Channel Update #28 (July) – elden thing

Arise ye tarnished,

Since finishing the last video I have done a second playthrough of Elden Ring and I’m now onto writing the script. The finished video should go live on Aug 10th although I’m hoping to finish it a little before then to give myself a bit of extra time for the next video, whatever that may be. Work is going okay. I think I’m a little more in the rhythm of things than I was earlier in the year.

As for the last video, it seems the title proved rather controversial, which, believe it or not, was not something I anticipated. I thought I was being a little bit cheeky, in a rather inoffensive way but it seems to have produced a huge amount of comments, some of which were quite angry and a lot of which seem upset about clickbait. I only really chose the title because it seemed like a less generic alternative to other options like ‘dark souls is a masterpiece’ (I feel masterpiece is annoyingly over used in youtube titles/thumbnails and a video with lots of views and this title already exists), or something like ‘Dark Souls is amazing’ (boring) or ‘Dark Souls Review/Retrospective/Analysis/Critique (each of these terms feels loaded to me in a certain way and these titles also fail to set a video apart from all the others with the same title).

Still mostly I didn’t put much thought into the title, which made the strong negative response rather surprising. Maybe I’m out of touch with what people consider clickbait. I always thought of the term not as something which encourages people to click, but something which misleads people to click. Like how when you go fishing you use a worm as bait to hide the less-enjoyable-to-eat hook. So something like thumbnails of boobs on a video that has nothing to do with boobs, which was pretty common once upon a time. But as long as the title accurately reflects what the video will be about I never considered it a problem. Anyway I’m just going to not worry about it. Worrying about making the next video good is enough worrying for me and I’m sure most people don’t care that much. Also the video did seem to get more people than average to click on it, presumably as a result of its accidental clickbaity-ness. So that’s a nice upside. It feels a bit like that ‘task failed successfully’ meme.

As for the video itself, I think it’s okay but a bit too short. Usually when I’m editing a video I think the opposite, that it’s too long, and I wish I could rewrite a few bits to shorten it. Sometimes I do make small cuts when editing but usually I’m very limited in what I can do without rerecording more audio which I try to avoid as otherwise it can turn into a big time sink that only gives modest gains. Still this time, for once, I wish I had said more and been a bit more explicit. The upside is that this next video still has plenty of Dark Souls in it and by saying less in the first video it means it should be easier to avoid repetition in this one. So I’m hoping both videos will ultimately compliment each other but we’ll have to see how that actually turns out.

That’s all from me for now though. Next month’s update I’ll let you know what the next video will be but I really don't think it will be Bloodborne.