As of 30th November 2023, New Game runs for The Last of Us/The Last of Us: Remastered must use default skins and are not allowed to have activated costum skins/backpacks/etc.

We found out that costum skins potentially change the appearances of soundglitches, which also influences the loadtimes. On top of that, the Sewers Skip, that has been found last week, only works with costum skins activated for both Joel & Ellie. If you attempt it with default skins, the game will always crash when you enter the suburbs/sniper area and there is no way to make it work with default skins. Unfortunately, skins can only get unlocked after finishing the game once and therefore go against the nature of a New Game speedrun, which is why we decided to have costum skins turned off for NG runs.

Important: This rule is only effective starting from now! Any run that has been done so far will stay valid on the leaderboards! Additionally, this only applies to New Game runs, so for New Game Plus runs, you can select whatever costum skins you'd like. The three latest any% NG runs that have done Sewers Skip will get rejected, though.