The Darksiders 3 video is finally complete after unfortunate delay. I am actually surprised it is nearly an hour long, and perhaps with a bit more time put into examining the level-design and each Sin’s region, it could have been as lengthy as the video for the original Darksiders. I’m glad I did not choose to make it so long, however.

I will be honest and confess to being unsatisfied with this video. While I had chosen to perform some experiments, they only made a minor impact on how I felt during the video’s creation and editing process. I won’t share my own personal critiques of my work, but needless to say, there are multiple points where it feels like a shoddy and rushed product despite the time taken.

Nonetheless, I am always my own worst critic, and I still feel like this video can stand on its own as my personal reasoning for why I enjoy Darksiders 3 despite each of its flaws. For that reason, I would not change much. Additionally, the lessons learned while producing this video were incredibly valuable, and were perhaps a very, very long-time coming.

One of the biggest issues I had faced in the past was grouping all of combat together in one chapter. Typically this turned the heftiest chunk of the video into the most difficult to edit, as scrubbing through footage would be the most time-consuming and, therefore, progress would be slow-going. When you look at the timeline, knowing you have ten more minutes left to edit but the past minute took several hours, it starts to weigh heavily upon your mind. Chopping those segments up into smaller chapters not only helped organize my thoughts better, but also made the process of creating each chapter less daunting.

However, realizing how much more of the script was left to complete began to weigh on me as a whole. It was during my time working on this video, and contemplating future videos and projects, that I realized I’d be better off making multiple videos rather than working on a long, singular deep-dive. Of course, the YouTube algorithm seems to love large, multi-hour deep-dives on specific games, but I think it’s clear that my editing style does not gel well with that sort of length. I’ve noticed many of those YouTubers will rely on long cuts of gameplay, talking over it in generalizations whereas I try to cut shorter edits fitting the specific nature of what I mean. Perhaps this is an area that I can perhaps work on, be it in my writing style or being less of a perfectionist, but I feel like it’s one of the things that makes my videos work. It’s too easy to watch an extended clip of gameplay and stop listening to the words, focusing instead on the action. When the clip is shorter and tied more closely to what’s being said, it’s easy to connect the two and not let your mind get distracted.

That said, splitting one video up into multiple is, I think, a far better decision moving forward. I won’t know immediately, however, as I’ll be taking a short break from video production to just play some games. I already have two or three videos planned for Elden Ring, and an Unscripted video I’ve been wanting to do for a while, but the games I’ll be playing this week are also intended to be used for video content. In addition, while I intend on pushing deep-dives aside for now, I’m open to the notion of working on one over an extended period of time, broken up by the smaller videos. Working on a larger video for three-to-four months without anything in-between is stressful, but perhaps working on a deep-dive for six, seven, even twelve months would be less stressful if it’s a long-term project broken up by smaller videos.

Either way, I’m excited for the future. While I may not be entirely satisfied with the end result of the Darksiders 3 video, I’m glad to have finally finished it and face a potentially new vision of RamblePak64 from here on.