Resident Evil 2 speedrunners are absolutely shattering all of the game's fastest world records now that a game-changing mod lets you instantly skip all cutscenes and door animations.
The Resident Evil 2 Door & Cutscene Skip mod, courtesy of Resevilnemesis30, does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: every single cutscene in the game, no matter how small, can be skipped using the main action button, and the little animations that play when you interact with doors are instantly skipped. It's pretty easy to see how this paves the way for significantly more seamless speedruns and, of course, new records.
"Begone, doors! Begone cutscenes! 27 years later, this mod for the Sourcenext version brings the single most needed QoL feature for the vanilla game," the modder says. "It allows you to finally enjoy your favorite game without having to see your RTX 6090 struggle with a 200kb file, or watching Annette and Irons narrate their dramatic childhood."
The mod was only uploaded around a week ago, and we're already seeing the fastest Resident Evil 2 play times ever recorded be more than halved by players using the new mod. Over on Speedrun.com, Resident Evil 2 speedruns are now broken down into two categories: Vanilla and Cutscene Skip, and at the time of writing, the fastest Vanilla run is 48m 32s and the quickest Cutscene Skip run is just 19m 39s. For a game that's now, somehow, 27 years old, that's an extremely significant development in the speedrunning scene and will likely be the biggest advancement to arrive for years to come.
