Press escape to skip cut-scene

[Camate]

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.

[Crevox]

Understandable! Thank you for explaining

[Dale]

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.

[bungiefanNA]

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.

[Bladerunnerr]

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.

[Zehira]

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

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

[Alhanelem]

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.