Feedback Request - Median Beginners Guide Video Series

I recently posted the first video in a Median beginners guide series I plan on making. I'm hoping that some community members will take a look at it and provide constructive feedback, so I can improve future episodes. The videos are geared toward new Median players, who have some ARPG experience but have never played Median before. Throughout the series, I hope to explain the basic mechanics of the game, provide advice as to where to find further information, and show players that you can progress through most of the early game without a build guide. Once the self-made build hits a wall, we will find ways around it, or I will show ways of finding viable guides to continue progression.

I'm new to the content creation world and have always been a consumer of the help guides / how-to's / build guides in the past. I'm making this video from the perspective of someone who has played thousands of hours of ARPG's but has almost always relied on build guides to walk me through the mechanics of games. With this project, I'm trying to educate myself as well as others while I make each video. Currently I'm formatting the videos to suite my preferred style of Youtube video, which is a longer Let's Play format - something that I usually throw on the second monitor and listen to passively while I'm playing games or doing other work.

After posting the video I can see some changes that I will make in future episodes:
- Length should be reduced to the 20 minute mark
- Information on tips could be shown on the screen (I.E: when I talk about a cube recipe)
- I can prepare / inform myself a little more prior to recording, to reduce the "ummm" and dead space while I process something during recording

I look forward to any feedback provided!

Here is the link:

Hello, always glad to see more guides. A couple suggestions:

1. Add timestamps to the video so people can sort of "search" through the content. For example "Akara's Quest - 7:07" in the description. As of late, YouTube has added a feature that reads these timestamps and automatically adds them to the seekbar (the red line). Moreover, they let newbies quickly rewatch a section if they miss or forget something.

Corrid wrote:I can prepare / inform myself a little more prior to recording, to reduce the "ummm" and dead space while I process something during recording

2. If you find yourself in a lot of dead time, consider typing the whole script out. Then read off of it as a narration. Doing this also lets you review the entire video content as a whole, so you can reorganize and adjust them as needed. Cheers.

I feel like this format is too heavy in the "Let's play"-area and too light in the guide area. If the point is to teach new people how Median works, then I think more focus should be put on the why and not so much on the what. One example is when you went over the talent tree, you basically do no explaining of how the talent tree works and in regards to the uber skills, you push it off to when it will become immediately relevant, in a future episode.
There is an argument to be made that, explaining the uber skills at that time was not relevant but at the same time, it feel weird to me that a new player has to sit through maybe 3-5 episodes before a fundamental feature of Median is explained, hence why I mentioned the balance between Let's Play and guide.

Edit: Otherwise a really good idea.

Hey man, I think this would be better suited as a walkthrough series instead of a game guide. Doing a character guide from the beginning to at least 120 would require too much delving into the inner workings of the game to function coherently in a video.

My suggestion is to separate the leveling part as a walkthrough. If you really want to delve into the documentation and mechanics of the game, have a separate series where you quote footage of your walkthrough as examples instead.

In terms of the video itself, I think it already does a good job of cutting out the irrelevant parts. Maybe it can do with more personality.

Thank you so much for the feedback, this is exactly what I was hoping for. At the end of the day, making this video showed me that making content is hard, and making good / informative / structured / engaging content is even harder. I've learned a lot from your comments and have re-watched the video a few times to gain a better understanding of how I could approach things going forward and what I'm really trying to get out of creating this guide series.

NotCube wrote:1. Add timestamps to the video so people can sort of "search" through the content.....

• Noted and I will start to do this moving forward.

NotCube wrote:2. If you find yourself in a lot of dead time, consider typing the whole script out. Then read off of it as a narration. Doing this also lets you review the entire video content as a whole, so you can reorganize and adjust them as needed. Cheers.

• The first portion of the video where I walked through what Median was / how to install was scripted. I like how that flowed and will work toward developing the skills to be able to script more of a video while still sounding natural and informative.

Cheno wrote:I feel like this format is too heavy in the "Let's play"-area and too light in the guide area. If the point is to teach new people how Median works, then I think more focus should be put on the why and not so much on the what. One example is when you went over the talent tree, you basically do no explaining of how the talent tree works and in regards to the uber skills, you push it off to when it will become immediately relevant, in a future episode.

Engersion wrote:Hey man, I think this would be better suited as a walkthrough series instead of a game guide. Doing a character guide from the beginning to at least 120 would require too much delving into the inner workings of the game to function coherently in a video.

My suggestion is to separate the leveling part as a walkthrough. If you really want to delve into the documentation and mechanics of the game, have a separate series where you quote footage of your walkthrough as examples instead.

• I think both of you hit the nail on the head here, the purpose of the video and the execution are a little confused. It's not necessarily super informative nor is it super entertaining, as it's trying to do both.

Engersion wrote:Maybe it can do with more personality.

• This is tough! I have personality in RL (I swear) but getting it through while talking into a microphone and looking at my monitor is a skill that needs to be developed.

Moving forward with this series I've decided to play the Bowazon through to level 120, recording relevant parts as I go and developing a "guide" that will take a new player from a lvl 1 Amazon to a lvl 120 Bowazon that is capable of entering early endgame. From that, I will produce two videos which provide a quick overview of Normal / Nightmare progression (vid 1) and Hell / end-game progression (vid 2). These videos should be short and succinct (~20 minutes) and provide a template for a new player who wants to hop into Median, get a taste for the game and get a character who is somewhat capable. These videos should be much more informative, information should be easier to digest and pack a bit more of a "punch" as I can clip and condense the entertaining / exciting parts of leveling a new character.

From there, I can make videos that cover topics more in depth and are on the informative side, or just record playthroughs, knowing that they are positioned to be on the entertaining side (if they are or not is another story...).

At the end of the day, I'm looking to give back to the community somehow and produce something that may be of value to someone. I've spent years and years consuming guides and walkthroughs and videos for each game I play and I feel that it's time to give back. After all, the level of production needs to meet the level of consumption in our for a community to thrive.

Thanks again for the feedback. I'll post my next video here to see what everyone thinks!

You know, somehow your style reminds me of this guy, especially the way you can make the mundane part of the game tolerable to watch. It will be fantastic if you can recreate the feeling of learning the game from ground zero.

New episode is up! Episode 2 covers the basics of gearing - tiered uniques, runewords and other associated cube recipes. I've worked in all the feedback I received and think I've made an incremental improvement to the quality of the content. I'll keep plugging away and trying to make these videos better and better.

Feedback is always appreciated!

Good stuff! I kinda skimmed through the videos but you really explain everything, maybe even too accurately but it is meant for beginners so that's not a bad thing. I sent links to my brother so he stops bugging me with questions, he can give better feedback in a while. And you have a nice voice.

Thank you all for the feedback! I'm working towards making each video better and more streamlined to provide useful information in a package that doesn't have a bunch of extra fluff.

The 3rd video is up, covering stat and skill point allocation basics:

Next video we will talk about the different mercenaries and gearing them out!