Retry: Demon's Souls Out This June (Patreon)

Retry: Demon’s Souls was meant to come out in the summer of 2021. That was the plan.

When the game was released on November 19th, 2020, we began work on the show straight away. Episodes were planned and time was blocked out to film. We wanted to offer the show in 4K, so we conducted some early tests using a range of 4K capture kits to see what was the best option. (These tests are still up on the channel, just hidden from public view, if you want to take a look.) But things didn’t go to plan. On January 6th, 2021, Covid rules were once again tightened here in the UK, and we entered a third lockdown here in the UK. Our plans had to change.

We never wanted to film the show over Zoom, and while we finished Retry: Sekiro in between lockdowns filming under social distancing, we didn’t want to do that for Demon’s Souls. It’s something we did out of necessity, to finish Retry: Sekiro in a timely manner, but it always felt weird and unnatural to us. It wasn’t a compromise we wanted to make for a new Souls game. We only get one chance to experience a new FromSoftware game together, and we wanted to ensure filming it would be the best experience possible.

Across 2021, there were pockets of time when restrictions were relaxed and we felt comfortable enough to film but there was never enough time to accomplish what we wanted to with Demon’s Souls. So we filmed Retry: Chalice Dungeons and Retry: Resident Evil 8 when we could.

Only as we approached the end of 2021 did we become comfortable enough to confidently break ground on Demon’s Souls. We started filming the series on November 18th and finished on December 7th. Since the New Year, we’ve been deep into post-production, working on the series every single day. The purpose of this post is not only to give a little insight into what we’ve been working on but to explain why it’s taken longer than other playthroughs that are out there.

Since January, we’ve been editing the episodes. Often we're reducing many hours of footage down to a single episode. There’s a quick way of chopping up this footage into dozens of episodes, and slinging them up onto YouTube. But our approach, and what we want to deliver, takes time. An hour of footage typically takes 4 or more hours to edit, and then each episode receives multiple passes to make it tighter, funnier, and more rewatchable. Typically, an episode will take a full working week to edit, with someone working on it every day, before it’s then checked and revised by someone else.

Yes, we could outsource the post-production of Retry, but we think it’s important that we edit our own show. We believe it’s one of the reasons it’s good. It means we’re able to shape it beyond just what we say when the camera is on. We want the entire show to be authored by us. But when we’re deep in that process it obviously leaves little time or headspace to make much else. We temporarily paused post-production to make We Played Every… Alien Game and Hitman: 3 Ways, so there wasn’t a big gap between videos on the channel, but those shows also took time to be exactly what we wanted. We never want to publish a video for the sake of it.

So what have we been doing with Retry: Demon’s Souls to make it different? Well, settle in.

We wanted to offer this show in 4K as an experiment and a challenge. But working with 4K files poses some specific challenges. While a 4K image is four times larger than something in HD, the files we’re handling are actually much bigger. Not all 4K video files are equal. They may all have the same dimensions, in terms of pixels, but the quality of the image in motion is governed by its bitrate, and this can make files dramatically bigger.

For this series, we’ve shot our camera in 4K ProRes. (Sorry, but you’re going to have to deal with a very clear image of us.) Gameplay files are slightly smaller (but still captured at incredibly high bitrate) to simply keep file sizes within reasonable limits. One hour of our camera equaled roughly 575GB and one hour of game capture equaled 40GB. (We’d also have two identical backup capture kits running in tandem, so as to avoid us encountering an Ornstein and Smough situation.) When you throw in our audio files on top, the entire raw project files for Retry: Demon’s Souls comes to 25027GB.

To edit 4K files you need to be able to read those files quickly. So we invested in some new drives and new computers, but even transferring those files onto a working drive takes hours even over the fastest connections we have. Right now we’re transferring files overnight to work on the next day, refining the edits and adding finishing touches. These finished episodes are then exported overnight and uploaded the following day. It’s a process that requires time, and a fair bit of it.

We want to give the series the best start in life and it’s going to look great for years to come. We know people rewatch our episodes again and again, and we want this series to be something that lasts into the future.

Visual fidelity is just one aspect we’ve tried to improve. We’ve made several others, too – some of which we’re going to be talking about separately in the coming weeks. But for the first time ever we’ve had a proper production budget, which we’ve invested into music, new graphics, and collaborating with a wonderful artist on original thumbnails for every episode. We’ve gone all out to make this the best produced series we’ve ever made, and hopefully set a new standard for what you can do with a Let’s Play.

We left IGN to focus on making the best version of our show, and that aspiration has grown into seeing whether we can make the best long-form playthrough of a game on YouTube. We don’t know if we’ll succeed in that, and whether we do isn’t really important – what’s important is for us to strive towards that goal.

The truth is we could make far more videos with considerably less effort, but making the show in the way we want takes time. We don’t want to make ephemeral videos but proper episodes that can be rewatched, a show that has structure, is properly edited, and goes through meaningful post-production. This ensures Retry gets the hundred little finishing touches that go by the wayside if you’re under pressure to upload constantly.

Unfortunately, if you make Let’s Plays, or other game-related content on the Internet, you’re usually under the pressure to do it quickly. There are a variety of cultural and economic reasons why this is the case. Direct support from our patrons means we never have to talk about algorithms or SEO or CPMs. We recognise this is an immense privilege. It means we can prioritise quality over quantity, put creative decisions before monetary ones, and ultimately, make the things we feel passionate about rather than videos we think will do ‘numbers’. We believe this allows us to do something different with the Let’s Play format.

Of course we want to make things that are liked, and videos that people want to watch, but since we’re supported directly by our audience, we don’t have to make things that appeal to millions for all of this to be viable. We don’t have to advertise products we don’t care about, or cover the latest releases simply because they’re likely to trend. We can spend time making things we find creatively fulfilling.

We’re deeply fortunate to be in a position where we can live by our principles. If we want, we can publish a two-hour video that takes 6 weeks to make if we believe that’s the format it deserves, rather than feeling the need to hack it up into smaller, algorithm-appeasing bites.

We play games, make videos about them, and publish them on YouTube. It’s not original. So we understand why we are sometimes compared to the output of other channels who do something similar. We get excited about new games but we’re not as passionate about covering all the latest releases. Other channels are way better at that than we could ever be. We want to focus on making Let’s Plays and, thanks to our fortunate position, do something  special with that format. The audience will ultimately be the judge, but we believe it’ll result in a much better show, one that will be as good in 10 years time as it is on the day of its publication.

We’ve always worked on things and brought them to you when they were ready. But this project has been our most ambitious – that’s before contending with a pandemic – so it’s taken much longer as a result. We recognise there’s a frustration in some sections of the community that we don’t publish more frequently, but that simply isn’t possible with what we’re trying to achieve with this show and the channel. But it’s never been through a lack of interest or care – in fact, it’s the exact opposite. We may not upload every day, but we’re working on new things for the channel every single day.

We should’ve been much better at communicating the above earlier, and what we want to do in general. But for a lot of the last two years, we were waiting to see how the world turned, and were often just making the best of the circumstances. In future, we want to give you much more insight into what’s going on. We’ve already been talking about fun and engaging ways of doing that.

The second and third years of RKG weren’t what we expected them to be. So many of the plans we had were put on hold, and we adapted the best we could. But now, in our new home, we can start planning for the adventures that lie ahead. Retry: Demon’s Souls is a pivotal project for us. Once it’s released, it’ll give us the time and space to work on other things. In future, alongside Retry, you’ll start to see a variety of projects that embody our approach to making things. We can’t wait to tell you about them in the months ahead.

Thank you for supporting us, and we can’t wait for you to finally share all 17 episodes of Retry: Demon’s Souls with you in June.

RKG x