As I mentioned recently, A More Civlized Age has pivoted to covering Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 in order to remain compliant with the BDS movement in a way that aligns with their morals and ethics as a group. Which means this is the first video game I’m going to play for more than a few hours since I started playing Final Fantasy 14 back at the start of the year (literally January 1st). Furthermore, the group has released their mod list (which seems to have been put together by Austin Walker, the only person in the crew to have previously played this game), so I’ll also be spending a decent amount of time (an hour or two at most, I’m sure), setting up my own mods. While their coverage of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was a lot of fun to listen to, AMCA has mentioned that multiple people in their fan/Patreon community had a difficult time following along with the podcast if they weren’t playing the game. Which makes sense. While they cover a lot of the details of the game, lacking the accompanying visuals and all of the pieces that go between what they directly mentioned in the podcast would make it difficult to really get a sense of the game being played. This time around, Austin is playing ahead to hopefully steer the group toward a better structure for the show as a whole by figuring out where good stopping points are via his own play rather than trying to guess at them based on his recollections of having played the games in the past (which didn’t work out the best in their KotOR coverage for a lot of reasons but I bet that some of the planets being of very different lengths and levels of involvement didn’t help much). Additionally, Austin’s also recording his playthroughs and posting an edited version of them as a let’s play, skipping over the boring or repetitive bits (or the bits where he looks stuff up for six minutes), which he’s posting to their YouTube channel the week before each new episode releases. Between these two changes, I think AMCA should have the game pretty well covered even for their listeners who haven’t already played it or aren’t currently replaying it in parallel.
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A More Civilized Age Pivots To KotOR 2 Due To Boycott Of Disney+
Last night (as of writing this and a bit over a week ago as of this being posted), A More Civilized Age announced that they would not be covering the second season of Disney’s Andor. According to the podcast episode (which appeared in their feed instead of the first episode of coverage that everyone was expecting) shared along by the social media posts, members of the podcast felt it would go against their moral and/or ethical beliefs to cover something on the BDS boycott list, which they’d just learned included Disney+ specifically. This recording specifices that this was a difficult decision for them to make given that the members of the podcast had differing views and that they had to make it in under a week since they only learned of the Disney+ boycott the week that the new season of Andor began streaming. It makes sense that they might struggle with this choice since their weekly coverage of the first season of Andor launched them into a position of relative fame that has contributed to their current success and included perks like being able to watch the final episode early in order to release their final episode of coverage at the same time that the season 1 finale aired. That said, it speaks to their strength of character and their overall morals that the eventual decision wasn’t to cover Andor season 2 without the members of the group who objected to breaking the boycott but to pivot to covering something that isn’t being boycotted.
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