No Man's Sky
Added 2016-09-02 14:59:41 +0000 UTCIn this episode I took a look at No Man's Sky! I feel like discussion of the game proper has been lost in the derailment of the hype train and the kerfuffle about whether its marketing was truthful, and I kind of wanted to step back and look at the game as it stands.
This episode was also produced much faster than normal - a two week turnaround instead of my normal month-to-month approach. I kind of feel like it shows, a bit, but I'd like any/all feedback. Like I said in that housekeeping video, I'm trying to figure out how to ramp up production. I've got a few more experiments up my sleeves that I'm working on, but I was wondering if I could straight up brute force more videos out the door. And... I dunno, maybe? Again, let me know!
Oh, and as a reminder, don't forget that The Gaming Symposium has formally started! Episodes should be up on the last Friday of every month. In this first episode we looked at the French surrealist indie RPG OFF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K41pPdnZTzw
Comments
Enjoyed this as much as any of your videos. Keep them coming!
Pasha Alpeyev
2016-09-04 23:50:56 +0000 UTCThanks! I certainly hope that's the case, I'd love to be able to increase my output without having the quality of things fall off too badly. I know for a fact I need to do less fancy cuts to relevant footage unless it absolutely sells my point - it's often incredibly time consuming to get the perfect shot, especially when that shot only lasts for a few seconds! Longer takes that matter less to the spoken words would speed up the show immensely, I think. That said, I want to balance that against the show's current identity - I don't think I could go to twenty minutes of unedited game footage, either! So yeah, I definitely could pare back some of the polish, I think!
Christopher Franklin
2016-09-03 03:06:53 +0000 UTCMostly I just brute-forced my way through the writing process and did far fewer/less thorough editing passes, along with letting it "stew" less. Sometimes I know there's an idea in there and I can't quite get at it, so I take a break for a few days and come back with a fresh mind (or move on to a new topic). This time I just kept writing until I was at something of the appropriate length, gave it a single editing pass to add a bit of missing context, then ran with it. It's very much a "first draft" script that didn't get a proper soak/edit. You can see this in the resulting script a bit - the tone is all over the place (far too positive and far too negative in turns), and there's not really a core theme or idea at play other than "let's look at the game for what it is." If I could make another pass at it I'd probably ditch the various technical glitches (I already lament bringing them up in the video as it is) and focus more on this idea of the game as a zen game about absurdism. There's a grain of a good idea there that could probably sustain a fuller examination! But instead of a 12 minute video that goes deep into how No Man's Sky works as an absurdist zen game, that idea kinda just got shoved in at the end after a lot of other surface level complaints.
Christopher Franklin
2016-09-03 03:03:43 +0000 UTCVery glad to see the video, enjoyed it a lot. So much of the conversation is drowned out by the hype that I have seen only a few instances of talking about the game on its on terms, as it is now. I did not notice much of a shift in terms of production (got some nice editing jokes in there), but to be fair I think this is a more straightforward topic to tackle than others you have in the past so perhaps the fast turnaround is not applicable for all topics.
Andrey Kurenkov
2016-09-02 23:07:13 +0000 UTCOut of curiosity, what did you do to speed up production?
Ian Danskin
2016-09-02 22:45:21 +0000 UTCThanks for the video, Chris. It's good to hear commentary on the game itself. The other kind of critique has been plenty. The way you characterize No Man's Sky must be the most plausible description of it that I've heard. I really like how you point out the good and the bad, and on top of that you find a niche for the game, a purpose for its existence, so to say :-). I can't say I noticed the short production time as any kind of deficiency in the video. Maybe it means that the half of the time you usually spend on a video is adding extra polish, and you are capable of producing good videos also without that polish.
Ville Nurmi
2016-09-02 18:31:44 +0000 UTC
