Press escape to skip cut-scene

Many love the story, some don't care, some have seen them all before and don't want to watch them all again.

Why does FFXI not have the ability to skip these long cut-scenes still? This is such a disrespectful waste of players time on a game that is trying to be more casual friendly. These things should always be an option.

When you do CoP, you can warp faster but it still takes forever because you are forced to watch these boring cut-scenes in their entirety. This is off-putting, I still haven't done many of the WoTG missions on my alt because I just can't be bothered to put up with watching long boring custs I'm not interested in. I recently did CoP from start to finish and it wasn't fun in any way at all, it was boring and annoyingly slow for no reason.

Great stories and cut-scenes are amazing, a great asset. They should always be a choice though. Not allowing people to skip these is going against the basic changes you are trying to add to FFXI in not wasting peoples time needlessly.

If there was a dislike button to this idea, I'd press it now. :(

Don't get me wrong, I understand some people don't like watching cutscenes. When I'm playing a game through again or if I accidentally died and have to re-watch a cutscene then yeah, I like to skip them to save time. But the point of the game's story paths is not the items or unlocks at the end; you're supposed to enjoy and be a part of the story itself. Someone took the time to write out this story, to craft the characters and backgrounds, and someone took the time to tie it all together and code it to make it possible. As a writer, I'd be appalled if someone wanted to just skip through my work for more grinding mentality. It's disrespectful.

I'm sorry that players these days are too impatient to enjoy the storyline; I understand that some people find them boring, and that they're not interested in the story. But the point of an RPG is to be part of the story, to be involved in the game beyond simply "I fight X and kill it to get Y loot to kill Z monster." If you don't like storyline, go play a FPS or something else that doesn't need a story; don't drag down a classic storyline franchise because you can't appreciate it. :(

However, it would be useful when you have multiple characters and have already seen the cutscenes, or if you are playing on a console where specific cutscenes lockup in the middle and they haven't fixed the bug in years.

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Originally Posted by Kensagaku

But the point of the game's story paths is not the items or unlocks at the end; you're supposed to enjoy and be a part of the story itself. Someone took the time to write out this story, to craft the characters and backgrounds, and someone took the time to tie it all together and code it to make it possible. As a writer, I'd be appalled if someone wanted to just skip through my work for more grinding mentality. It's disrespectful.

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Yes, and I loved watching the original main mission CSes the FIRST time, they're not stories which have much 're-read' value to me, so having to waste time spamming the 'ENTER' key to skip past the endless dialog the second and third time is more than tedious.

Also, having leveled 6 characters I've seen all of COP and TOAU every damned time, it was aggravating to have to suffer it yet again. The COP story is great, pretty involved in terms of characters and events and a thrill to watch visually at times .. the FIRST time, if I wanted to see them again I'd toss the goblin a coin, I don't need to be forced to view them again.

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Originally Posted by Kensagaku

If there was a dislike button to this idea, I'd press it now. :(

Don't get me wrong, I understand some people don't like watching cutscenes. When I'm playing a game through again or if I accidentally died and have to re-watch a cutscene then yeah, I like to skip them to save time. But the point of the game's story paths is not the items or unlocks at the end; you're supposed to enjoy and be a part of the story itself. Someone took the time to write out this story, to craft the characters and backgrounds, and someone took the time to tie it all together and code it to make it possible. As a writer, I'd be appalled if someone wanted to just skip through my work for more grinding mentality. It's disrespectful.

I'm sorry that players these days are too impatient to enjoy the storyline; I understand that some people find them boring, and that they're not interested in the story. But the point of an RPG is to be part of the story, to be involved in the game beyond simply "I fight X and kill it to get Y loot to kill Z monster." If you don't like storyline, go play a FPS or something else that doesn't need a story; don't drag down a classic storyline franchise because you can't appreciate it. :(

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I'm not saying remove the stories or cuts, even though I rarely watch them I'm glad they are there if I do or for those that like them.

All I'm saying is add the option to skip them if you choose to, the devs are trying to make FFXI less of a time sink because the players are now older and have less free time. If I have 2-3 hours to play in the evening and while doing missions (that I've probably done before) I know that I'm going to be watching cut-scenes play out instead of playing the actual game I'm going to feel as though it's simply not worth playing a game where I can't make much progress.

As I said I recently did CoP in it's entirety and although I did watch some of the cut-scenes some were just really boring and time wasting (and some of these cuts drag on for a long time...I mean you can't even go make a cup of coffee while they play because they often "press enter to continue" mid cut for no damn reason). In a time when the devs are obviously trying to make the game less of a time sink and more respectful to players free time not being able to skip IF YOU WANT TO is idiotic. Give players the option, I dont' want doing CoP to take 20-30 hours, and half of that be watching cuts I don't want to see.

You can button mash through the cutscenes reasonably fast, but yeah, I'd say give the option to skip cutscene if it's already been watched (i.e. a failed fight). Otherwise, the story is there for players to enjoy- why skip through it? If you are bringing an alt character through the missions, just mash the button to quickly skip the dialogue. I know that doesn't help much for the non-dialogue portions, but SE is pretty anal about making sure people don't hit buttons by mistake... just look at all the double and triple confirmations they make us do for the most mundane activities like buying a scroll from a vendor. It's ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by Pixela

Many love the story, some don't care, some have seen them all before and don't want to watch them all again.

Why does FFXI not have the ability to skip these long cut-scenes still? This is such a disrespectful waste of players time on a game that is trying to be more casual friendly. These things should always be an option.

When you do CoP, you can warp faster but it still takes forever because you are forced to watch these boring cut-scenes in their entirety. This is off-putting, I still haven't done many of the WoTG missions on my alt because I just can't be bothered to put up with watching long boring custs I'm not interested in. I recently did CoP from start to finish and it wasn't fun in any way at all, it was boring and annoyingly slow for no reason.

Great stories and cut-scenes are amazing, a great asset. They should always be a choice though. Not allowing people to skip these is going against the basic changes you are trying to add to FFXI in not wasting peoples time needlessly.

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This game has a lot of interesting characters and some of the cut scenes are cool. But this game also has a lot of uninteresting characters and some of the cut scenes are boring. What makes it even worse is I often find myself spamming my x button to advance through the tedious dialogue and I accidentally hit a choice by mistake. This happens to me a lot. So seems I have the opposite problem Ramzi does.

I agree a great story is an asset to any game: but making me have to wade through one Taru love story after another is enough to make me want to go bang my head on a wall until the pain ends. So I definitely support this thread and think players need to have the choice to skip cut scenes and long streams of dialogue if they want.

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Originally Posted by Kensagaku

If there was a dislike button to this idea, I'd press it now. :(

Don't get me wrong, I understand some people don't like watching cutscenes. When I'm playing a game through again or if I accidentally died and have to re-watch a cutscene then yeah, I like to skip them to save time. But the point of the game's story paths is not the items or unlocks at the end; you're supposed to enjoy and be a part of the story itself. Someone took the time to write out this story, to craft the characters and backgrounds, and someone took the time to tie it all together and code it to make it possible. As a writer, I'd be appalled if someone wanted to just skip through my work for more grinding mentality. It's disrespectful.

I'm sorry that players these days are too impatient to enjoy the storyline; I understand that some people find them boring, and that they're not interested in the story. But the point of an RPG is to be part of the story, to be involved in the game beyond simply "I fight X and kill it to get Y loot to kill Z monster." If you don't like storyline, go play a FPS or something else that doesn't need a story; don't drag down a classic storyline franchise because you can't appreciate it. :(

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It's not about being patient or impatient though. Or being disrespectful. Certain characters and plot lines appeal to different people and not everyone is going to enjoy reading the same book or story. Much the same way as people don't enjoy playing certain jobs on this game. It's not because they are too impatient to play them or being disrespectful to the developers because they don't take the time to level them. They do it because they just don't enjoy playing as those jobs. And in the end games are suppose to be about having fun and enjoying yourself. Not being forced to read stories you don't find interesting or play as jobs you don't like because a developer somewhere took the time to program them.

I would even extend the cut scene skip to fights that have the same one that play every time you do the fights like the avatar fights. There are only so many times even with bashing enter you want to see the avatars coming out from their crystals before you just go ugh I wish there was a faster way to get past this.

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Originally Posted by Lithera

I would even extend the cut scene skip to fights that have the same one that play every time you do the fights like the avatar fights. There are only so many times even with bashing enter you want to see the avatars coming out from their crystals before you just go ugh I wish there was a faster way to get past this.

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Sometimes creative people are so happy with their work they like to try and force people to experience it since they put so much effort into it.

I was guilty of this myself. Because when I dabbled in game design I would create these long cut scenes dialoguing what I thought to be a cool story. But after the zillionth time play testing my game even I began to get sick of them. And I was the author and as a result of course bias towards my own work. So I can just imagine how others would have felt lol

It's just sound game design to allow the player choices in this regard I think. That way players can get right into playing the game when they want and not be bothered to read or watch something they simply aren't in the mood for.

We definitely understand that having this type of feature would make it more convenient when leveling up a secondary character and such; however, the cutscenes within FFXI were not originally programmed to include a feature to skip them and there is a high risk that new bugs may arise when attempting to add this.

For example, there are cutscenes in which certain flags are turned on while you are viewing the cutscene, but by skipping it there could be a glitch with the flag itself that prevents players from obtaining rewards even if they have completed the quest.

Since there are enormous amount of cutscenes and quests in the game, this is a feature that we unfortunately cannot address.

Understandable! Thank you for explaining :)

Yeah I agree with Crevox. I can understand if adding this would require you to have to essentially re-program every quest-line and cut screen it probably isn't worth the amount of time it would take. So thanks for taking the time to explain why.

But maybe for future cutscenes you could take this into account and turn on or off flags before or after the cutscene rather then during it so you could give us the option to skip it without causing bugs. I'm sure some of us at least would appreciate that.

I've already glitched with a mission because of a flag not being set properly, and a year later they still haven't been able to fix my character data. I'm stuck on San d'Oria mission Lightbringer because I can't get the key items to spawn the NMs or view the cutscene. The NPCs act as if they already found the sword, but I'm not done with the NM battle or the cutscene in Uggalepih Temple. I can't cancel or restart the mission, and I can't change nations to do Bastok instead. The dev team is supposedly the only group that can fix my character data, and my ticket is untouched (except by GMs checking on it for me) in their queue for a year.

EDIT: I realize this thread is old, but I completely agree with it! There should be an option to exit or ESC a cutscene. They did this in FF14, so it's not like they haven't thought of this before.

"We definitely understand that having this type of feature would make it more convenient when leveling up a secondary character and such; however, the cutscenes within FFXI were not originally programmed to include a feature to skip them and there is a high risk that new bugs may arise when attempting to add this.

For example, there are cutscenes in which certain flags are turned on while you are viewing the cutscene, but by skipping it there could be a glitch with the flag itself that prevents players from obtaining rewards even if they have completed the quest.

Since there are enormous amount of cutscenes and quests in the game, this is a feature that we unfortunately cannot address." — Camate

I see this has been answered, and I can totally understand.

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Originally Posted by Pixela

Many love the story, some don't care, some have seen them all before and don't want to watch them all again..

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That's me when playing "alt" characters... I have killed the Shadow Lord so many times. (laughs)

While it's not impossible to make a scene skippable, using their current system, a skip option basically has to be built in, in the form of a prompt asking if you want to skip it (which is done with the high tier mission battlefields). So basically, to implement a cutscene skip would need to be done on a per cutscene basis, and cutscenes which award items or have important decisions to make would not be able to be skipped still.

This is in contrast to say, FFXIV, where while there are cases of making decisions in a cutscene, the decision almost never matters and so unskippable cutscenes are rare as there are no scripts that would need to be advanced to make a skip happen.

FFXI was built in a time when this sort of ability wasn't common and so the devs never considered cutscene skipping when designing the systems for the cutscenes.