Released in 2012, Dishonored is a first person stealth action game developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks, originally arriving on Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, with later releases including Dishonored: Definitive Edition on newer console platforms. Its speedrunning identity is tied to the game’s “immersive sim” structure: large, flexible mission spaces where the same objective can be completed through multiple routes, power choices, and levels of aggression. That design gives runners a lot of surface area to optimize without needing the game to be strictly linear.
Dishonored speedruns tend to revolve around movement and mission flow. The core toolkit, especially Blink, supports fast traversal and creative positioning, which means the run often becomes a chain of efficient pathing decisions rather than a straight fight through every encounter. Common optimization themes include minimizing detours for gear, manipulating patrols and sightlines to avoid combat slowdowns, and using skips that bypass sections of traversal or set piece pacing when the game’s triggers allow it. As routes matured, tutorial style documentation and video guides helped codify these patterns into repeatable strategies that emphasize consistency as much as raw speed.
What makes Dishonored distinct from many stealth adjacent speedgames is how often its fastest play looks like a hybrid of stealth knowledge and movement tech. Instead of simply sprinting through corridors, runners are usually optimizing objective order, vertical travel, and trigger activation while working around systems designed for detection, chaos, and narrative staging. The scene reflects that flexibility in its public category structure, which spans fastest completion styles alongside constraint driven play such as Ghost and non lethal approaches, with separate boards for the base game and major story DLC.
Dishonored’s speedrunning roots grew out of the same places many early 2010s PC and console runs did: individual video uploads, informal community threads, and runner to runner knowledge-sharing that gradually hardened into repeatable routes. As the scene consolidated, Speedrun.com became the central public record for categories, submissions, and verification, with the game page established early enough to capture multiple eras of strategy and rules as they developed.
In those early route-building years, the “standard goal” quickly centered on fastest completion of the base campaign, which is why Any% became the gravitational hub for routing discussions. At the same time, Dishonored’s stealth systems and end-of-mission evaluations made constraint play feel natural to formalize, so categories like Non-Lethal and Ghost grew alongside pure speed categories rather than as novelty side boards. The modern leaderboard structure reflects that foundational split between “finish fast” and “finish clean,” with major categories including Any%, 100%, Non-Lethal / Ghost, Glitchless, and All Collectibles.
Timing norms also settled around practical realities of the game. The community leaned into load-removed timing on the leaderboard, which helped make runs more comparable across hardware and reduced the incentive to optimize around loading behavior. Start timing conventions likewise became standardized around the opening sequence, with runners commonly using a prepared early save created immediately after the intro cutscene, so attempts begin from a consistent moment of player control rather than relying on variable cutscene timing or auto-split quirks.
Version and release differences became part of the early conversation because they affected what the “fast route” even looked like. Community guidance has long noted meaningful distinctions between older and newer patches, including patched movement and clipping behavior, and route segments that behave differently depending on version. That reality eventually produced the familiar speedrun pattern of version awareness and, when needed, version policy or splits. Broader re-releases also mattered: Dishonored: Definitive Edition expanded the game’s platform footprint and bundled DLC content, which encouraged separate boards and category thinking for story expansions as well as the base game.
Even outside the main leaderboard ecosystem, early patch focused discussion shows up in older community spaces, including threads specifically about obtaining or running on patch 1.2, underscoring how quickly Dishonored runners learned to treat version choice as a strategic decision rather than a technical footnote.
Dishonored’s speedrunning community grew the usual way for a big single player game with flexible systems: early knowledge spread through forum posts, comment threads, and run videos, then consolidated into a smaller number of “home bases” where routes could be discussed, tested, and standardized. Over time, the center of gravity shifted toward persistent chat and faster feedback loops, with a dedicated Discord server acting as the day to day workshop for questions, clip testing, and quick rules clarification.
The public record, though, lives on Speedrun.com, where categories are defined, runs are submitted, and verification is handled by the game’s moderator team. Submitting a run is typically straightforward: you use the game page’s submission flow, attach a video link, and provide the relevant run details so it can be reviewed against the category rules. Verification on the site is ultimately an approval process by moderators, who are expected to check that goals were met, the run appears legitimate, and the timing is accurate when needed, with platform guidance also acknowledging that moderators have a processing window rather than instant turnaround.
What keeps the scene healthy is how its knowledge gets archived in ways newcomers can actually use. Dishonored’s Speedrun.com hub doesn’t just host leaderboards; it also preserves tutorials and written guidance (full route walkthroughs, setup help for common macros, and technique explanations) alongside a curated set of practical resources such as split files, configuration tools, and community maintained utilities.
The culture that forms around that structure is a mix of experimentation and institutional memory. When something becomes important enough to affect fairness or consistency, the community tends to document it, debate it in public threads, and then preserve the “how to” in guides or resource links so the next wave of runners is not starting from scratch. Even older style spaces like Speed Demos Archive show up in the historical trail for version and patch talk, but the long term pattern is the same: discoveries move from scattered discussion to shared documentation, and then into the stable reference points runners rely on.
On Speedrun.com, Dishonored’s main board is organized around a small family of “full game” categories that reflect the game’s two identities: a fast, skip-heavy action route and a stealth-first challenge route. The headline category is Any%, built around completing the campaign as quickly as possible, while variants like All Collectibles and 100% expand the objective set and force runners to trade raw pace for route coverage. A separate Non-Lethal / Ghost track pushes the run toward the game’s systemic stealth logic, where minimizing violence and detection becomes the defining constraint rather than optional style. Glitchless and Legacy exist as rule-defined alternatives that narrow what techniques are acceptable, emphasizing cleaner traversal and more “intended-feel” solutions even while still optimizing movement and mission flow.
Timing and submission standards are built to keep runs comparable across different hardware and load behavior. The leaderboard supports multiple timing methods, and Dishonored prominently uses LRT (real time without loads) as a primary column, with RTA also available in some submissions. In practice, runners often rely on autosplitting setups, and the community has historically standardized the start to avoid inconsistent intro timing by beginning from a save created at the earliest possible playable moment after the opening cutscene. That same autosplitting context is why quickloading behavior is treated carefully, with community guidance noting that timer resets are an intro-specific edge case rather than a run-wide rule problem.
The “big rule decisions” that shape Dishonored’s leaderboard identity mostly come down to what counts as a permissible shortcut and which game versions are treated as acceptable for competition. Any% typically permits the full suite of fast movement and sequence breaks that define modern Dishonored routing, while Glitchless and Legacy narrow that toolbox by disallowing certain classes of exploit-heavy progression. Version differences are acknowledged rather than ignored: community guidance has identified patch 1.2 as the fastest in principle, but also describes the practical gap as small in the current route, with specific spots that behave differently on newer builds. That same guidance also notes that later versions are tied to DLC availability, including Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall and Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches, which is why platform and version context matter for run verification and comparison.
As Dishonored routing matured, the scene leaned harder into what the game rewards most: rapid traversal and flexible mission solutions. Early speed tactics that were essentially “smart stealth done quickly” evolved into routes built around chaining mobility and exploiting how objectives, triggers, and mission geometry can be approached from unusual angles. Techniques like double Blink became part of the shared vocabulary because they extend the game’s traversal range in ways that change what “a normal path” even looks like.
Over time, runners also learned that Dishonored’s most powerful movement tech is often inseparable from performance settings, especially on PC. Community discussion around staples like elevators (corner-based vertical boosts) highlights how consistency can hinge on framerate and player inputs, and how those constraints shape both learning and route choice. The same thread of experimentation shows up in slip clips, where runners iterated on different setups and then shared the most reliable variants, along with practical “un-sticking” techniques when high FPS causes persistent leaning or sticky movement states.
That push toward consistency is where tooling and standard setup practices became as important as new skips. Dishonored runners commonly use an autosplitter in LiveSplit for starts/splits and load removal, which keeps timing cleaner and reduces category variance across hardware. On the resource side, the community has published run-focused configuration and utility tools, including speedrun INI files, downpatch options for specific Steam versions, and even an Any%-specific RNG fix for a known variability point (Boyle/Timsh), reflecting a long-term trend toward making attempts more repeatable while keeping the route fast.
One of the earliest “milestone patterns” for Dishonored running was the point where a single, shared baseline route began to feel stable enough that runners could stop reinventing the wheel every attempt and start polishing execution. That stability came from a mix of repeatable movement tech, a clearer understanding of which mission triggers could be bent or bypassed, and practical decisions about which game versions were worth targeting for competitive play. The community’s long-standing interest in downpatching, preserved openly alongside other utilities, is a good marker of when “version awareness” became part of the game’s identity rather than a footnote.
A second milestone type is the moment Dishonored became a “marathon language” game, where runs were not just personal best attempts but public demonstrations with incentives, category choices, and commentary aimed at a broad audience. It showed up early in Awesome Games Done Quick with bid wars that framed how differently the game can be run (pure speed versus stealth-constrained styles). It continued at Summer Games Done Quick with formats like races and donation incentives tied to DLC visibility, reinforcing that “Dishonored speedrunning” is not one fixed expression but a family of approaches. And much later showcases, like a Glitchless feature at SGDQ 2024, function as the same kind of watershed moment in a modern context by presenting the game as a coherent, teachable run rather than an opaque bundle of skips.
A third milestone is the first major wave of “route rewrites,” where the run stopped being primarily about efficient stealth lines and started being shaped by the strongest traversal and clipping families. Once techniques such as Blink chaining and environment-based boosts were understood well enough to be taught, they changed what runners considered a reasonable path through a level. The enduring milestone here is less “one trick” and more the shift in mentality: verticality and trigger manipulation became core planning tools, and runners began treating consistency as something you engineer with setups rather than something you hope for.
Finally, Dishonored has a milestone thread that is easy to miss if you only watch highlight clips: the slow professionalization of the attempt itself. As the scene matured, it produced the same infrastructure you see in long-lived speedgames, including standardized split files, configuration tools, and even targeted fixes for known variability points, all aimed at making runs more repeatable without flattening the game’s creative routing. When that kind of tooling becomes “normal,” it marks a shift from a community that is still discovering the game to one that is preserving it.
HardLifeNH — Any% — 29:53.280 (LRT) — 20 days ago (approx. Jan 22, 2026) — PC (VWA: Yes) — First listed sub-30 on the Any% board, a clean marker of the modern “route ceiling” for this category
Long_John_Steven — Any% — 30:10.480 (LRT) — 4 years ago (approx. 2022) — PC (VWA: Yes) — A foundational sub-31 benchmark that represents the post-optimization era of the main route
heny — Any% — 33:28.180 (LRT) — 9 years ago (approx. 2017) — PC (VWA: No) — A representative time from an earlier competitive phase, before later consistency and skip refinement tightened the category
DrammHud — Any% — 35:09.000 (LRT) — 10 years ago (approx. 2016) — PC (VWA: No) — An older-era reference point that still shows up when people talk about how the classic route used to look
FearfulFerret — Non-Lethal/Ghost — 47:42.000 (LRT) — 12 years ago (approx. 2014) — PC (VWA: No) — An early stealth-route baseline that captures the category’s identity: speed while preserving Ghost/stealth constraints
DecidedSloth — Non-Lethal/Ghost — 45:29.000 (LRT) — 12 years ago (approx. 2014) — PC (VWA: No) — Another early-era Ghost/stealth marker, useful for comparing how the category’s “safe, clean” lines evolved
Long_John_Steven — Non-Lethal/Ghost — 37:58.020 (LRT) — 4 years ago (approx. 2022) — PC (VWA: Yes) — A later-era proof that stealth categories can be pushed toward near-Any% pacing through mature tech and routing
Voetiem — All Collectibles — 40:45.560 (LRT) / 42:38.970 (RTA) — 3 years ago (approx. 2023) — PC (VWA: Yes) — A strong completion-route benchmark where movement flow stays speedrun-first even with additional pickups and detours
lurven — Glitchless — 35:28.960 (LRT) / 44:14.240 (RTA) — 5 years ago (approx. 2021) — PC (VWA: Yes) — A top-tier “rules-clean” performance that highlights movement and mission execution without the biggest glitch-dependent skips
zood — 100% — 1:05:48.550 (LRT) / 1:19:42.960 (RTA) — 1 year ago (approx. 2025) — PC (VWA: Yes) — A modern full-completion benchmark that’s useful as a reference point for long-form routing standards
DecidedSloth — Marathon showcase (AGDQ) — 0:49:33 — January 10, 2014 — Marathon VOD (platform/version not specified in the event listing) — A watershed visibility moment: a major charity-marathon slot that helped broadcast the game’s speed tech to a wider audience
FearfulFerret and DecidedSloth — Marathon race (SGDQ) — 39:17 (race time noted in VOD title) — June 27, 2014 — Marathon race (platform/version not specified in the event listing) — A high-profile race showcase that reinforced the category’s competitive legitimacy on a major stage
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