18 - The Witcher Plans, and Some News
Added 2016-10-24 19:15:36 +0000 UTCHey everyone. So in case you missed it, I ran a poll in conjunction with the latest video to decide what the Next Big Project will be for the channel. It was The Witcher vs Mass Effect and Geralt won. By a tiny bit.
I wanted to lay down some of my plans for the games but first there's a few things I want to get into. The first one is that my wife is pregnant with our second child. She's due in February and we've known for a while. I wouldn't bring it up like this except it's linked to the work that I do.
The time between videos has been wildly inconsistent lately: with too big a gap in August and September and then three so close together. The next two are going to be the same way. The issue, that I went into before, is that a lot of my time was being taken up by looking after our son. My wife and I worked on our schedules and *mostly* solved the problem. It's the video editing work that was difficult to do during the day but we found something close to half a solution. I have to put in more time per minute of finished video but it's still something.
The problem that's making the videos bunch together is that I'm finding it near impossible to record audio. We live on a busy street in a busy building so I can only record at night--especially with a kid who's learning how to talk and a sensitive microphone. Having to get up early to then look after my son when my wife goes to work, and having to stay up to record audio... I'm sure you get the idea. The biggest problem is that it's not enough that I'm *awake* to record. I have to be alert. I can do the rest of the video work and playing the games while sort of sleepy; recording like that isn't an option.
I end up in a situation where I have multiple games played. Multiple sets of footage recorded and scripts completed. And then I get a good chance to record a bunch of them and can get through it all quickly. Only to be back at the same issue again.
So my wife is pregnant. Which means this is a temporary problem. The current plan is for her to go on maternity leave around the end of the year. Late December or very early January. Canada's family support is fortunately quite generous so that gives us a year. With the way the channel is growing with support here and with ad revenue, it's looking likely that she won't have to go back to her job. At least we hope so.
I know that this may not be vital information for you all but I like to be open about what's going on. I also think that you should know that there will be a short gap in February when the new baby arrives.
Getting back to videos though: The Witcher Project will be something on the same scale as Uncharted and TLoU. It might even be bigger. So there's a chance it won't be finished until around the same time as the baby's due date. I want to avoid the issue that came up with Uncharted. I have a lot of smaller scripts planned out and I'm hoping that I'm able to balance playing the larger games while weaving some short ones in between, along with some one-shot video ideas similar to The Openings of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. And maybe even some overviews of games like I did for Subnautica, Long Dark, and Don't Starve. I'm going to ease up on trying to hit so many new releases so this can work. Although there are still a couple I want to get to.
Another good option is to go back and do videos on games that I've already played. Since I know how long they are and have some idea about them already.
The way I work means that I want to get the entire Witcher project done before I upload it. I want to be able to reference points between games and make changes to the script as I go. My best guess right now is that I'll play Witcher 1 and then write something on that game. Then Witcher 2 and write something. Witcher 3. Write something. Then go back and make changes. I also want to read the books and do a video on them. And then play all of the games a second time making different decisions. I'm hoping I won't have to do this a third time. I might resort to looking stuff up on wikis if there are a lot of different choices. I can't play the games 10 times to see everything and I don't think you'd want me to.
For now I'm playing Fallout 4 again while looking at shorter videos as a sort of trial run to see if I can pull it off for Witcher. The video on that has been pushed back to a "Fallout 4 - One Year Later" which I'm trying to get done to be exactly a year from when the first video went up. I'm also not sure if I'll upload the whole thing on The Witcher as one big video when I'm done, or if I'll split it into parts. I regretted the way I uploaded Uncharted+TLoU at the time since it didn't get much exposure, but I kind of like having a long video now that I look back at it. Maybe I could do parts and then upload a big, combined version when all the parts are up so people can choose? I don't know. We'll see.
Mass Effect came so close to winning that I think I should just go straight into a series on that after The Witcher. It's something I'm going to think about.
Thanks for reading all that. Thank you for the support. I hope this is all acceptable.
TL;DR - Wife is pregnant. Recording problem is temporary. Fallout 4 next month. Shorter videos while working on The Witcher Series. Will be looking at the books as well as the games. Mass Effect might be next after it. Love you.
Comments
Congratulations!! I'm very excited to see you're doing The Witcher as it's one of my favourite game(s) and all of them (particularly the third) are the exact kind of games that would benefit from your in-depth quality-driven analysis. I would also just like to say that personally, and I suspect much if not most of your fanbase will agree, subscribe to you because of how much richer and better your critiques are, and things that are high quality often require patience because they are labours of love! So for the aforementioned reason I would like to say: don't sweat it! We aren't going anywhere.
2016-10-28 03:31:49 +0000 UTCTake care of your family and take care of yourself. We'll be here when the next video is ready. Oh and congratulations on the new child!
GiantPurplePen15
2016-10-25 04:51:31 +0000 UTCGrats on the second kid! Have fun with Witcher 1... that game hasn't aged particularly well and generally feels like a single-player MMO. The plot and writing is as good as the other games in the series, but the actual gameplay is pretty rough. I'd recommend playing it on an easier difficulty setting (but not the easiest) to clear through the boring parts and get to the interesting bits more quickly. In fact, I'd recommend that for all of the Witcher games. Some people like the gameplay, but I've always found the gameplay to be rather bland. W3 has the most interesting gameplay, but in practice it worked out to be "stab, quickstep, stab, quickstep" until the monster fell over with an occasional bit of magic when the situation called for it or outright required it. The books are fantastic. Eastern European fiction is just always so oppressive and bleak, and the Witcher books are no exception. I don't think they're required to really enjoy or understand what's going on in the games, but they will fill in a substantial amount of backstory and setting to give a little extra life to what's going on on-screen. I might recommend reading The Last Wish before playing W3, at least. Yennefer has a lot of screen time and a major role to play in W3 and knowing the full story of her history with Geralt can be helpful, though it's certainly not necessary.
David Carper
2016-10-25 03:06:21 +0000 UTCHey Joseph, Congrats on the second child! I'm in the same boat with juggling kids during the day which leaves recording and other things in the evening. I'm looking forward to both the Witcher and Mass Effect videos, as I find your analysis very informative and intelligent, particularly when it comes to a game's narrative. One thing you may want to consider is doing livestreaming when you play these games. Videos of your livestream can provide good content for your viewers. You could also consider doing shorter Vlogs to help pad out your channel. Looking forward to your upcoming content! Keep up the good work!
2016-10-24 22:56:11 +0000 UTCHi Joseph! I think you should focus on The Witcher, and review or do critiques about games you already know a lot about. It will be easier to write the scripts, and you wont need that amount of time playing the games, because you have already played before. You also should keep with the scripts and recording, so when you have a free time, you voice record the most you can in a roll. I face simmilar problems. I'm a casual musician, but I do compose songs. The problem is that my brother has mental problem, and when I sing, he gets crazy, he punches things, he dislikes it, and I have nothing to do about it, because it is a mental problem. So a looot of times I have some songs idea, but I can't record because of him. It is really annoying, and I get angry a lot of times. But when I do have some time, I try to work on my songs, even though it is a short time. So keep with the scripts, and recording the things you play. So when you have some time, voice record the most you can. About The Witcher 3, one of my major problem is that in the beggining of the game you don't have money, and it is not that easy to lv up. But after some time, you do so many sidequests, that you start to lv up to fast, and the game starts to feel too easy. Also, when it was released, all itens, including craps (that are used to craft a lot of types of stuffs - or that are used to be dismantle), had weight, which means you got heavy all the time, it was really annoying. Now, these crap stuffs dont costs weight. The UI was confusing, terrible. It looks a lot better now. Things are separated correctly. We now have a part just to read books. A problem that I still face (on the PS4) is that, because I have some many things on my inventory, the loading of these itens is bad, it takes like 5 or 6 seconds to load everything. Even the world map takes like 2 or 3 seconds to load. The Horse is terrible to play, even today after several patches that improved its gameplay. The combat is good, but after playing Dark Souls (I played Witcher 3 before), I think Witcher 3 has an ok gameplay. My major problem is that a lot of times Geralt stops locking on someone (I don't know why), and because of that, his moves changes and I usually get hit because of that. I said these stuffs so you know how the game was before. It was released next to Metal Gear Solid V. At MGS V, the IDroid menu is super ultra fast, you do multiple things easily (the time does not stop at it). It is 60 solid frames per second on the console, while Witcher 3 still suffer from fps problems on consoles. The horse from MGS is also a looot better. Because of that, everytime I played The Witcher 3, I felt like I was playing a really slow game, that takes a looooot of time to load and had a terrible UI (not as bad as Skyrim). It takes time to load weapons, the crafting menu, the potions menu, the itens menu, the map... So after playing fast games like MGS V and Dark Souls (the menu from Dark Souls is also fast and easy), the Witcher feels annoying to me. If you play on the hardest dificulty, you will die a lot. And it will take forever to load, so you will eventually give up. At some bosses, you die by 2 or 3 hits, and it can take more time to load than to fight. It feels worse when its the first time you are fighting a type of enemy, that you will eventually die trying to learn the enemy moves, so because of that, you will face a lot of loading screens.
2016-10-24 21:38:30 +0000 UTCCouple tips for reading the Witcher books: The audiobooks are great. They are voiced very well and can make it very easy to plow through the books if you have long drives or commutes anywhere. However, the last book is not out in English yet (paper or audio). It's set to come out in 2017 probably around Summer. Congrats on the pregnancy and thanks for the awesome videos!
Gordon Freischlad
2016-10-24 21:10:12 +0000 UTCcongrats on the new addition to the family! so happy with hearing your take on the witcher, currently going through your back-catalogue of videos and i seriously love it. thanks for all the great work
Robin Lindbladh
2016-10-24 20:27:30 +0000 UTCCongrats on the pregnancy! I don't really know how youtube metrics (or people) work, but there never seems to be much obvious consistency in how video length affects viewership. One of your Bloodborne videos has twice as many views as the other, even though it's twice the length. But the "Uncharted 4 Critique" has more views than the other, longer Uncharted 4 video. The question is: What is the best format to talk about the Witcher games, especially since there is a dearth of analysis on the old ones? You might change your mind as you play them. I would suggest, based mostly on intuition, that you release one very long, in-depth video that covers the entire series and call it something like "The Witcher: A Series Analysis". It could be 6 hours long, people will eat it up. When you allow them to pick and choose between videos, you lose views. Good luck. Love...you...too, I guess?
2016-10-24 19:36:18 +0000 UTCCongrats on pregnancy! I can't wait for the new stuff and best of luck with the witcher video!
Light
2016-10-24 19:27:43 +0000 UTC
