Personally, I would break it down into 3 focused videos that can follow on from each other but be consumed separately. The Red XIII / party switching stuff is gold and needs to be the first. That then naturally leads into the second, the rushed final chapter segments / Boss fights QA outlines. Then the third and final video would be the lessons learnt during development (going back to the original paragraphs of the article about PS5 development / options) but also a stronger focus on what SE can take (or not take, as may be the case) into future installments.
Again, this is all just my opinion. Great content, but it desperately needs to be refocused.
It's super interesting to see the way you ordered things, because there is a specific reason that I laid them out in the order I did.
I started with the PS5 & Release cycle constraints, because those are all things that would be a part of the development cycle that shifts their technological focus & internal roadmap starting
at least 3 years ago. So while the PS5 isn't out, and we still think of it as upcoming technology – it's very much just surrounding historical context for
Remake's development that causes a lot of the bugs and developmental bottlenecks that you see hitting around the end of the game, and is why Red XIII & party switching gets cut. Understanding that makes how & why features get cut something more understandable & less lazy or shortsighted.
Then looking at Red XIII & Party Switching to show how complex they are to establish and how many pieces are still around in the current release establishes a better certainty that those are the elements that are cut out of the game. As a part of looking at the technical, design, and thematic shifts that are meant to employ them, those missing features inform us what type of content bottle neck they represent within the development. This is ultimately what informs what other pieces of the game would even exist at that type of stage, and then how cutting that content impacts everything else around it being in a more rough QA stage – leaving enemy encounters, traversal, loading gates, save benches, and even the boss fights in a rough state, and letting us infer more about how each chapter gets tackled & polished.
Then with that information, we can look at the final chapters & unfinished boss battles, because understanding the workflow of what those boss battles were going to be is only possible once you understand what Red XIII & Party Switching was supposed to provide for them. This allows you to examine how the gameplay design was supposed to have expanded throughout those boss fights – ending up with the two final bosses that are meant to be pulling HUGE amounts of very specific types of player data that doesn't currently exist specifically for utilization along with the next gen technology that all of this development has been guided by, in order to shape how they can approach expanding the content of the game, as well as how all of these issues combined might have them look at releasing smaller packages of chapters as content vs. full game sequels.
It's definitely not as attention-grabbing, or focused as individual parts – but each of those things relies
incredibly heavily on a thorough understanding of the topic that comes before, because that's how it actually happens within game development, which is all how & why I can even dissect this type of information as an outsider. It was initially split into those three parts, but the deeply technical minutiae of all of the Chapter 17 and boss fight stuff is overly nit-picky if you're not a QA person (one of the things I learned from posting about it in forum threads first). Ultimately it's too heavily focusing on highlighting the issues rather than showing how the issues help to highlight the path itself, which is why those ended up getting more condensed and laid out in a single page. This is also because that's by far the most speculative of anything since the end of that is really based on what we can infer about what's meant to be built on missing pieces, rather than what we can infer about extant content & technology from what's still there.
At the moment there is only a skeleton crew in the Creative Circle (which is a shame, we definitely need to find ways to get more people involved) but if this is something you would consider doing, I'd offer my help to see it come to life. I've got a lot on, but we need to try and unify our collective efforts across the site more anyway. This seems like it would be a good start.
The most difficult part for me currently is timing on things. Writing is easy because I can absorb a random half hour here and there, or suddenly get into a groove at midnight and write until 6am. It's definitely a place worth starting though, and I think that better unification on the collective creative efforts here is definitely a good thing. Not sure what the best way to spin up initially looking at doing something about it would be, but drop me a message or something, and I'll see what all might work best!
@Lex It's not about the overall views, as the Exit and Bounce numbers make it easy to tell who just checks the first page and moves on. That's pretty expected of internet traffic, and I'm not at all bothered that a bunch of people will want to skim through. It's why I break up things into section headings, to help people just scan and get the basics, because not everyone has the time or interest in all of the tl;dr.
The part the bothered me was that of the unique views who actually
DID take the time to have read all of the content on the first page, 75% of
those users didn't ever get to the second page. This is despite already being specifically within the group who have already committed their own time to go through the article's first page in detail out of their own interest. Those views aren't just anyone –
they're the core audience for this kind of content. That's why I went hunting to try and figure out the best data we have on the specifically interested audience who genuinely likes this stuff, after I had friends missing half of the article totally unintentionally because Wordpress's pagination is next to invisible. We don't want 3/4s of our core interested audience to be missing out on half the content –
least of all the parts that are more specifically focused on the game itself & the actual conclusions from all that detailed work.
It's like if you made a movie that drew in an ok crowd, but then found out that of the 100 people who really liked it and were paying close attention, 75 of them thought that the intermission was actually the end credits and just left the theater (or closed the video during the first ad break). That fucking sucks, and you
DEFINITELY need to find out a way to identify & correct that misunderstanding before trying to make another one.
X
), but that practice on other websites annoys me so much.