There has been a new skip found in the game, one which skips the Dust Storm tutorial cutscene.

This is done by abusing the game's event loading times to pause the game before it has disabled the "Skip" option, but after the cutscene technically has started, by clicking outside of the game window as you jump into the Dust Storm ability orb.

Showcase by Lucar:

We do not currently know much about the limitations of this skip, which platforms support it and what not. It's likely PC-only, perhaps Windows-only, but it's not been thoroughly tested.

This thread is intended to serve as a discussion(not a chat!) about the pros and cons of this skip. Why it should be included and/or why it should not be.

If you want to chat about the skip, please use the Discord server. This thread is intended only for final thoughts. Edit your previous post if you need to rather than creating a new one.

Guess I'll inaugurate the thread. For reference, I've been running using the trick this entire week minus on Friday when I went out and didn't have access to my PC, so anyone who has any doubts about how to go about performing it or setups can just check my channel. I would say I get the trick around 90% of the time: Lucar can confirm or deny this statement since he's normally there when I run.

I see literally no "valid", real, reason to ban this trick. Not only do we more or less know that it can't be used anywhere else (with Lucar having done a rundown of the entire game trying to use it everywhere), I also don't think being able to skip more of the game with it would warrant a ban unless we were talking about skipping whole areas, and even then, I don't think we should ban it, rather, make it its own category. We don't have any game-wide banned glitches either, nor did we ever have them as far as I know.

Now, to address some points that were made against the trick:

-The trick may be PC only: I don't know when we started caring about this. Ever since I started playing the game, we've found a fair amount of new tricks, like YGS or the ones regarding save points. No one has bothered to test these tricks in any platform that isn't PC, and, to add insult to the injury, only two runs out of 31 submitted to the leaderboards are on a platform that isn't PC. Should we get any new runners, they most likely will be running on PC too (Ever since I started running, we've gotten 3 people who've expressed interest in running the game, all of them on PC. I would also like to note that all 3 have been turned away by EFS, so, if we're going to bring new player experience into this, I would like to submit a petition to ban EFS too). Not only that, but this argument only addresses the Warpless categories. I would like to remind everybody that the category defined as MAIN, I repeat, the MAIN CATEGORY of the game, the one every runner sees when they click on Dust on speedrun.com, is Any% Warps, a category that is PC only. If we really cared about other platforms this wouldn't be the main category. And even then, since the category is PC only, bringing consoles into banning this trick from it would be completely irrelevant. I would also like to point out that we have a history of allowing console only glitches (Not even that, PS4 only glitches mind you) in the form of the PS4 Gaius Skip, currently showcased on the 117% WR run by Will (Siete) which stood for a good 2 months as the only way of going straight into the final phase of Gaius, a much bigger timesave than the 25-30 seconds we're discussing right now (Gaius Skip has been timed to save between 3 minutes 30 and 4 minutes, making it 6/7 times as worse). I don't know why the arguments that were presented back then are suddenly void now, but I would like to bring them back up and tell everyone that there's plenty of games that have a single leaderboard for the game even with version differences (the examples used back then were Crash, Sly 1, Mario Kart ).

-It's external manipulation of the game: This quite literally doesn't make sense to me: We're not setting a launch option, we're not modding the game, we're not using a third party program: We're alt tabbing to abuse a game mechanic that was undoubtedly intentionally programmed in, the auto pause feature. To me this makes as much sense as saying that force closing the game with alt f4 is external manipulation (Dark Souls and Child of Light close the game like this, to give some examples) or turning your console off (Majora's Mask does this for example)

-The trick looks hard/precise/dumb/etc

I don't think difficulty of a trick should ever be a reason to ban it. The majority of the speedrun community seems to agree with this point since everyone has heard of frame perfect/pixel perfect tricks.

As a closing statement, I would like to say that, like every single other trick, no one is forced to go for it. Just for starters, I'm currently the only runner who does Early Cirromon Bomb (10 seconds), Bopo Skip (15 seconds), Sorrowing OOB (20 seconds), Sorrowing OOB 2 (15 seconds), Elder Skip (3 seconds) and Double Cannon Fire Skip (20-25 seconds depending on RNG). And not even I go for Spike Bomb, which theorically could save 10 seconds. All of this amounts to way more than 30 seconds which is the amount of time a TAS performed DSCS would save.

Should anyone make an argument that I have not covered here, I will try to edit my post to cover it