On "Noblian Chronicles"

In late 2019 I started writing some outlines for the story that would eventually become Noblian Chronicles. It was based on an even earlier idea and fictional world I had made up years before that.
At the time, we were still relatively new to making videos in The Sims 4 (or making videos in general) and there were a lot of tricks we hadn't learned yet. So when I wrote the summary of Hope's kidnapping and the subsequent war for the Noblian Throne, I knew it simply wouldn't be possible for us to adapt this in video format yet. Too much of it required mods that didn't exist (or if they did, I had no idea where to find them), and it just seemed like such a huge undertaking in general.

We continued on with other projects, but all that time I looked for mods, animations, footage from other games, anything that could help to bring about the world of Noblia. I created lots, with builds made by some talented people in the modding community, and a few I made by myself from scratch, and saved them down so that they would be ready for use. I wrote character backstories, lore, created maps of both Noblia itself and the even bigger Continent. I would guess at least 60% of all the things I came up with wasn't even information that would be directly relevant in the series itself. Some of it wouldn't even be brought up at all. But I had become too invested in this world of my own making to stop the cogs from turning. I realized this was the series I had wanted to make ever since me and Llunkttut made that (in retrospect horrible) first video, "Roommates", in 2017.

And finally, in the early fall of 2021, I sat down to record the first episode of Noblian Chronicles. Llunkttut exported the final episode of the main series in June of 2022.
Almost a full year of work for the both of us. And if you include the preparations for the series, Noblian Chronicles took more than three years to complete.
It sounds insane, doesn't it? To put down that much work into porn videos. Better yet, porn videos made in The Sims goddamn 4!
But, this is the medium we chose to work in, and it was a story I've wanted to tell for a long time.
Because that is mainly what we do. Of course, providing people with content they think is hot is great and all, but if it wasn't for the chance to tell stories, and come up with interesting characters, it would all feel pointless. And never have I put down as much work on writing a story and creating characters like in Noblian Chronicles.

 

"No road was ever traveled that didn't gnaw at the wanderer's feet."
-Old Noblian proverb

The difficulties to create this series are too many to go over here. The limitations of The Sims 4 has of course always been an issue for us, but that goes double when your videos take place in a medieval-style fantasy world. You wouldn't believe the number of shots that were ruined because a random sim with jeans, a winter jacket and a giant pink afro walked straight into the lot during recording, a suburban style house or a water tower was spotted in the background, a plane flew by across the sky...
While recording some of the sex scenes, the sex itself was the last thing I was even looking at - I was looking at everything else, my eyes peering all across the screen desperately trying to spot something that could ruin the shot I just spent 10 minutes setting up.
I mean good lord, it's almost like EA didn't consider that someone might make human-on-elf porn videos in their game!

Llunkttut had a tough time too. Editing these videos is incredibly time-consuming, and during some of the editing process he was working two jobs. This series required him to find/create even more specific sound effects, dig for music that would fit a series of this style, and come up with even more creative tricks to make everything look a little bit less... silly.
As always, he impressed the hell out of me with his editing. Especially considering I was constantly nagging him about finishing this video, then this video, then this video...
The end result was spectacular. It's obviously never gonna be perfect or just the way I want it while we're using The Sims 4 as a machinima tool, but he couldn't have done more than he did - the visual shortcomings were almost always on my end.

In fact, I came to realize that the only way I could ever tell this story properly would be in the shape of an actual novel. And maybe I'll sit down and actually write that one day, if time permits it.
When the series was finally finished, and we were in the process of uploading it, we came across another hurdle. We were thinking the hard work was behind us, but before we could finish uploading the entirety of season 3, XVideos suddenly stopped publishing our videos (more on that in earlier posts here on the blog). We waited for months for those issues to be sorted out, and when it started to look like that wasn't happening, we switched to Spankbang. Over there it worked for a while, until one day all the videos were purged without warning.
At that point, it became very disheartening. I looked for other options, but none of them worked. Xhamster required personal identification in order to upload videos, which both me and Llunk were uncomfortable with. NaughtyMachinima had a file size limit that every single video we'd ever made surpassed heavily.
At this point, I started to wonder if porn sites even want you to use them in the first place.
By the time of writing this, we're in the process of reuploading our old videos to Rule34Videos, which is working so far (despite a couple of hiccups where some vague server issue cancelled a couple of uploads). I sincerely hope that website can be a permanent thing, but at this point it's difficult not to expect the worst.

 
But, enough about that. At some point, the entirety of Noblian Chronicles was online, and hopefully enough people got to see it before the videos disappeared.
It was a bumpy end to a bumpy (and very long) road. It's by far the biggest project we've ever done, and I have my doubts we'll ever undertake anything bigger. But then again, you never know.
And it's not necessarily over yet either. While writing this, poor tired worker bee Llunkttut is right in the middle of editing the later parts of the spinoff anthology series Noblian Tales. And I have a feeling that when those are done, there might still be more stories from this world left to tell. After all, there's so much we still haven't seen.
If that should happen, I hope you're there to watch them. And, pretty please internet, let us upload them.

/Fröy