Is there a reason the end screen "Play Time" isn't used as the final time, specifically on console?
It's consistent, as in it counts exactly when the player is in control of the game. But RGG doesn't count some things that we do count. For example, the in-game timer pauses during fight intros, which we traditionally count, and unpauses the moment that Kiryu can be controlled by the player. (Of course, that's not necessarily a problem.)
One hurdle for using the in-game time is actually that results screen itself, the one you're talking about. The in-game timer continues to count up while that results screen is being shown (the player is in control, after all), so the play time it shows on that screen will always differ from the save file you make immediately after that screen. (But again, we could all agree on how to handle that.)
I'll do an "IGT%" stream soon where I link the Livesplit timer to the IGT to show when it's running and when it's paused. The results are very predictable, they're just not what we've traditionally done.
Here's the VOD.
In summary:
- The timer stops during fight intros and story objectives, any time there's big text on screen. After a continue during a fight, the timer does run during the fight intro, which is an interesting quirk.
- The timer continues to count at any moment that the player is in control, including during cutscenes since they can be skipped.
- The timer continues to run during the credits. I think maybe they can be skipped in NG+, so that could be why the timer runs there?
- The timer continues to run during the results screen and all the way up until you make a completion save, which is why there's always a discrepancy between the two numbers.
- On a continue from a game over, the timer resets to exactly the start of the fight or chase segment that you game overed on. Annoying! Of course, we don't ever want to die in a speedrun anyway, and in a deathless run the IGT is exactly what you would expect it to be, but all the same that's an unfortunate thing for speedrunning specifically.
Overall, in-game time (in Y3 at least) seems to be a solid metric of actual playtime in the game. It's different than what we typically count in a speedrun, because it excludes fight intros and the like. There are also a couple of quirks around continuing from a game over. (It's possible that other games in the series handle those quirks differently than in 3.) For deathless runs, and only deathless runs, IGT seems to be an effective comparison between runs in Yakuza 3.
