Retrograde Amnesia in 2020

Happy new year! It is time to make some declarative statements about this podcast.

The Xenogears series will end sometime in 2020.
Sometime around September 2020, we're going to complete our run of Xenogears. At the time of this post, we've recorded conversations up through the "Protect Nisan" chapter. That's gotten us through about 30 episodes of the show. Much of this is still in production. We're currently estimating that the show will take about 50 episodes.

We're going to keep spending your money to make the podcast better.
Mostly, it's going towards things we can use to make the podcast sound better, easier to record, and faster to produce. In the spirit of transparency, we'll keep you updated on what we're doing and why we're doing it.

• Auphonic Leveler ($89): Ever notice that you have adjust the volume of your device when you move from one podcast to another? Auphonic automatically levels the "loudness" of the podcast to ensure a consistent overall sound.
• Izotope Rx Elements 7 ($29): Repairs audio to remove noise, clicking, and other abnormalities. We previously did a lot of this manually, so this will free up time for creative production.
• Descript ($120/yr): We're still demoing this, but we're likely going to take the plunge soon. Descript offers collaborative editing software with a transcription service that is perfect for editing a podcast that leverages sound clips and music. It also makes it very easy to edit out filler words, cross-talking, and silence. 

We're going to refresh the tier system.
Based on your feedback, we'll be refreshing the tier system. The new tier system is already published on the main site, with the primary edition being a new benefit for $5 (and up) patrons coming soon.

The $5 tier will unlock access to our miniseries collection. Our first miniseries will begin production when we reach our $100 Patreon goal. Goals for future series will be announce at a later date.

A miniseries will be a short series on a single topic or game. As mentioned, the first miniseries will be a full discussion of the Xenogears Perfect Works. In the future, we'd like to cover other games and topics that you (or we) think would make good shows, but perhaps aren't long enough for a full season of the show.

Bonus topic selection will continue to be community-driven, and we encourage you to let us know what topics you'd like to see us cover. Most of our bonus episodes to date have come to fruition based on your suggestions, and for that, we thank you.

We're going to pick our next game.
This has been a ton of fun. So we're going to do it again. We'll pick a list of games. You'll decide our fate. We're already excited about the proposition of doing a second season, and we love to hear what games you think deserve the Retrograde Amnesia treatment.

All tiers will still carry a "modifier" for voting toward the next season's game, but it'll be based on your lifetime contribution instead of number of months you've been a member. This is simply because we've grown faster than we thought and it'll be a hell of a lot easier to calculate when the time comes. We may have to cap the modifier at a certain number to ensure we have some semblance of a democracy, but we'll figure out the math later.

We will kill god.
Yes, we will.