For my video project, I decided to answer a question I've been asked for the past year. Any time someone finds out I play Star Wars: Battlefront II (2017) I'm always asked "Why?" At launch the game got a stigma that even kept some of the most devoted Star Wars fans away from it. The year it launched was the year microtransactions in video games became a huge issue, and Battlefront II ended up being a catalyst for the backlash against the practice.
Despite the monetization system being removed hours before the game was available to everyone, the damage had already been done. To this day people still view the game as "Pay-to-Win." Since it's launch, however, I've witnessed huge changes come to the game, and next to all of those changes have been for the better. I mention in my video how I only played the game at first for the Star Wars brand. Now I play it because of how much the game has evolved and continues to show positive growth.
I brought up in my reflection for the Photo Essay that I'm not much of a photographer. Capturing still images isn't my strongest quality, so filming motion was going to be a challenge. Luckily for my video, I didn't need to use a real camera at all. The Xbox One has a built-in game DVR system. All I have to do is hit "record game clip" and the last two minutes of gameplay is captured and saved on to Xbox Live. The problem was that every time I wanted to use the game DVR, any gameplay after that point would be lag-city. Uploading those clips practically ate my internet connection, so I could only get one or two clips per match. It slowed down my filming process by a long shot.
Luckily, my roommate Joe came in and saved the day yet again. He let me borrow his elgato (an external game capture device that avoids lag) and I got the last of my footage easily. After all my footage was recorded I would quickly cut some clips and save them onto my flash drive. Audio was easy enough to record and cut; I had audacity on my laptop, so that task was completed within an hour. Video, on the other hand, was going to take a trip to the library.
I don't have Adobe Premiere on my laptop, and it's the only video editing software I'm familiar with, so I had to use the Owen library computers to finish my project. While I did do some minor cuts to the footage I recorded, they were very rough, only cut to conserve storage space on my flash drive. I spent about two and a half hours cutting together my video essay, then I needed to export it. Last year I used Premiere 2017 to edit my videos. This year it was 2018, and Adobe drastically changed how to export video files. I was lost until I figured it out later in the Mac lab. I exported my video, and it went very poorly. Clips were playing the wrong section of footage, audio in some sections was out of sync, some footage was extremely jerky, etc. I ended up going back to the library and using the same exact PC I edited the project on to export it, and it worked just fine. Macs and PCs really don't get along.
Uploading to YouTube was simple enough, and I made sure to share it with some of the people I play Battlefront II with. Their feedback gave me a lot of confidence in the final product. I'm glad I stuck with this project to the end. The most challenging part was filming, as most of the footage I needed to capture was left entirely to chance of what map I got in multiplayer (getting that shot of the AT-M6 on Crait took a lot of patience) and the DVR lag was not helpful. After all my footage was recorded, the rest of the project was a breeze.
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