I thought I’d talk about something a bit different this
week…
Over the weekend I played a game that I’d had for a while
but hadn’t gotten around to playing, called Mount and Blade. It was on my radar
largely because TotalBiscuit had talked it up at one point, and it was a Role
Playing Game so I was willing to give it a bit of time, but I hadn’t played it
up until now because I was aware that it was a game that had no real end-game
to speak of. Some games work very well like this – the Sims games thrive on it
– but I like there to be a goal, something I can aim for. If a game doesn’t
have that, I find it hard to justify the time I put in to it at the expense of
games that do!
 |
| Because he doesn't look like Aragorn at all... |
Nonetheless, I had a go with it and was pleasantly surprised
to find an open-world RPG where the idea is to build your… prestige, I suppose,
and become a part of a saga of warring nations, eventually becoming a key
player in it yourself. It reminds me of somewhere between Romance of the Three
Kingdoms and A Game of Thrones. I enjoyed my time with it but again, with there
being no apparent endgame, I did wonder how long it would keep me engaged for.
I put that thought out on Twitter, including the remark
about A Game of Thrones, and it wasn’t long before my Dad came back with “8
seasons?” by way of a reply.
That gave me an idea…
What if I recorded gameplay videos in episodes and uploaded
them to Youtube, creating a “series” of videos that would document my progress
through the open-ended game? I have a few games I could do this with, Mount and
Blade being one of them but also Cities: Skylines, and it would be an interesting
take on showcasing those games. I could aim for a series of 12 videos, and put
it to bed after that, knowing that I could draw a line under the time I’d spent
in the game and the progress I’d made up to then.
Now, this isn’t the first time I’d had the idea of recording
gameplay footage, and I tried it a while ago with DXTory. Paid £60 for the
licence, and everything. Unfortunately it didn’t go very well, for a couple of
reasons that come down to one fact: I play most of my PC games on a laptop.
The problem that this runs into is framerates. My graphics
card was one of the top end models at the time I bought it and should be able
to run most games at 60fps (frames per second) without even trying. But you
still need a pretty fast hard drive to write that data to, and the hard drive
on a laptop isn’t that fast. It’s understandable; unless it’s specifically been
built for gaming, laptops aren’t really designed for speed. They’re designed
for long battery life and high storage, neither of which needs the hard drive
to run very fast. The most I can get out of the framerate for most games I have
is 30fps, or just under. Since most of the games I play on my laptop are
turn-based strategy games, this isn’t usually a problem for me but I wouldn’t
expect a warm welcome on Youtube if I can’t run high framerates!
The other issue is the file size. They’re huge. When a video
is made in DXTory, the file is made up of what’s on the screen and everything
the graphics card is processing. What this means is that even a 15 minute video
takes roughly 100 gigabytes. I don’t have that kind of storage space!
However, last week I tried streaming Horus Heresy: Legions
off my laptop for a while. It seemed to work; I only had two veiwers and I’m
pretty sure they were both me, but I did it using XSplit Gamecaster. It’s just
possible I might be able to do it off that, so this week I’ll give it a go, and
see what happens. I might just end up on Youtube!
No comments:
Post a Comment