frogthroat: Hm. Perhaps there are mods for that. To skip the act 1, I mean. But there's a couple of unique weapons you might miss, so perhaps you can download a save file. (Although that's a security risk to download random save files from the internet. Would not recommend.)
I thought of a workaround. Start 6 games. Nomad male, Nomad female, Street Kid male... etc. Play until the beginning of Act 2, but do not invest any perk points anywhere. Set the difficulty to easy to breeze through the life path introduction and act 1. Much faster when you can just run through people, although of course it's not as fun when there's no challenge. But we're looking to build a save file library, not to actually play the game at this stage. Don't do any side missions or anything. Just the bare minimum and collect the missable unique items. Like Yorinobu's gun and Saburo's katana. And save all those points when you level up.
Save each one of them in the beginning of Act 2 and take backups.
Now you have 6 tabula rasa save files, right in the beginning of Act 2, and nothing but the bare minimum is done.
I don't think there are any hard choices to be made during Act 1, so that shouldn't be an issue. I think the only one would be The Pickup, and even then if you pay with Meredith's chip and don't shoot Royce, that leaves most doors open.
I'm at 260 hours. I don't think i can endure those additional 10 hours. I am barely hanging on now as it is.
