I'm collecting recordings of my own gameplay, and it became a form of fear.
When I started playing Genshin in 2023, I quickly started to record most of the timed events, quests, my pulls/grinding and Spiral Abyss (later joined by theater and stygian).
At some point i started pressing record button at all events and AQ/SQs since there is actually no way to replay ANYTHING, even not time-gated content. In classic single-player games you can start again with a new save while also not being dependent on an external server for the game to operate.
In competitive multiplayer games, you have so much unique matches that you mostly don't have to record them entirely, just cutting out the moment you want to save. This way you also make it easy to make compilations that you can share with friends and community.
But Genshin? It breaks my mentality so hard. You still "own nothing" like in muliplayer games in terms of it being live service, but it also throws a whole lot of content at you every patch, and it's mostly unique (I don't talk about some events like another round of collecting coins in co-op while using another Natlan character, but rather new locations and SQ/AQs). Once you're done with them, they're gone forever on your account. This makes watching others' playthroughs the only way to see what you should've seen and "recording everything" the only way to see what you've actually done.
Another thing to note is that I'm playing the game in non-English language even though I use English voiceover, and AFAIK most if not all events are actually recorded and uploaded to YT in a good quality by ENG channels with a pretty big audience, and that couldn't be said about other languages (mine is definitely a popular one, but non-major events are being uploaded by channels with less than 1000 views and 1000 subs and could just disappear any day).
I ended up by building a whole server with two 16tb mirrored drives (and it was a really good experience because I actually use it for computations/programming and whole lot of other things aside from just storing files!)
I usually record at \~30 Mbps 1080p H.264 and when I try to transcode the footage to H.265 or other codecs, I immediately start seeing compression artifacts that break the feeling of immersion.
Currently my collection is around 6TB.
Sometimes I feel like I could just delete or compress 90% of it without actually hurting my memories, but I don't know if I'll remember something at some point that I won't be able to find and feel devastated long after that.
This became my fear of loss, and every patch is 50-200+ GB for me.
Sometimes I even feel like I lose the colorfulness of feelings while playing because I "send" them to the future where I'm nostalgic about the content... that may not even exist.
I actually do watch my videos, but on quest side it's mostly certain Archon/Story Quests such as Sumeru/Fontaine AQ, Zhongli/Raiden SQ, 5.4 main event and some other.
I don't rewatch my abyss/stygian/theater runs much though, but some of them are just generic and some are actually interesting for me: first 36\* Abyss, first 8\*/10\*/12\* theater, first Menacing/Fearless, and both first Fearless and 12\* as well as the first 59-second run of an abyss chamber (12-2 of December abyss) were done just two weeks ago. I think it's also possible to squeeze these runs by making a sped up version of them and mixing these versions with original footage in LosslessCut so only retries will go at 4x-10x speed.
What do you think about this situation? Will just nuking everything I'm not interested in be the optimal outcome? Or there's something that could be valuable or even become lost media?
At some point i started pressing record button at all events and AQ/SQs since there is actually no way to replay ANYTHING, even not time-gated content. In classic single-player games you can start again with a new save while also not being dependent on an external server for the game to operate.
In competitive multiplayer games, you have so much unique matches that you mostly don't have to record them entirely, just cutting out the moment you want to save. This way you also make it easy to make compilations that you can share with friends and community.
But Genshin? It breaks my mentality so hard. You still "own nothing" like in muliplayer games in terms of it being live service, but it also throws a whole lot of content at you every patch, and it's mostly unique (I don't talk about some events like another round of collecting coins in co-op while using another Natlan character, but rather new locations and SQ/AQs). Once you're done with them, they're gone forever on your account. This makes watching others' playthroughs the only way to see what you should've seen and "recording everything" the only way to see what you've actually done.
Another thing to note is that I'm playing the game in non-English language even though I use English voiceover, and AFAIK most if not all events are actually recorded and uploaded to YT in a good quality by ENG channels with a pretty big audience, and that couldn't be said about other languages (mine is definitely a popular one, but non-major events are being uploaded by channels with less than 1000 views and 1000 subs and could just disappear any day).
I ended up by building a whole server with two 16tb mirrored drives (and it was a really good experience because I actually use it for computations/programming and whole lot of other things aside from just storing files!)
I usually record at \~30 Mbps 1080p H.264 and when I try to transcode the footage to H.265 or other codecs, I immediately start seeing compression artifacts that break the feeling of immersion.
Currently my collection is around 6TB.
Sometimes I feel like I could just delete or compress 90% of it without actually hurting my memories, but I don't know if I'll remember something at some point that I won't be able to find and feel devastated long after that.
This became my fear of loss, and every patch is 50-200+ GB for me.
Sometimes I even feel like I lose the colorfulness of feelings while playing because I "send" them to the future where I'm nostalgic about the content... that may not even exist.
I actually do watch my videos, but on quest side it's mostly certain Archon/Story Quests such as Sumeru/Fontaine AQ, Zhongli/Raiden SQ, 5.4 main event and some other.
I don't rewatch my abyss/stygian/theater runs much though, but some of them are just generic and some are actually interesting for me: first 36\* Abyss, first 8\*/10\*/12\* theater, first Menacing/Fearless, and both first Fearless and 12\* as well as the first 59-second run of an abyss chamber (12-2 of December abyss) were done just two weeks ago. I think it's also possible to squeeze these runs by making a sped up version of them and mixing these versions with original footage in LosslessCut so only retries will go at 4x-10x speed.
What do you think about this situation? Will just nuking everything I'm not interested in be the optimal outcome? Or there's something that could be valuable or even become lost media?
Commentaires
The thing is, any quest that I want to rewatch, I can just find on youtube. And if I want to review the dialogue, it's all there on the wiki. You can even see the alternate paths... what would have happened in the other dialogue options. I hope that helps. In the modern era of youtube, nothing is lost.
I also think the Aranyaka quest series helps with this. Even if your memories are lost, what you did is still in the world in some form. Your deeds are reflected back in the world around you. Somewhere in the forest is a tree branch that's the shape it is because you passed by there once. Somewhere in the world is your song on the wind.
In Genshin terms, your past is there in your game progression, such as in the souvenirs in your inventory... in the furnishings in your teapot... Even in your character levels and equipment! You killed the monsters, got the drops and mora, and spent them on your characters, and even if you've forgotten, they remember through their combat strength. Every step you ever took in the game is *there* in your account, if not in your memory.
Hope this helps, and good luck!
I can mostly agree with that, but I think AQs/SQs/events don't leave much after you finish them, aside from some teapot or other items in your inventory. But yes, WQs do impact the map, and sometimes changes are absolutely huge!
In the era when nothing is predictable I wouldn't say it's a bad habit of keeping things and memories you want to preserve, people keep giant ass photo albums after all. I download everything I 100% need like drivers, operating systems etc, but I also download and keep random stuff I like.
People always talk about YouTube and accessibility of it, but they take it for granted. Whatever happens to YouTube is not under anyone's control, it could easily just go down. Twitch for example is actively shutting down streaming services, reducing quality in certain regions of the world, and a few years ago they just decided to allow people to keep some specific amount of hours in VODs, shit ton of data was lost, including mine. There are also governments, assuming you're not in the US there's just no guarantee YouTube will always stay available for you. This madness with age verification in EU and UK is a good example.
As funny as it sounds, but having some kind of digital independence is not a bad thing. It's a good thing.
Or maybe something from AMD.
And yes, this whole independency thing is something I understood for a long time, just when my liked videos from YT started to disappear one after another. It gave me a lesson.
I'm saving this plan as a last resort because I still have some space left and I'll probably delete some of my videos.
Whatever is not on your infra is not yours
I’ve been recording events, wishes, max friendships, conversations in the teapot, characters getting to level 90 and Spiral Abyss along with random little clips now and again.
I don’t actually keep the recordings on my hard drive. I ended up making an Instagram account and upload them there in parts.
Considering a majority of what I upload on Instagram is archon quests and events, it’s not going to be a great loss if they disappear.
If you *want* to trim it down, look for those things which hold meaning to you: pick your favourite characters at first, and focus on their quests, their pulls, etc. That can be your baseline, so to speak, and help give you an idea of what you are most likely to cherish in the future. If, while searching for those things, you find yourself skipping through *other* things, than those *other* things are clearly less valuable to you.
From a technical standpoint you can try to reencode into newer codecs especially AV1 or H265 for more space efficiency. Will need to know how and why you are getting those artifacts though; maybe Handbrake setting issues?
Datahoarder subreddit can also advise on the transcoding issues and further on how else you can get cheaper storage (yes I know, the RAMegeddon is now affecting HDD prices)
Can also consider Backblaze as your backup solution if it helps
I don't need cloud since I already have 3 copies in 2 locations, but thanks anyway