Intro Skip

Ever since the game has released, the community has been discussing skipping sections of the intro to avoid watching the many cutscenes at the start of each run. The game begins with a gameplay section before watching cutscenes afterwards, which results in no clean method of implementing a skip. Either valid gameplay sections of the speedrun would be skipped, or runners would have to spend a considerable amount of time waiting in cutscenes at the beginning of every run, neither of which are outcomes that runners would be happy with.

After a few months of discussion, some possible alternative implementations were proposed and a vote was decided to be held taking everything into account.

Verdict

The vote result showed that the community remains heavily divided on not only implementing an intro skip, but also on implementing an alternative to intro skip, and even on leaving the rules unchanged. If any single option were to be chosen, then it would not represent the viewpoint of a significant amount of the community.

The mod team have opted to try and adopt a split approach of implementing a small change to the Main Leaderboard, and a much bigger change to the Category Extensions, so that runners are able to have the runs they do represented on a board somewhere.

Leaderboard Changes

Main Leaderboard:

• Runs may now start from a save file that has already watched the first cutscene, skipping about 40s from the start of the run.

  • Any run that starts from this file will have a time offset added, equal to the time of the cutscene.

  • The offset amount depends on if the run is performed using a Digital/Physical copy.

    • Digital: 38.9s
    • Physical: 39.5s

• Recommendations:

  • Set the time offset as the time the timer starts at. This will keep runs, and all split times, directly comparable with runs that start from a new file.
  • Keep a copy of the saved start file on slot 2 and copy it to slot 1 before each run. This will prevent having to rewatch the cutscene to remake the file, which would negate the point of using this file.

Category Extensions:

• The same changes and recommendations as the Main leaderboard.

• Runs may skip the Throne Room and Jail cutscenes, skipping about 4 minutes of cutscene.

  • Runs may suspend and close the game once the room transition into the throne room has innitiated. Then the game may be opened on an alternate profile which has a pre-made save in the jail after the cutscenes have ended.

    • No time is counted between beginning the room transition and confirming the selection on the file. The timer is paused during this action.
    • Runners have at most 60s to perform this action.

  • The pre-made save must be created at the point that Zelda collects the Echo Rod, but before she has captured the table as the first echo.

  • Any runs that perform this will have a time offset applied to them depending on what starting file was used and if it was a Digital/Physical copy.

    • Digital:
      • New File: 4:04.0
      • Save File: 4:42.9
    • Physical:
      • New File: 4:02.3
      • Save File: 4:41.8

• A new Any% (Intro Skip) Category

  • Both Restricted/Unrestricted subcategories

In the Future

The outcome of the vote did not return a very confident consensus of opinions, and so this topic will remain open for discussion. If at some point there is a shift in opinions then another rule change vote should be brought forwards.