It happened on Christmas Day. My first Let’s Play video was uploaded to Youtube. The video is a simple let’s play of Minecraft where I head out from spawn and make a fancy mine entrance. Nothing overly special, but it was my first. You can view the video here, or here:
I have since uploaded a couple more Minecraft episodes and also uploaded a Let’s Play for The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. Over the next couple of days, I will also be adding first episodes of the old school God Simulation Game, Zeus, and a new indie game that is similar to Terraria crossed with Lemmings called “Craft the World.”
I feel in some ways that a new journey is beginning. My goal is to upload new content daily, and i have a plan in place to make it happen. I have no doubt that ultimately I will miss it from time to time. Life seems to affect my plans in ways I don’t like and have a hard time getting around sometimes. But my plan will hopefully alleviate that and give it some space.
I talked a little bit in my first video as to why I decided to start doing Let’s Play videos, but thought it was worth talking about more here. The honest truth is, that I see it as an extension as to the original purpose of my blogging, which isn’t really this site at all. It goes back to my original site… The Life and Times of Kazar. That blog, was created for the purpose of writing a weekly summary of the things that I was doing in Asheron’s Call 1. At the time, I feel the site had a decent following. It wasn’t huge considering the niche it was, but I felt it did OK.
When I stopped playing AC1, I closed that site and moved onto this one. I don’t think my intent was ever the same. There was definitely a break between the two sites and by the time this one came around, I had either stopped playing MMORPGs, or come to the realization that the genre had changed. You see, for AC1 and UO, these games weren’t on rails quite as much as modern MMOs are. Sure the MMO genre still feels fairly wide open, it isn’t exactly a rails game. But when you start a quest, everyone follows the same path. There really isn’t a lot of derivation in the game, the change comes in what class or race you play and nothing more. If you play a Dwarf Paladin in WoW, you get pretty much the same leveling experience as everyone else. There does come some daily changes once you max out, which doesn’t take long, but it is a lot more repetitive. AC1 was so wide open, that literally no two people’s path was the same, and even when you were doing a specific quest, two people could go about it a different way depending on the quest. The point is, I felt there was something to write about back then, and when I started the new blog I didn’t feel that as much. So instead, I started writing about what was happening in my life, my thoughts on the game industry, game reviews, politics and other random crap. Anyone who has followed this blog at all has some understanding of how random it can be, and to some degree I enjoy that.
But with YouTube, I see a path back to what I was doing with Life & Times of Kazar. The Witcher is a great example. Sure, the first game in particular seems to be very much on rails. There are some parts where you can deviate and take a different path, but the result often is the same. I hope that others have enjoyment in watching me take the path though and because it is a more direct viewing, I feel like there is something more to watch than if I were to write about it later. There is also something more fun in watching something as it is happening, I feel. Let’s Play videos take a bit of slack out there, and I admit, it’s a little weird watching others play video games, but there’s also something interesting about it as well that I can’t put my finger on. It is entertainment. So I hope others watch it and enjoy it, but like with Life & Times of Kazar before this, I am really doing it as a way to just catalog what I’m doing in the world. I have gone back and read those blogs in the last couple of years and smiled at the times I had back then. Now would I enjoy it if my videos became super popular and I could quit my day job and do nothing but that? Hells yeah. Do I think that I will be able to? Hell no.
I will say so far the process has been weird. I feel that even though something new is just beginning… really this is the end of a lot of work. I’ve actually been working on creating these videos for 3 months now. I haven’t been recording until the last couple of weeks, but there was a lot of effort that went into finding the right programs to record and then edit, doing various test runs to ensure everything was working correctly, doing research on a good way to do descriptions, titles and tags, figuring out what games I want to play and then going out and getting permission to play those games. And let me say that it is kind of annoying that I am required to get permission to play someone else’s games… just stupid. I very much hate how copyright law is working right now. And so with me finally publishing my first videos… I feel like a lot of difficult and annoying work is over. And there is definitely a sigh of relief on my side.
If anyone is interested, my youtube channel is https://www.youtube.com/user/Razakius/. I will not be posting here when I update there. For that, you will need to either subscribe to my video, or follow me on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter (Links should be on the right hand side). I may do an update here from time to time, but I really don’t want to bog down this blog with video posts.