Is Cutscene skip modding not a thing yet?

[Boss 4]

I'm fine with the idea people mod games and apply a variety of changes to them and that the thought process involved can be intricate and reflect what the player may feel is lacking in a game, and all that. However, a lot of the time, the one thing that I feel one of my old imperfect favourites could use is the same as always - a way of skipping cutscenes entirely. This may not be such a huge problem when playing on an emulator with a powerful turbo function, but whenever that is not the case, I really feel the pain. 

A case in point: Final Fantasy X. Remastered multiple times for what seems like three different systems, and not a single time with an option to skip the story and focus on the glorious gameplay. I do imagine that if such an option were present, it would be very hard to stop me from playing this game for months on end and play something else. But with the way things are, I'd rather play anything but FFX whose storyline I'm already too familiar with and which distracts you from gameplay too much, especially when doing a luck-reliant or difficult challenge. 

I'm sure many other games could use such a mod, not only FFX. 

So has anybody tried making such edits? Does anybody even care? I imagine the requirements are incredibly meek compared to ambitious difficulty mods people have been making. 

[zombero 24]

2 hours ago, Boss said:

Does anybody even care?

Approximately zero creativity would go into making this type of mod, so there isn't much incentive to make one.  Pretty much the only reason to make one would be if you really wanted to play it yourself:  enough so to actually do it.

2 hours ago, Boss said:

I imagine the requirements are incredibly meek compared to ambitious difficulty mods people have been making. 

That's not really the case.  The amount of time it could theoretically take may not be too bad (hard to say), but all of that time would be spent working on assembly, which is the most intensive part of modding, and few modders would have the necessary skills to make those kind of changes to a PS2 game.  So among those few modders, you'd have to find someone who wants to put in a fair amount of high intensity effort into an entirely mundane pursuit.  And putting effort into mundane pursuits is what paying jobs are for.

[Emmy 47]

Some modders have made cutscene skips as part of all the changes that they have made (such as in FF7 New Threat), or things that speed up the ability to mash through display text (the "cross skip" hack for FFT).  I'm sure if skipping cutscenes is a feature of a mod you've played, that the smaller hacks used to do that are available (or could be made as so if you ask the mod creator nicely).

[Boss 4]

On 10/8/2017 at 9:04 PM, zombero said:

Approximately zero creativity would go into making this type of mod, so there isn't much incentive to make one.  Pretty much the only reason to make one would be if you really wanted to play it yourself:  enough so to actually do it.

I can agree with that... Whenever I start a new Pokemon 0 experience challenge, I routinely go through a ROM of the game myself and edit every single base exp value to 0, which is usually enough to prevent levelling for the entirety of the challenge. I'd be pretty hard to convince me to repeat the same actions if I didn't want to do the challenge immediately afterwards... want a lot to be precise. As simple as the edits were, I wouldn't have figured out what programs to do the editing with (in the case of the 3DS games, the logistics involved were especially complicated for me) if that desire hadn't been strong enough. 

On 10/8/2017 at 9:04 PM, zombero said:

That's not really the case.  The amount of time it could theoretically take may not be too bad (hard to say), but all of that time would be spent working on assembly, which is the most intensive part of modding, and few modders would have the necessary skills to make those kind of changes to a PS2 game.  

Thanks for clarifying; point taken. Couldn't imagine how much time it would take; couldn't imagine what assembly is like at all actually. 

On 10/8/2017 at 9:04 PM, zombero said:

So among those few modders, you'd have to find someone who wants to put in a fair amount of high intensity effort into an entirely mundane pursuit.  And putting effort into mundane pursuits is what paying jobs are for.

Also true I'm afraid. The whole JRPG community that a lot of us belong to in one way or another has been in a decline, in my mind. When new games are released, there's really not much rush to publish high quality FAQs (you may end up without a good one for an extended period of time), with people well known and respected for such work in the past doing things like mass-uploading low effort YouTube videos in the past instead (as you say, it pays). The re-releases of classics like FFIX and FF12 TZA scarcely inspires any discussion about ways of playing the game well. For instance, TZA's board mostly revolves about trolling and speaking about the female cast in a lustful way, while the best gameplay-related discussion you can hope to see will be an exchange along the lines of "A: Class 1/Class 2 is better than alternative builds. B: No shut up nobody takes you seriously; repeated multiple times in various threads". 

Some appeal to utility to "a dedicated playerbase" could be made, but one doesn't really exist anymore. Seeing the failure of Breath of Fire 6 essentially spelled out we're a dead generation of grown men (whose kind has gone extinct) who aren't even good at (or probably just invested in) coming together to discuss and do things together anymore. Nobody caters to us, and we are too self-absorbed in the things we ourselves care about (time limitations being much more pronounced than 10 years ago) to cater to each other. 

So in FFX's case, I should probably suck it up and acknowledge it couldn't happen unless I myself knew how to do it, of which there's no chance happening. I don't even know if I could soft-mod my PS2 to play it anyway, if it magically existed, I guess... 

On 10/8/2017 at 9:24 PM, Emmy said:

Some modders have made cutscene skips as part of all the changes that they have made (such as in FF7 New Threat), or things that speed up the ability to mash through display text (the "cross skip" hack for FFT).  I'm sure if skipping cutscenes is a feature of a mod you've played, that the smaller hacks used to do that are available (or could be made as so if you ask the mod creator nicely).

This got me really curious and I did some quick research on the latter. It sure is nice of Xifanie to provide a mod for the cross skip alone. Since YouTube searching yielded nothing; you don't happen to know of a video of said cross skip being displayed in action? I routinely replay vanilla FFT quite a bit and might try to convert it to PSP-PSX to be enjoyed in comfort.