Legacy of the Sith

While I'm not exactly a black-piller doom and gloomer, and I kind of despise too much of that attitude, I think some of the black-pill comments about SWTOR are probably directionally correct. The game is old. The updates are puny. Even this "big update"; what a UI change and a character designer change, and some mechanical stuff that is allegedly going to make existing content feel a bit more fresh again? My thought on the "combat styles" was "Cool. (shrug)" If there were new content, new stories, etc. I'd feel like this game really had some life in it. I feel like the devs are trying to give us the illusion that there's life in this game while, in reality, they're just letting it mostly sit there and make modest money from cartel coin sales and other cosmetic stuff that they put out to nickel and dime the players with in microtransactional (or not so micro-sometimes) fashion. We actually haven't heard anything about the new content.

To be fair, they did do a fairly big content update of that kind a few years ago with Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne. And scuttlebutt is that the reaction to that was mixed. I think the reality is that BioWare isn't really doing much with this game, and isn't likely to. The lead developer may have recently said publicly that he expects the game to be going strong for many years to come, but the reality is 1) what else is he going to say, regardless of what he does or doesn't know? 2) he's not likely to be in a position to know what the head honchos at EA are thinking about the game and its life cycle, and 3) it hasn't been "going strong" by any reasonable definition of that phrase already for a long time.

I think I'm justified in moving forward, and maybe in fact, in advancing my timeline, of recording the stories. Oh, sure... sure... there are other people who have done this already, but I want my own versions of the characters. And I want to keep it saved for posterity so that when the game is gone, if I feel the itch, I can relive it with my recordings. 

Where I'm being a bit wishy-washy is in how to record it. I've already played every class through once. Twice, in the case of the bounty hunter. And my first run through was done very iconically; white males as the characters, and the most iconic (in my opinion) of the advanced class options. So... do I do the same thing over again so that I have iconic recordings? Or do I explore the alternative options; alien races and less iconic combat mechanics? If I do, will that mean that I'm ultimately less happy with the result? Do I want to record more than one of each class?

I don't know. And on top of this, I'm a little intimidated by the technology; I've never really done much with OBS Studio, or movie editing, and I don't know how difficult it will be to do. Which causes me to demur somewhat and not get around to recording anything. I need to do a little bit of experimentation, and probably soon, just so I know how it all works. I'm almost tempted to do the cutting and clipping on my phone, of all places, because I am familiar with KineMaster, at least. And I'll probably want relatively short cuts to build up to the total movie. The editing is likely to be a big task. And do I want to mostly turn the music off in the game, and add music in myself? If I don't, I'll likely get weird music cuts because the music will be playing in the background while I'm cutting and chopping up the experience. That just makes the editing more work. 

So yeah; I've got a lot of stuff to figure out, and because I'm kinda wishy-washy and a bit intimidated by the project, it's taken much longer to get off the ground than I initially thought. But, the Legacy of the Sith expansion actually suggests to me that I better do it soon. It's not a super substantial expansion. And at the 10th anniversary? Either BioWare is playing their cards very close to the vest in terms of stuff that we'll see this year, or they're just not really making a huge deal out of it. Either way... the future of the game, especially at its age, is probably uncertain. Just like you go and ask your grandfather to tell stories of his youth while you still can, knowing that his age means that you could lose access to them if you don't, I'm feeling like I better do this while the game is still here. And then, with any luck, it'll still be here in five more years. But if it isn't, well... I'm not left high and dry.

UPDATE: As I kind of suspected, feeling intimidated by the technology was foolish. I did a trial, and it was easy. I went ahead and recorded the opening cut-scene of my new Jedi Knight. I made him a male Mirialan, and as is my wont, I did not dress him in a typical "Jedi" fashion. What most forget, in this post prequel era, is that there was no indication throughout the entire original trilogy that the Jedi Knights wore any kind of robes. Obiwan did when we meet him, its true, but then again, he dressed like that because he was in hiding on a poor backwards planet. If you recall, there's essentially no difference at all between how Obiwan dressed and how Uncle Owen dressed. For that matter, Luke's own "moisture farmer" outfit with a simple homespun tunic and leggings wasn't particularly different either. 

Obiwan was then, of course, shown that way as a force ghost, so he'd be easier to recognize (I presume) and so that they didn't have to make him a new costume. Yoda also wore simple, homespun peasant gear. But he was also in hiding in a hut on a primitive planet. If you'll recall, Luke never wore anything like "Tatooine peasant" garb in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. And it wouldn't have made sense for him to have done so, either. He wore his orange X-wing pilot flight suit, and he wore a khaki set of "fatigues" jumpsuit for lack of a better term, during the second movie; an all-black set of fatigues-like outfit during pretty much the entirety of the third. He did have a cloak on early in Jedi, but that's probably better seen as a concession to the environment of Tatooine than trying to look like a Jedi.

Anyway, I could be wrong, and maybe Lucas knew all along that the Jedi wore plain robes, rather than him deciding that during the prequel pre-production in order to give them obvious strong visual cues. And there's something to be said for that, especially as his Jedi became more and more monk-like in many respects. However, I've never been a fan myself, so my Jedi are not weird, monastic characters sitting around being pretentious and spouting fortune cookie wisdom without any context, like Lucas' do; my Jedi are simply swashbuckling action heroes with a lightsaber and some modest magical powers.

I used the type 2 body (as I—so far—have always done) with the Trailblazer jacket (dyed black and deep red), the Trailblazer gloves, the Series 615 Cybernetic belt, Advanced Slicer pants and Thermal Retention boots. Head slot is hidden, although for the heckuvit, I put the Thermal Retention goggles on, since I'd already pulled them from collections anyway. Maybe I'll use them visually occasionally. I played around with the color unification to give me a good look; sometimes unified, sometimes not. And I replaced his dumb practice sabers with some vibroblades that I have in my collections as well. He's got double crossed swords on his back right now, since he's a Sentinel. It's more of a "traditional" smuggler look than a Jedi look, but again; I suspect that utilitarian casual clothes are what everyone wears day to day, regardless of class. I think it fits my vision of this character quite well, and my vision of what the Jedi should be like anyway.

It took me a couple of hours to record what was essentially about five minutes of video. Part of this is because I actually had over thirty minutes of video, and I had to edit and cut what I had. Why'd it take so long? Because getting the stuff to look right is tedious. I "escaped" out of the cut scene so I could run to the mailbox, get all of the stuff that I get as a new character, exit out of this character to one that has some money and other things, mail that to my new character, log back into my new character and retrieve all of that stuff, set up my UI the way I want it, grab the stuff in collections that I needed, equip my character, and then run back and start the cut scene over again, except this time equipped. It turned out fairly well, but was more time-consuming than I thought. And then, of course, I had to actually cut and edit the thirty minutes of footage that I had, and watch them a time or two to make sure that it all worked. Then I had to do more cutting of "dead footage" to make it a bit tighter, and watch it again. And then once again I did more cutting and more watching. I had recorded some voice-over during all of this stuff that I was doing, thinking that it'd make a good "behind the scenes" stuff, but I wasn't thrilled with most of that, so I'll probably not use it for anything. (Maybe I can do voiceover that I record separately over some of that footage after all. I'll keep it just in case. For a little while, anyway.)

The only thing that I messed up and will have to live with is that I didn't mute my microphone when I wasn't talking, so there's some minor mic noise here and there, during the opening crawl, for instance. I forgot that there was a mute button on the mic cable. Oops. 

Anyway, I'm reasonably happy with how this turned out. I don't know that I'll be able to record any more before going out of town for the holidays, but when I come back, I will focus more on this aspect of the game than my existing characters, who are mostly just tooling around with dailies and reputation and other things like that. I'd like to get these class stories recorded sooner rather than later (ideally before the launch of the update, although that seems very unlikely) and now that I've actually started, it seems more doable than ever.

Next time I post about this in particular, hopefully I have a link to my actual first Youtube upload in this series. And then I have to figure out my cadence. Do I want to stick with this character, Taul Kajak (names borrowed from my Space Opera X game), or do I finish Tython and then do another character's introduction too?