(copy-pasting this to both mass effect 2 and 3 forums)
I've recently discovered that by .ini file edits (similar to how we rebind text skipping to mousewheel) we can make unskippable cutscenes skippable (in mass effect 2 and 3), because all that determines if a cutscene is skippable or not is just an ini file line that goes "SkippableMovies=" followed by the name of the movie file associated with relevant cutscenes. By just adding more lines like this for cutscenes that aren't currently skippable, we would be able to skip those cutscenes.
Here's the question: should this be legal in speedruns?
My thoughts: yes, it should. It is a very easy edit to make (just copy-paste in some lines like we do for mousewheel text skipping). It serves basically the same purpose as mousewheel skipping as well: removing some of the dumb slow stuff that isn't gameplay to make the run more enjoyable. Making the run more fun to do is worth quite a lot, I think.
Doing this also wouldn't necessarily be unprecedented compared to other speedruns. I was asking some other speedrunners (albeit not Mass Effect runners) what they thought about this situation, and one mentioned that Prince of Persia: Warrior Within literally just deletes the entire cutscene folder in order to achieve a similar purpose.
Curious what anyone else who may or may not be paying attention to these forums/ran these games thinks.
definitely pc only. if this ends up getting made legal, there would probably be an overhaul to how the leaderboards are set up, part of which would have console getting categorized separately (i'd probably also try to preserve existing runs somehow, maybe by putting them into a legacy category or something?)
Depending on how long the sum of the duration of all the cutscenes is this does sound like a reasonable thing to do.
Regarding the leaderboards: if the duration is always exactly the same, you could just time it and subtract that from the current times.
Yeah, the subtracting thing was a thing I was considering doing (duration should always be the same I think). The cutscenes are quite long across pretty much all the games in the series; mass effect 2 probably could save at least 15-20 minutes I'd guess and mass effect 3 quite a bit more.
I posted my thoughts on the ME3 board but I will say them here as well.
Sure I don't see an issue with doing this. It's like you said we are already changing the ini for text skip why not cutscenes as well.
tested it out and as far as Mass Effect 2 goes, tested it out and really only makes a difference on the post-Omega 4 Collector Station approach cutscenes, where it saves around 3 minutes (I left the loading screen movies intact, not sure what would happen if they were made skippable). Probably still worth doing. I'll put up an explanation of how to do it at some point.
