The Road Ahead 2024 Edition

Now that I've finished the Hammerhold DLC for Kingdom Rush Vengeance and will soon be done adding Isfet to my Impossible Hero Challenge series, it seemed like a good time to do a new road ahead post to put down my thoughts on what games I'll be working on for the rest of the year.

I really was not expecting a new DLC for Vengeance, and it, along with the announcement of KR5, have rather thrown off my original plan for the year.  I had hoped this year to get back to finishing some of my older projects, like my Baldur's Gate and Stronghold videos, but Kingdom Rush is what pays the bills (well, not really considering my channel isn't even monetized yet, but it certainly is a lot more popular than an old DOS game from 1993).  So we roll with the changes.

If you haven't heard, the fifth Kingdom Rush title, Kingdom Rush Alliance, will be coming out July 25th.  Given that, I'd really like to do Legends of Kingdom Rush before then.  It's extremely doubtful I can get all video content done before then (I don't even know what I might be doing for it besides a walkthrough, having not played the game yet), but I'll give it a try.  But regardless, when July 25th hits I can guarantee I'll be dropping everything to get into it and start posting content as quick as possible.

First will be a walkthrough series, as usual, and then I'll have to see about an Impossible Hero Challenge series.  If you haven't been reading the updates, Alliance will now let you use two heroes on a level at once.  In exchange for this power (which includes having two hero spells to use), it looks like the game will not include a major power like Rain of Fire, Lightning Bolt, or Soul Impact.  I'm not sure right now how I would go about an Impossible Hero Challenge when you use two heroes at once.  I'll have to play the game to find out.  It may be that you can opt to only use one hero at a time, but obviously the game will be balanced around having two, so I'll just have to wait and see.

Assuming I do one (and of course I'll find a way one way or another), it will definitely consume the rest of 2024.  The devs have announced the game will launch with 12 heroes and 16 maps, so with 3 modes that's 48 sets of potentially 12 videos each to do.  If I do the same cadence I settled into with the Hammerhold DLC of two per week (which is about the max I can handle), that's 24 weeks to get through it all.  I have to finish the walkthrough series first obviously, but I can probably crank that out in a few weeks.  And of course we can absolutely expect new levels and new heroes as time goes by, so expect KRA content to go well through 2025.

Of course my Skyrim series will continue coming out every weekday as well.  This year I've gotten a lot more proactive about planning out my content, and it's really helping me to visualize the future better.  For instance, I know I'll publish my last Isfet video on 5/7.  Now with Skyrim I have to do a lot of estimating of how many videos it will take to do particular content, but with 400+ videos already I'd say I've gotten pretty good at it.

Right now it looks like my current efforts to 100% explore Skyrim will take at least through July.  After that we'll do the main questline, the Civil War questline, and Hearthfire content, and that should take us through September.  After that we'll head to Solstheim for the rest of Dragonborn content.  Once that's done the series proper is over, but I am going to go back and do some "non-canon" videos for the sake of completeness, such as the questlines when you side with the Dawnguard and Stormcloaks instead.  All in all I expect Skyrim to go through the end of 2024.

So 2024 will definitely be Skyrim and Kingdom Rush Alliance, plus Legends of Kingdom Rush thrown in wherever possible.  It looks like I'll just have to push my other projects to 2025.  However, I will say I've been working diligently on getting ahead in generating videos.  At first this was because I was going to be gone for a month this summer and probably wouldn't be able to produce any content, but I didn't want my channel to sit idle for that long.  Well it turns out I'm not going to be gone for a month after all, but I still want to keep trying to get ahead.  I've been working on trying to get two weeks' of Skyrim content done every week, so every week I get one extra week ahead on the publishing schedule.  If I can keep this up then I potentially could be done generating all my Skyrim content by the end of summer.  That would then free up the rest of the year to either devote to another project or accelerate my release cadence for Alliance content.  It's a big if, so we'll see.

Of course the giant caveat is that I never know when I'll get the itch to play another game and just throw my schedule to the winds so I can play it instead.  Lately I've had a serious craving to go back and play The Summoning, an RPG from 1993 that I absolutely love.  We'll see what the year holds.  Let's just say that while I'm anxiously awaiting Alliance, I also wouldn't be terribly disappointed if the release date slipped.