are impossible to solve at less than 77.
Despite this change having an effect on speedrunners, it didn't trigger a rules discussion until the beginning of 2020, four years later. Weirdly enough, it wasn't about letting people downpatch to the Low FOV version, because by then this version was considered a different category from New Version. Instead, it was because the very existence of the Low FOV version had a ripple effect that infected every update after it.
Unlike every other setting, the game preserves your FOV when you start a new file. It doesn't preserve your mouse sensitivity, it doesn't preserve that you want subtitles, it doesn't preserve your keybinding selection. Just FOV. Additionally, the game doesn't validate the FOV value in your save file. If the FOV is outside the slider's range, it keeps that value. The knob on the slider would be visually past the end of the range, but it wouldn't force your selection back in range unless you tried to change it.
It's admirable that the game can handle this without crashing.
So, it's possible to get a 60 degree FOV on New Version without cheating by using an old save file to set the FOV, which'll then be carried forward into the new files for your runs. There was only really one person who was in favor of this exploit, though, so it was quickly decided against. The game rules now state that you can only use FOV values that are selectable in the game version you're running, which means 84 for the first two versions, 60-120 on the second February 4th update, and 80-120 on every version after that.
February 15th, 2016
The FOV slider wasn't the only thing that changed in that February 15th update. This is the update that finally added a reticle; the little gray thing in the middle of the screen that you can focus your eyes on so it's less likely you'll get motion sick. Jenna Stoeber would be proud, if she hadn't already completely written off the game. This reticle was diamond shaped and a little strange to look at, but it had a speedrunning benefit in addition to helping you not throw up: it showed you exactly where the cursor would appear upon entering solve mode, which meant you could aim better.
This update also added the "multisampling" graphics quality option to the game settings, but I have never personally touched it. The real thing I want to talk about here is the first patched speedrunning trick: the mountaintop exploit.
There's a puzzle at the top of the mountain that gets activated once you complete 7 lasers. You need to do this in order to enter the mountain, so of course, nearly every category reaches this puzzle. It's a bit of a strange puzzle: there are three start points and three end points, and you have to solve it three different times, one for each end point. There's also two statues standing on top of the panel blocking your view. The real challenge of the puzzle is finding the right position to stand in for each solution such that the statues aren't in the way. Because of this, most speedrunners call this the Mountaintop Perspective puzzle (although early runners call it Crazyhorse, because that is, for some reason, what the game calls it internally).
A top-down recreation of the Mountaintop Perspective puzzle, without the statues.
Note the three starts and three ends. This puzzle was designed such that each solution had to go from a start point to the end opposite of it. However, this wasn't actually enforced. All that mattered was that each end point received a solution; so, if you managed to find an alternate solution that reused a start point to reach two end points, you'd still be able to unlock the seal and enter the mountain.
Of course, this is what ended up happening. Players found early on that there was a solution for the back right end point starting from the back start point, rather than the bottom left. This solution was visible as you approached the puzzle, rather than from behind as the intended solution required. Thus, using this solution allowed you to save something like 3 seconds of walking. And that matters in a speedrun!
On the left is the intended solution that requires standing behind the puzzle. On the right is the alternate solution that uses this exploit. The position you have to stand in is somewhat precise because it's hard to make the back start point visible and also be able to round the corner near the end. But it's possible!
Or, at least it was, until the February 15th patch. Now, the puzzle starts off with no end points, and when you click on one of the start points, only the end point opposite to it appears, forcing you to use the intended solution. It's a bit of a shame to not be able to use this exploit anymore, but it really didn't save that much time, and it's understandable how this change could improve the experience for casual players. The puzzle is really about finding standing positions that provide the right perspective, not about figuring out which end point to use for each start.
There was one other notable thing that got fixed in this update, but it didn't have any utility; it was just an amusing bug. Early in the game, you stumble upon a large puzzle affixed to a metal door. The puzzle has multiple starts, multiple ends, dots, and stones. You find this before you even find the tutorials for dots and stones, and you're intended to see this, get confused, walk past it, find the tutorials, and then come back for a little challenge. We call this the Tutorial Vault, and there are four other challenge puzzles like this that guard access to the same prize that this one does: a video code for the Theatre.
Much later in the game, you find yourself in the Quarry, an area focused on the eraser symbol mechanic. There are two buildings in the Quarry, and one of them, the Mill, focuses on combining the eraser with both dots and stones. Once you've cleared all of the required puzzles in here, there's an optional puzzle at the end, just in case you want an extra challenge.
Here's a picture of both puzzles, with Tutorial Vault on the left and Mill Control Room 2 on the right. See if anything about them seems familiar.
Yep, they're almost identical! It's like a "spot the differences" puzzle. In this case, the differences are that Mill Control Room 2 is missing one of the start points, and has an eraser symbol. It's unknown why these puzzles are so similar, especially because the latter is not a vault. It is completely optional; solving it does nothing.
Or, well. It was supposed to do nothing.
Some players started reporting that the Tutorial Vault door was open despite them not solving the puzzle on it. The reason? They'd solved Mill Control Room 2. It seems that when Thekla designed the latter puzzle, they just copy-pasted the entity for the Tutorial Vault puzzle and changed some parameters on it. This is a fairly reasonable thing to do when you want to closely mimic work you've already done, but it does come with the risk that something will unintentionally sneak into the new entity via the copy-paste. And that's exactly what happened here: they forgot to unset the field that says what happens when you solve the puzzle, which in this case, was "open the Tutorial Vault door".
This was a a pretty funny bug, but like I said, it had pretty much no use, so it's fine that they patched it. As an additional fun fact, cause I'm full of them: there's actually another case of this in the game that never got fixed! There's a puzzle in the secret underground section of the mountain (otherwise known as UTM) that is almost identical to a puzzle on Symmetry Island, and we discovered in 2023 that solving it activates the next puzzle in the Symmetry Island set. It took so long to get discovered because you're usually required to do all of Symmetry Island before being able to reach UTM, so there's no non-glitchy way to encounter this and it only came up because the Archipelago mod can give you access to UTM early. If we could solve those underground panels early, it would lower the solve count in All Lasers Low% by two. There's currently no known way to do this since that area is very late in the game and the puzzles are facing away from the island (which makes sniping-through-walls difficult), but maybe someday we'll find a way to make that category just a little bit more of a nightmare!
April 4th, 2016
There were a couple of updates on February 19th, one of which added some alternate control schemes; you could use ESDF or ZSQD instead of being forced to use WASD to move around. It also added the advanced graphics settings dialog that you still see in the game today, as well as the option to disable vignetting. The latter is important because vignetting makes corner sniping harder by darkening the corners of the screen, so it's nice to be able to turn it off. But other than that, things were pretty quiet for a while. The game was in a stable state, and the post-release deluge of updates had reached its end.
Then April 4th happened. This was another update with multiple changes, but these had a little more impact than the previous patch. I'll start with the small things first. Remember the diamond shaped reticle from the previous update? It's already gone. Now the reticle is square shaped, which is how it remains to this day. The square reticle is a little bigger, and looks more like a bounding box for the cursor when it shows up. It's not a huge change, but I think the square reticle looks better, so this is a thumbs up from me.
The two reticles. They are admittedly pretty similar, but the square one just feels right to me.
Next, we have a bit of a weird one. The Witness auto saves your progress every 60 seconds, and whenever you pause. It also keeps track of your score, which is the sum of your solved panels, EP's, and obelisks. Previously, if your score passed a 120 point threshold, it would save into a new file instead of overwriting the old one, effectively splitting your save. As of the April 4th update, it now does this every 60 points instead. It may not be obvious why this is positive, but you'll see later.
We got a Mountaintop Perspective change that actually benefited us. As you saw in the previous image, one of the statues is holding a laser box, which is what activates the puzzle to begin with. There are two cables coming out of it: one going directly down into the puzzle, and one that the other statue is pulling over the first statue's shoulder.
The thing about this second cable is that it blocks your cursor just like any other object. When the game was first released, there was a lot of slack in the cable between the two statues, making it hang pretty low. This mattered for the solution going from the back start to the front end, which is inputted from the side. The position you had to stand in was rather precise because you had to prevent the right statue's leg from blocking one of the turns, but if you moved too far forward, the cable would block the line segment below the top white stone.
The April 4th update thankfully shortened the cable, giving you a lot more leeway in your standing position.
On top, the standing position for the back -> front solution, with the line drawn. Observe how close the cable comes to blocking the line. On the bottom, the shortened cable, seen from the same standing position.
Next we have another bugfix that doesn't immediately seem impactful. In the past, if you were solving a panel and then paused and loaded a file, the solve wouldn't get canceled until after the new file loaded. You could tell because the "solve cancel" sound effect would play as the pause menu disappeared. This was obviously a bug, but why did it matter? Well, it's because the bug allowed for a trick called Force Bridge Skip, which you can read more about in the linked blog post. It's one of my favorite tricks (partially because I discovered it myself), and thus I dedicated a little bit more time to explaining it.
It's sad that Force Bridge Skip got patched out, but there's actually an upside to it. You might be familiar with Eclipse Skip, otherwise known as the largest skip in the game. If you've read my post about it, you might remember something called the Theatre Pause Glitch. Basically, if you load a file while seeking through one of the Theatre videos, the video will be paused at that point after the load. This glitch is a critical part of Eclipse Skip. It's also a minor timesave in 99.8%, in which you pause a video early on in the run so that you can get the Catwalk EP later without having to walk all the way back into Theatre.
The video seek panels are pretty unusual, for a number of reasons. One of which is that canceling a solve on them has a special effect, just like the force bridge panels. The reason seeking works at all is because partially solving the panel is technically still canceling the solve; the panels just don't call the regular handler for a solve cancel. You can test this out easily: start seeking through a video and left click in the middle. Then repeat the seek and right click. The exact same thing happens both times.
The problem with this is how it interacts with the Force Bridge Skip glitch. Since it causes an in-progress solve to get canceled after the load, the seek handler gets called and the video continues playing from the seeked position. Not only does this immediately break the timesave in 99.8%, it also clears whatever flag in memory that normally causes the seek to smear across files, which breaks Eclipse Skip.
Despite this, Theatre Pause Glitch is still possible prior to the April 4th update. It just works a little differently. After seeking to the position in the video you want to pause at, you need to load a save file that hasn't input the video's code yet, so the seek panel isn't on. Then you can load your original file again, and in the case of Eclipse Skip, you can start loading the other files you want to smear the pause into.
So, the trick was still possible, but it was a bit harder because you needed to have an extra file to load into. Eclipse Skip has this built in because it also depends on Save File Splitting, but the 99.8% trick only works if Theatre is far enough into the run that the file's naturally split itself already (which it is in the current route, even taking the old split threshold into consideration). It should also be noted that needing to load an extra file, perhaps multiple times for Eclipse Skip, makes these tricks slower, especially since loading files is slower in Old Version.
All of this is just to say that patching Force Bridge Skip did have a positive effect, in making Theatre Pause Glitch and Eclipse Skip easier and faster. Unfortunately, this update was not all sunshine and butterflies for the 100% category. Now it's time to talk about the biggest patched trick in Old Version: Keep Skip.
Keep Skip
One of the requirements for a 100% run is solving all of the environmental patterns, or EP's. The Keep area has some of the most inventive EP's in the game. In the back half of the area, there are four puzzles that aren't solved by drawing lines through grids on panels like usual. Instead, there are large pressure plates arranged into grids on the ground, and you have to walk over them using the path of your solution.
Where this gets really cool is the fact that, when you're standing at the top of the Keep tower, each solved pressure plates puzzle becomes solvable as an EP. It makes sense, after all: they are visually Witness lines, and they're in the environment. What's unique about them is the fact that the pressure plate puzzles have multiple solutions, and not all solutions are equal.
Take, for example, the Purple Pressure Plates. Here's one solution, as seen from the top of the tower:
First of all, there are no symbols visible here. You can see the panel that this puzzle is connected to in the lower right, and the symbols are visible on that. So you'll just have to take my word for it that this is a valid solution to the puzzle, and that there aren't many others.
The next thing you'll probably notice is that this can't be solved as an EP. There's a broken pillar blocking one of the line segments, meaning your cursor won't be able to cross it. This happens regardless of where on the tower you stand; that line segment is always impassable and you can't get the EP if your solution uses it. This isn't the only such restriction: there's black paint spilled on a nearby segment, which has the same effect as the pillar: it breaks the continuous purple line, and prevents solving the EP.
Now consider this solution:
This one seems much better! The solution doesn't use the segment behind the pillar or the inked pressure plate. Indeed, you can solve the EP using this line. But there's something else that's important to note about this solution, and it's part of the reason why the puzzle was designed to use pressure plates rather than line drawing. That something is the wood piling next to the inked plate:
The piling sticks out at an odd angle. It's not really visible from the top of the tower because of the angle you're viewing the puzzle from, but from the ground the problem is more apparent. You can't walk across that pressure plate because the piling blocks you. You can activate that plate, sure, but you can't keep walking. You have to turn around and find some way to the other side in order to continue your line.
For a casual player, figuring out how to deal with this problem is really fun! The answer is that you can use the castle ramparts (or one of the other shortcuts in this area) to get to the puzzle after Purple Pressure Plates, and then walk the rest of the line starting from the end. The two lines you've drawn meet up in the middle, and the solution is accepted! Horray!
Something to note about this, however, is that it requires the door at the end of the puzzle to be open, and it only opens once you've solved the puzzle. That means that, in order to get the EP in 100%, you have to solve Purple Pressure Plates twice, using both of the solutions I showed. This can be pretty slow, since you're limited by walking speed rather than line drawing speed!
Okay, so, that's a lot of information about one puzzle, but what is that Keep Skip thing I mentioned? Well, you remember that wooden piling? It turned out that you could actually walk on the right side of it, next to the inked panel. There must've been some kind of bug with the collision there that allowed the player to step onto it. And what this meant was that you could walk a line up to the point where you activated the pressure plate blocked by the piling, and then you could backtrack a little bit and walk between the piling and the inked panel in order to continue your solution. This was called Keep Skip, and it allowed you to do Purple Pressure Plates in only one solve for 100%, saving something like 30 seconds, which is pretty significant!
So, why have I spent so much time explaining this skip? Well, it should be pretty obvious: they patched it in the April 4th update. You can't walk across the piling without activating the inked panel anymore, which means you're back to doing two solves and spending 30 extra seconds doing it.
This was a problem because it was the first time an update to the game really hurt the speedrun. Whenever something like this happens, it spawns endless conversations about whether to allow downpatching in runs. At the time though it wasn't too big of a deal because few people were actually doing 100% runs, and it was also somewhat easy to downpatch with Steam. Luckily, by the time the game started getting more active again and a Steam bug had made it harder to downpatch, the game had changed in a way that made up for the loss in time from Keep Skip.
And that's even before we found FOV clipping, which essentially brought Keep Skip into the modern era, as well as adding a number of other great skips, but that's a lesson for another blog post. It's time to move on from April 4th.
August 22nd, 2016
There was one more update to the Windows port of The Witness in 2016, and for a long time I thought it was equivalent to the April 4th update. But on the day of publishing this post, I remembered something that I knew didn't work in the initial release and did work on New Version. So I stepped through a bunch of different versions, expecting it to change on either April 4th or in New Version. To my surprise, I found that it changed on the one update in between: the August 22nd update.
There's a handful of moving bridges in the game that you can control by solving some sort of special panel. Swamp has two of them, and we call them Sliding Bridge and Rotating Bridge, because, well. You get it.
Rotating Bridge is particularly complex. There's four color-coded platforms around it: black, blue, purple, and red (although red is just a dead end). The bridge itself is bent at a 90 degree angle, so it always connects two adjacent platforms. The puzzle on the panel can be solved to direct the bridge to any rotation, and you can even specify whether to go clockwise or counterclockwise.
Swamp Rotating Bridge in its default rotation, connecting black and red.
The black and blue platforms are connected to the rest of the island, and you can't even get off at red, but the purple platform is different. It just leads to a puzzle, two EP's, and an audio log. So if you, say, solved the bridge control such that it rotated to connect black and blue, and you got off the bridge at purple while it was rotating, you'd be stuck there with no way to leave. You couldn't even snipe the control to get the bridge to rotate back to you because it'd be facing away.
Luckily, Thekla thought of this. If you stand at the purple platform and neither end of the bridge is touching that tile, it'll automatically rotate back to you. The same is true of the black platform, likely because if you're at either blue or black and the bridge is rotated to connect purple and red, the control will be facing away and you won't be able to snipe it back.2
What's interesting is that this didn't apply to the blue platform. Standing there when the bridge is facing away used to do nothing, before August 22nd. My guess is that this was because it's possible to get to the blue area of Swamp by the boat, bypassing the beginning. You can't actually make progress without going in through the front because there are locked doors on the black platform that open from the other side. However, if you stand at the blue tile and the bridge rotates to connect blue and black, and then go around to the front of Swamp and do the normal progression, you'll eventually reach the Rotating Bridge and it'll already be facing the right direction. You won't be forced to learn how the bridge works, which is something that a first time player could potentially experience, and maybe Thekla wanted to prevent that originally.
Rotating Bridge isn't the only thing that changed. The Sliding Bridge also now comes to you if you stand at either end of it. It didn't move automatically at all prior to this update, probably because you can't get softlocked by it. The control is visible from either side, and it would also be less likely for the player to have unintentionally sent the bridge away from them while also unable to access the other side by other means. Adding the automatic movement also does not harm the new player experience because you can't get to the other side of the bridge for the first time without actually using the bridge (or sniping two panels from very far away).
Now, are these changes relevant to speedrunners? Yes and no. There's no real speedrun category that makes use of either of these automatic rotations (although I have to once again mention Touch All Audio Logs No Mountain Low%, as it does make use of this feature in order to skip solving the Rotating Bridge control). There's a small chance it could be useful in bingo because there are two EP's on the Rotating Bridge. But otherwise you're not likely to encounter a situation where you'd need this.
It is, however, useful in the Archipelago randomizer. There's a mode in the randomizer that allows doors to be unlocked remotely, disrupting the normal progression of areas. And so it's possible that being able to enter Swamp on the blue side using the boat and then crossing over the Rotating Bridge to the black platform could allow you to make progress. It's not that uncommon, actually. Maybe one of the doors there is unlocked but not the other, meaning that if you approach the area from both sides you could solve all of the puzzles needed to progress. Or maybe the red underground room entrance got remotely drained, and you can head in there and maybe make it to the laser.
The In-Between
After that, the Windows port experienced a drought of updates. Speedrunners had a lot of time to adjust to and optimize the August 22nd version of the game.
During this time, Thekla was mostly working on ports of The Witness to other platforms. The PS4 version was already out; it was actually released alongside the PC version way back in January. It was released for Xbox One on September 13th, 2016, not long after the last PC update. A port for the Nvidia Shield came out on January 16th, 2017, and I've gotta be honest: I have no idea what the Nvidia Shield is, other than that it's a console. All three of those platforms are consoles, which also means they're unimportant to speedrunning.
The next two ports are pretty important, though. The first macOS version came out on March 8th, 2017, and I'll talk more in depth about that one later. And finally, a port for iOS was released on September 20th, 2017.
iOS is kind of a weird platform to port The Witness to. It's the only mobile platform you can play it on, and mobile devices pretty notoriously lack mice, keyboards, and controllers, which are the standard inputs for playing the game on any other platform. This means they had to completely redesign the way you interact with the game.
The result is pretty intuitive. You can tap somewhere on the screen and your player will start walking toward that spot. If you double tap, you run. The player's movement is nice and fluid; none of the hard stops you see in the PC version. You input puzzle solutions by dragging your finger around the screen, navigating the grids and environments through touch rather than from afar. It's clear a lot of work went into making the mobile experience friendly and responsive.3
Why am I talking about this? Well, sometimes when you do a huge refactor you end up writing or rewriting bits of code and then realize that hey, this might be good to bring over to the original branch. Why constrain all of the quality of life tweaks to iOS? This is exactly what happened.
December 21st, 2017 (New Version)
After a year and a half of silence, the PC version of The Witness received an update on December 21st, 2017. This update is known by many names: "Current", "Sliding", and of course, "New Version".
New Version brought over a number of the changes developed in the macOS and iOS ports. The most notable is a physics patch the community refers to as "sliding movement". In Old Version, entering solve mode brought the player to an immediate stop, eating up all of your momentum. In New Version, the player keeps moving briefly upon entering solve mode. You lose control of your movement and quickly (but not instantly) de-accelerate, with the result of "sliding" gently into place.
Sliding movement generally makes the game feel more fluid and comfortable to play. The instantaneous stop effect from entering solve mode in Old Version was visually jarring. This also increases the skill ceiling in speedrunning, because you can enter solve mode earlier than you would in previous versions and still be able to get into the position you want to solve or snipe a puzzle.
Still, this might not sound like that big of a change. It's just a smoother transition between 3D and 2D gameplay. However, there's two corollaries to this physics change that have a huge impact on the run: the player now accelerates from stop to full speed more quickly, and the player is no longer slowed down while walking up slopes.
I mentioned it before, but movement in Old Version was slow. The combination of solve mode instantly eating up all of your momentum, plus it being slow to accelerate back to full speed, made movement between puzzles feel clunky and tedious. And slopes were even worse. Climbing up Keep tower, or Town tower, or the Mountain, etc, felt terrible because the game just arbitrarily limited your speed so much. There's some argument about "realism" because "it's harder to go up slopes than down in real life" but if The Witness is supposed to be a paradise virtual reality island, I think the in-universe player would also be disappointed in having to walk slowly up slopes.
New Version solved all of those problems, and because of this, New Version is almost universally faster to run than any Old Version, even taking patched tricks into consideration. It's like Super Mario Odyssey, where important glitches were patched in Version 1.2.0, but the latest version drastically improved the load times, making it the optimal version for most categories despite having the most patched glitches.
The faster player movement in New Version didn't just stand on its own. It also led to one of the more unique tricks in the game.
Jungle Wall Skip
The first Witness speedrun I ever saw was FearfulFerret doing 7 Lasers (then called Any%) at Summer Games Done Quick 2016. There's a part in the route where you solve the Waves set of puzzles in Jungle, and then approach an orange panel next to a suspicious looking metal plate on the ground. Solving the panel causes the plate to spring up, creating a wall that blocks you from ever using that passage again. There are 6 puzzles mounted on the other side of the wall, so completion of the Jungle area requires you to navigate your way back to the other side of the wall without using that passage. As he popped up the wall, FearfulFerret said "It's impossible to activate that and to be on the other side of the wall as that happens."
I'm sure you can guess what happened next.
On January 16th, 2018, a user named Tedder posted the following video:
Yep! The increased player acceleration allows you to get to the other side of the Jungle Wall before it pops up. It's actually much easier than the video makes it look. The position you have to stand in isn't very precise; it's more the angle that matters. darkid posted a tutorial video showing how you can learn it yourself.
Jungle Wall Skip was big, not only because it saved 20 seconds of walking in categories like All Lasers and 100%, but also because it allowed us to re-route 7 Lasers. 7 Lasers is the most competitive category, and there have been a few routes for it in the past. The pre-Current route followed this structure:4
Tutorial
Town
Monastery, but don't get the laser yet
The first few panels of Jungle on our way to Bunker
Bunker, up to activating the elevator
More of Jungle, up to activating the popup wall
Use the shortcut into the Monastery courtyard, get Monastery Laser
The rest of Jungle
Bunker Laser
Shadows
Keep
Swamp
Mountain
Step 7 is the important one there. The Monastery courtyard shortcut is the fastest way to get back to the other side of the Jungle Wall, but it only opens if you do the beginning of Monastery. This forced us to do Monastery before Jungle. With Jungle Wall Skip, that shortcut was no longer needed, opening us up to routes that did Monastery later. And this did turn out to be fruitful. Here's how the current 7 Lasers route works:
Tutorial
Town
The first few panels of Jungle on our way to Bunker
Bunker, up to activating the elevator
The rest of Jungle, including using Jungle Wall Skip
Bunker Laser
Walk back through Jungle and do Monastery
Walk out the back of Monastery and do Shadows
Keep
Swamp
Mountain
The main change here is that Monastery is moved to be between Jungle/Bunker and Shadows/Keep. It takes a little longer to go from Town -> Jungle than Town -> Monastery, and a little longer to go from Bunker -> Monastery than Monastery -> Jungle, but Monastery -> Shadows is much faster than Bunker -> Shadows, which makes up for the other changes and then some. According to timing done by darkid, this route saves an additional 5 seconds on top of the free 20 seconds from doing Jungle Wall Skip at all.
Route A (early Monastery): 82.9 seconds
Path
Time (seconds)
Town Laser -> Monastery
18.4
Monastery Inner 4 -> Jungle 1
25.5
Bunker Laser -> Shadows
39.0
Route B (deferred Monastery): 77.5 seconds
Path
Time (seconds)
Town Laser -> Jungle 1
22.5
Bunker Laser -> Monastery
29.0
Monastery Inner 4 -> Shadows
26.0
Jungle Wall Skip is cool because it's really the only movement-based trick in the game. This is a game with very flat physics; no jumping, no parkour, barely even any running. But here we have a trick that uses fancy movement to save time. It's used in pretty much every category, so it's often one of the first things a new runner will learn, aside from panel sniping. Unlike most tricks in the game, you only have one shot: if you don't make it across the wall before it pops up, you're stuck there, and you have to take the walk of shame through the Monastery courtyard (or just reset if you're doing 7 Lasers, since the new route defers Monastery). It can take some getting used to, but once you learn it, you'll likely be very consistent at it, and it's a great feeling to get to that point especially considering how much time it saves.
Now, the reason this was discovered in January of 2018 is, of course, because of the physics changes in the December 2017 update. We assumed that this wasn't possible in Old Version because of the way it zeros out your momentum upon entering solve mode, and because of how slowly the player accelerates to full speed. But then what, pray tell, is this?
On July 16th, 2021, three and a half years after Jungle Wall Skip was found, a runner named Ezra3 posted a video where he does the skip on Old Version. How? Well, it turns out that Old Version doesn't actually zero out your momentum. Entering solve mode freezes the camera in place, but your player still has momentum; it's just not being applied. You do de-accelerate very quickly while frozen, which is why solve mode appears to zero out your momentum. However, if you exit solve mode almost immediately after entering it, you actually can carry some of your momentum through.
It's a pretty neat trick. What you do is line your reticle up with the start point on the panel, making sure you're standing in a good position with a good angle that will let you cross the wall, and then you walk a bit to the right. From this position, you should be able to start walking to the left and accelerate to full speed by the time you reach the panel. When your reticle touches the panel's start point, you have to very quickly click to activate solve mode, click to start the solve, move your mouse up to reach the end point, and click again to finish the solve and exit solve mode. If done right, you will still have some momentum after finishing the panel, and you'll make it across the wall before it pops up.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is a very difficult trick. The window of time you have while in solve mode is miniscule. There's a rhythm you have to learn: double click, up, click. It's surprisingly easy to accidentally do the up before the second click, and that means you'll miss the start point entirely. You're also pretty close to the panel, which means you have to move your cursor a non-negligible distance to solve the panel. Turning your 2D speed up before starting the trick can help with that part, but it also wastes time turning that up and then turning it back down again afterward.
This was a very cool discovery, and it was fun to be able to pull it off in a Legacy 7 Lasers run, but it is a pretty dumb trick that will ruin your run 99 times out of 100. Because of this, Jungle Wall Skip is still widely thought of as one of the hallmark New Version exclusive tricks.5
Other New Version stuff
There's still more to talk about with New Version! Even though New Version is an overall improvement both to the casual and speedrunning game experience, there are two things about it that I'd consider downsides over Old Version (in addition to the patched tricks inherited from the April 4th update). The first is pillars.
"Pillars" are special panel puzzles that are wrapped around, well, pillars. These puzzles are different from others in the game because the left and right sides of the grid are connected, and the solution line can wrap horizontally. There are only 12 of them in the game, but they're located in prominent places: the last thing you do in 7 Lasers is solve eight pillars,6 and the last thing you do in All Lasers is solve two pillars with randomly generated puzzles on them.
Unlike other puzzles, it's impossible to see the entirety of a pillar puzzle at once, because it's wrapped around a cylinder. Therefore, you interact with them in a unique way. Clicking into a pillar puzzle pulls your player into position in front of the pillar. As you move your cursor through the grid, the player physically walks around the pillar, making sure that the cursor remains in view. Because of this unusual method of interaction, pillars are among the very small number of puzzles that are distance gated, meaning they cannot be sniped.
In Old Version, the player was able to walk around the pillar very quickly, which could look a bit jarring, but felt good to play, since you were always in control. In New Version, they decreased the player's acceleration when solving a pillar puzzle. This is likely because it would've been difficult to control on iOS if it was too fast, but it unfortunately hampers the experience on PC. Instead of fluidly maneuvering through the grid, you have to spend time waiting for the player to catch up with the movement of your cursor. Sometimes, the cursor can even get stuck behind the pillar, which causes you to spin out of control, losing a lot of time in the process.
Solving a pillar puzzle on Old Version (left) and New Version (right). I got a really good solve on the New Version pillar here by keeping my momentum between the first and second rows of the grid. Trust me, they are usually worse.
The other downside of New Version is audio log sniping. There are 58 audio logs scattered around the island, and clicking on one in solve mode causes it to play a recorded message. Unlike panels, these are always distance gated. In Old Version however, there was a bug that allowed you to activate audio logs through solid walls, which meant you could get them out of sequence.
Truth be told, this is a pretty minor downside, mainly because audio logs are not really relevant to speedruns. No mainboard category requires interacting with them at all; not even 100%, because activated audio logs are not counted as points on the load file menu.7 They're only relevant in certain category extensions. Category extensions aren't split by game version like mainboard runs are, so in some cases (like the ones I'm about to list) there's a real advantage to downpatching.
I mentioned "Touch All Audio Logs No Mountain" in my post about sniping-through-walls, but to summarize: you have to activate all 45 of the audio logs that are reachable without going into the Mountain. The world record is a Legacy run and it's over a minute faster than the best Current run. This is because audio log sniping allows you to skip a bunch of stuff, which I list in the run description.
There's a category called "All Audio Logs and Panels" which requires you to get all 523 panel solves, and also listen to each audio log all the way through (unlike the previous category which just required you to click on them). This is important because you cannot listen to two audio logs at once. Also unlike the previous category, you are required to listen to the ones in the Mountain, but you aren't required to listen to the ones in Easter Egg Ending, which changes the total to 49. The combined length of these 49 recordings is an hour and 24 minutes, whereas the world record in the All Panels category is just under 46 minutes, so the idea with this category is to make sure you can start a new audio log as soon as the previous one finishes, while solving panels in between activations. Sniping audio logs through walls helps the flow of the route, especially in sections where the recordings are shorter and you need to detour from solving panels in order to get to the next audio log in time.
Aaaaaand that's it, as of right now anyway. So while it is a shame that they patched this bug, it doesn't impact us that much.
Time for some other miscellaneous things about New Version. Remember the Mountaintop Perspective exploit from ages ago, and how they patched it by removing all of the end points and only making the correct one appear when you click on a start point? Well, for some reason, they inverted their fix for it in New Version. Now, all of the end points start off visible, and the two incorrect ones disappear upon clicking on a start point. This has the same exact effect as the previous fix, but I suppose it's more player friendly to be able to see the end points even when you're not entering a solution.
Your movement keys can be fully customized now. Like I said before, they were originally forced to be WASD, and then they added options for ESDF and ZSQD. As of New Version, you can bind the four directions to any key you want. The way they did this is actually a little annoying though, because your keybindings are reset whenever you start a new game, meaning that if you use keybindings other than WASD, you have to set them every time you do a run.
Not all of the changes are easily describable. New Version changed something about tracing (which is what we call the act of drawing the solution line through a puzzle grid), and now it feels "better" in some way that is hard to explain. It's part of why it's hard for someone who's mostly played New Version to go back and try a Legacy run; the tracing just feels off on Old Version (and you don't want to get yourself accustomed to old tracing anyway, since quick, precise tracing is a huge part of the skill in a Witness speedrun).
The game is more generous with starting EP's now. On Old Version, you had to be pretty precise with your standing position to be able to activate an EP. Nowadays, most EP's will pull you into the correct position if you're a little bit off, which is very helpful for 100%. The main exception is the Town Tower Underside EP's, which are inexplicably harder to line up now. Shipwreck Underside CCW EP also got harder: the hitbox for the start point is a lot smaller and it's in the corner of the visible circle.
Speaking of Shipwreck EP's, here's a weird one: you know the Shipwreck Green EP? The green line that goes all the way around the shipwreck with a lot of quick connections and is very upsetting to mess up? There's a wall near the end that has glitchy collision now, and allows you to move your cursor onto the line behind it earlier than you're supposed to. It's pretty minor, but it does give you a little more leeway when solving it, which is reassuring since you lose so much time if you mess it up. It's also unexpected that New Version actually introduced some buggy collision.
Part of the Shipwreck Green EP solution. Notice how the cursor is on a wall instead of the green line. It's blocked from moving onto the end until the line becomes visible, but it still makes the connection more reliable to have your cursor so close.
And speaking of tiny weird changes: they removed a bush! Really. The path from Tutorial to Town has some trees and bushes, and you kind of rough your way through them at the beginning of 7 Lasers. The thick foliage made it hard to see where you were going, and it was easy to accidentally bump into something and stop moving. New Version removed some of that foliage, including one bush in particular that always seemed to get in one's way. They probably changed a bunch of little environmental things like this in the update, but this is the one speedrunners notice.
I don't know why they changed this, but I'm not complaining.
Remember how I said that you move around in iOS by tapping where you want to go? They brought that into New Version too. There's a "Click to Move" option in the menu now. Using it causes mouse movement to no longer rotate the camera. Instead, it moves a cursor around the screen (a different cursor than the one in solve mode), and you can click to direct your player just like on iOS. This is not useful for speedruns at all, although I can remember doing Click to Move runs once during the Witness weekly races.
You've always been able to press Space to exit solve mode, but you can now also use it to enter solve mode. When you're playing at a top level, you can use this to your advantage to speed up some panel solves. The fact that you previously had to use the same input (left clicking) to both enter solve mode and start a panel solve meant that the interval between clicks mattered. Now, for certain solves like the very first panel in the game, you can line your reticle up with the start point, and then press Space and left click in quick succession, getting you into the solve just a little bit faster.
Something that's worth mentioning is that New Version save files are backwards incompatible with Old Version. It's not possible to weave between versions during a single run, although the category split on the leaderboard makes that illegal, and there's very likely no situation in which that'd ever be faster than just doing a run on a single version. Saves on Old Version can be played on New Version, but doing so converts it to a New Version file, and when you open Old Version back up, you'll be standing in the starting hallway again.
Finally, another useful change: you can use your mouse on the pause menu now! In a lot of cases, it's still faster to move through the menu using your keyboard, but there's one control that's faster to manipulate with the mouse: the FOV slider. The range on the slider is 80 to 120, which takes a long time to seek through using key repeat. This is important because many runners (including myself) will play at the lowest FOV possible for the majority of the run, but it's advantageous to do Challenge with at least a 100 degree FOV. So, you can now press Escape, click on Settings, and click somewhere in the middle of the FOV slider to instantly get to the FOV you want, which saves a lot of time over holding down the right arrow key until you get there.
So that's New Version! There might be some stuff I missed, since so many little things changed, in which case I'll update the post. As you can see, change is both good and bad. We've lost tricks, but we've gained so much too. I think it's clear that New Version's benefits way outrank its cons.
I consider us very fortunate as a community that this happened. It means there's almost no reason to downpatch the game for runs. New Version is essentially a monolith; there have been additional updates pushed on Steam since 2017, but they don't appear to have had any impact on the speedrun. It lowers the barrier of entry for new players because they can achieve times as good as the top runners using the most easily accessible version of the game. Downpatching is not always easy to do; in fact, like I alluded to earlier, there was a period of time during the game's popularity when a Steam bug made downpatching harder than usual. You had to use an external tool instead of the built-in console, which itself was still not very user-friendly.
One way that speedrunning communities deal with version disparity is by creating separate categories for the different versions. This often happens when the older version is faster than the new version and the community wants to keep the main category accessible to new players. The reverse can happen too, though, and that's what happened with The Witness. By the time New Version came out, many of the older runners had stopped playing the game, and suddenly the runs they had put a lot of effort into were no longer competitive. It's one thing when this happens because a new trick or skip was discovered; in that case, there's effort that goes into learning and developing the trick, and it's understandable that these newer runs showcasing more advanced gameplay should eclipse older runs, even though older runners didn't know about the new strategy. It's quite another matter when there's a game update that just straight up makes runs faster with no additional effort.
Thus, in order to preserve the achievements of older runners, all mainboard categories were split in two. The sub-categories are called Current and Legacy, where Legacy is specifically any Windows release from 2016, and Current is any other release, including other platforms like PS4 which had releases in 2016. Legacy is mostly untouched at this point, but I still think it has a fascinating history, hence this mammoth of a blog post.
Now, even though I've hit the end of The Witness's updates on PC, there is one more version I'd like to talk about, and it's (in my opinion) the weirdest version of the game out there.
macOS Old Version
I've mentioned the macOS port a couple of times. It's the only non-PC version of the game that's at parity with PC, because the rest of the ports are for consoles or mobile. Despite this, most people choose to play on PC anyway. There's only one macOS runner on the board for 7 Lasers and 100%/99.8% (Cynthia_Clementine), and a lot of what we know about this port is thanks to her.
As I said before, the macOS port came out in March 2017, which was several months before both the iOS port and PC New Version. It's been updated a handful of times just like the PC version, but there's only really one version worth talking about, and that, of course, is the first. And why is that?
Because it had sliding movement.
Downpatching to the original version of the macOS reveals a strange combination of features from both Old Version and New Version. We can see what New Version features were originally developed for the macOS port: sliding movement being the big one, but also Click to Move, and being able to use the mouse on the menu. It's actually surprising that Click to Move was made for the macOS port and not iOS. We can also see the New Version changes that were likely due to the iOS port: fast slopes, bad pillars, audio log sniping being patched, and being able to use Space to enter solve mode.
I've organized these changes into a table:
August 22nd update
macOS Old Version
New Version
Non-sliding movement
Sliding movement
Sliding movement
Slow slopes
Slow slopes
Fast slopes
Good pillars
Good pillars
Bad pillars
Audio log sniping
Audio log sniping
No audio log sniping
Only LMB enters solve mode
Only LMB enters solve mode
Space enters solve mode
No mouse on menu
Mouse on menu
Mouse on menu
Only FPS Lookaround
Click to Move available
Click to Move available
I refer to macOS Old Version as a "Franken-version" because it really seems like an unreal mixture of worlds. The fact that there's a version that has sliding movement, good pillars, and audio log sniping is so bizarre. It actually counts as Current instead of Legacy because it has sliding movement. One might be tempted to use this version for runs, but unfortunately, there's something that stops it from being a "perfect version": slow slopes. Slow slopes lose more time than good pillars save, so there aren't many cases where this version is actually optimal.
There's one exception that jumps out, though: anything that relies on audio log sniping. Remember how I said there was a competitive advantage to doing Touch All Audio Logs No Mountain on Legacy? Yeah, I was sort of lying. macOS Old Version is automatically faster than the August 22nd update because it has sliding movement. You could do the same route that I did in my Legacy run, since macOS Old Version has audio log sniping, and it'll be faster with no extra effort put in. There's a good chance I'm going to attempt this by the time I publish this post.
This version was the only thing that was really exclusive to macOS. On December 8th, 2017, an update was released on a beta branch that brought macOS into parity with New Version. It was officially released on December 21st, same as on PC. After that, there were a handful of updates that don't seem to have affected the speedrun at all, again just like PC. There were some updates in 2023 that PC didn't get, but that was just to make the game compatible with the latest version of the OS (pre-2023 versions of the game won't launch on macOS Sonoma or later).8
One weird thing about the macOS version is that it includes a text file with a change history that dates back to September 20th, 2016, when the the port was apparently first available for beta testing. Most of them relate to miscellaneous bugs and crashes, like one would expect during beta testing, but there's a couple of interesting things. November 17th, 2016 mentioned "Threaded campaign saves", which is something I'm sure we've all benefited from. And February 20th, 2017 includes "Improved menu interaction with mouse" and "Click-to-move navigation enabled", which is interesting because it makes it seem like those changes happened pretty late in the development cycle.
There's one more thing to discuss regarding macOS Old Version before I wrap this post up. We've gone over the changes that macOS Old Version introduced when it was released. But what if macOS Old Version changed something... after it released?
On July 4th, 2023, Cynthia_Clementine posted the following image in the Witness Speedrunning Discord:
Huh? It looks like a night mode version of The Witness. The sky is black, the walls and floors are black, the trees and other decorations are still colorful, but the panels appear to be off. What's going on?
This is what happens if you launch macOS Old Version on macOS Ventura. Apple must have changed some kind of graphics API that The Witness was using. The game luckily continues to function despite something going very wrong, and gives us this stunning effect. I was able to reproduce it on my computer running Ventura, and I got some more screenshots that I think are just absolutely beautiful.
The Desert Temple at night. One must wonder how they can praise the Sun like this.
Having spent a significant amount of time playing this game, seeing the world drenched in darkness like this is utterly unreal. It looks like the island but after an apocalypse; it looks like a meteor hit the place. Maybe there was a bug in the virtual reality simulation and the in-universe player was in real danger. There's a lot of depth that this adds to the world's lore.
One of the most notable effects of this glitch is that most panels appear to be off. They're still solvable, but you can't see the grid or the symbols, and you can't even see the line you're drawing. You can still see your cursor, but you have to rely on memory to be able to solve the puzzles.
Glass symmetry panels are not affected by this, and the panels in Bunker are weird (the symbols are painted on the background rather than being part of the panels) so they're perfectly visible too. There's also certain dark panels that have light shining on them, like in Treehouse or in the pillar room, and for some reason that lets you see grayscale versions of the panels. But for the most part, the panels are only visible in your mind. It makes for a neat test of memory.
A view of the Shipwreck from the boat. There's an ominous glow rising over the horizon. Is it the Sun? Or is it something... else?
This also makes the two randomly generated puzzles before the pillar room very difficult. There's a trick we can use to get a deterministic left door, but the right door pretty much just has to be brute forced. And Challenge is essentially impossible. There's too many panels, and you're constrained to a 6 and a half minute timer.
I've dubbed this effect "The Witness's Nightmare". I did a 7 Lasers run in it back when it was discovered, including commentary about the effect and macOS Old Version in general. I also spend four whole minutes brute forcing right door, so that's fun. Check it out, if you're interested!
Conclusion
So there you have it! That's how The Witness has changed over the years with regards to speedrunning. As I said before, there are more updates than the ones I've listed, but these are the ones with changes that impacted us.9 Since there's a lot of detail up above, I've listed the main (Windows) updates below and summarized what changed in them:
01/26/2016:
Initial release.
01/28/2016 #1:
Fixed out-of-bounds access near Symmetry Island using the boat.
01/30/2016 #1:
Player accelerates from stop a little more quickly.
02/04/2016 #1:
Removed noclip keybinding.
02/04/2016 #2:
Added FOV slider, with a lower bound of 60.
02/15/2016:
Increased the FOV lower bound to 80.
Added the diamond reticle.
Disabled the Mountaintop Perspective alternate solution.
Fixed the bug that made Mill Control Room 2 open the Tutorial Vault door.
02/19/2016:
Added ESDF and ZSQD control schemes.
Added advanced graphics settings dialog.
Added menu option to disable vignetting.
04/04/2016:
Patched Keep Skip.
Patched Force Bridge Skip.
Theatre Pause Glitch and Eclipse Skip are easier now.
Replaced the diamond reticle with the square one.
Decreased save split threshold to 60 points.
Shortened the cable between the statues on the Mountain Perspective puzzle.
08/22/2016:
Swamp bridges automatically come to you now.
12/21/2017:
"Sliding movement" physics patch.
Player accelerates from stop much more quickly.
Player is no longer slowed down while climbing slopes.
Pillar puzzles are slower and less easy to control.
Audio logs can no longer be activated through walls.
Added "click to move" mode.
Space can be used to enter solve mode.
The mouse can be used on the pause menu.
Added custom movement keybindings.
The second February 4th update is arguably the best Legacy version. It has Keep Skip and Force Bridge Skip, it has the alternate Mountaintop Perspective solution, and it uniquely has the lowest FOV possible. But the version you'd want to play on may depend on what your goal is. Like, you might want to play on April 4th for 100% because of Eclipse Skip. Either way, December 21st, 2017 remains the best version of the game overall, and we are blessed because of it.
If you own the game on Steam, you can download and try any of these old versions using the Steam Console. Click on that link and then enter one of the following commands:
macOS Old Version: download_depot 210970 210972 84967383702265709
There's no progress bar, and it'll probably take a while to download, but eventually it'll tell you where it saved the game. New Version isn't listed because the most recent version of the game is already equivalent to the 12/21/2017 update.
If any of you survived this far into the post, I hope you enjoyed this journey into the past! It took quite a while to write, but I've always found the version differences in this game really interesting despite the fact that I started playing two years after New Version came out. I'd also like to say thank you to The Witness's speedrunning community (and darkid in particular), as their documentation of some of the changes throughout the game's history was an extremely useful resource for my research.
Happy 9th birthday to The Witness!
The first catext I ever ran was called Noclip Touch All Audio Logs, and I'm pretty delighted by it because it manages to take advantage of the tiny amount of non-Euclidean space in the game. The Hotel in the Easter Egg Ending is weaved throughout multiple locations on the island, and at one point you walk through a cave overlooking the Challenge record player. There are multiple audio logs in the Hotel, but the majority of the Hotel is located very far away from the rest of the island, and it would take a lot of time to fly back. You could retrace your steps and leave the Hotel the way you entered, or you could just jump into the Challenge cave and suddenly you're in the middle of the island. ↩
“WHAT are you DOING?” Mizar yelled, her voice clipping out the microphone she was using to speak with him. “That’s not even POSSIBLE. You can’t jump or go off ledges in this game! I checked!”
You can snipe the Rotating Bridge when it's connecting purple and red, either from the mountainside or at the end of the flood gate. It makes sense that Thekla would not expect a casual player to do this. ↩
As a former iOS Witness runner, I do have to point out that for some reason, cables activate much more slowly on the iOS version of the game. Like, there's just a delay between solving a puzzle and a cable turning on, and I have no idea why they added it. Thank goodness that did not get brought over to the PC version. ↩
There was an older route that split Town into two halves, and took a detour to do Shadows/Keep in between the halves. This is the route FearfulFerret did in his SGDQ run. The speedrunning guide says it's about 3 seconds slower than the route I describe above. ↩
Interestingly, Jungle Wall Skip is completely impossible on iOS. Tapping to walk is disabled after solving the panel, and isn't re-enabled until the wall is up. Using two fingers to move does still work, but the walk speed is drastically lowered during the popup animation. This makes it seem like they were conscious of the possibility that the player could cross the wall before it popped up, which makes it all the more strange that they didn't do anything to prevent it on PC. ↩
Another thing that The Witness has in common with Super Mario Odyssey: they both end in an area called the Pillars Room! ↩
It is possible to see which audio logs you've found by looking at the flowers in the lake. There's a flower for each audio log, and they bloom once the audio log has been activated. ↩
As part of my research for this post, I downloaded a few old macOS versions to see exactly when specific changes happened. I already knew about the quirks of the original release and had played it years ago, but unfortunately I was not able to launch it on my desktop computer anymore because I'd updated the OS. I have an old MacBook Pro from 2012 lying around though and it has macOS 10.12 Sierra on it, so I was able to test on that. However, another cute little fun fact: Steam Client no longer supports macOS 10.12! The Steam DepotDownloader tool also kept timing out for me on my laptop, so what I ended up having to do was download versions of The Witness on my desktop and then transfer them onto my laptop in order to try them out. The Witness is a 4 gigabyte game. This was certainly an experience. ↩
NewSoupVi, developer of The Witness randomizer for Archipelago, asked me to include a footnote ranting about how difficult it was to find the "exit solve mode" function while modding the game, since it apparently changed in every version of the game and none of the byte code matched. Then they asked me not to do that. I'm so scared and confused. ↩
%20-%20YouTube%20-%200-16-19.png)
Comments