I checked the reddit announcement and it's actually insane how weird people are being. "NOOO IT RUINS MY EXPERIENCE. PEOPLE WILL SPREAD MISINFORMATION. PEOPLE WILL PRETEND TO CARE ABOUT THE STORY. IF THEY SKIP THEY AREN'T TRUE FANS AND SHOULDN'T PLAY THE GAME. WAAAAAH!"
Legitimately what is wrong with those people?
Because these are some of the most defensive braindead slopeating fandoms out there, near modern star wars stan. They defend every dumb thing for the sake of it, like lacking the most things every games has, and praise hoyo for the bare minimum.
I'm reminded of someone on the genshin subreddit making a thread saying the aventurer book in genshin should first open on the daily tab since you can complete dailies from there now of the and dozens of people called OP retarded and lazy, only for hoyo to do that later and everyone praise hoyo for listening.
But the story is a bit different because it was such a good shield/elitism. If someone shits on hoyo story, they're CLEARLY iliterate and this is why we can't have a skip button. But now they added a skip which can be seen as Hoyo admitting defeat, and we can't have that, we must lash out on skippers so we can look smart and literate.
Reddit is also inherently hypocrital because karma farming creates a circlejerking of "Only WE can POLITELY criticize the thing we like" but the star rail sub will pretend they never went hard on Amphoreos. They milked black screen and yapping memes for weeks.
This is good for everyone involved but i fear it will lead to, ironically, star rail story getting even more "bloated" like honkai 3 that went hard VN, since they'll write with skippers and archive in mind.
Also, genshin and star rail doesn't really do "visual novel exposition" well (ZZZ tries but i didnt play enough to argue). There is an art to having many portraits and music changes as you read and hoyo misses it due to the engine, so you always have everyone standing in a circle with blank expressions and one vague ambient song playing. At best you get a single flashback CG like slave aventurine, acheron and blade driving.
The MC is also not allowed to have real inner thoughts beyond processing information, being rpg forces the story to have random breaks to fight shit and live service nature means having padding and cliffhangers for the sake of it.