Tag: master
‘We’re making four Star Wars films’: The ‘Andor’ master plan
Charles Dickens may not be the first writer that comes to mind when you think of Star Wars. But that’s kind of what Tony Gilroy aims to change with Andor.
Like the famed Victorian author, Gilroy (of Bourne franchise fame) is splitting his narrative into chapters (in Andor‘s case, 24 of them) for wide distribution – but says he intends a novel-like narrative that will one day be ripe for viewing as one whole.
Dickens stories feels stuffed with characters, with roughly 40 major and minor ones in Great Expectations; Andor has 200 speaking roles in the 12-episode first season alone. Dickens deliberately drew his characters from all walks of life, high and low, and usually opened with his protagonist at the bottom of the heap; so too does Andor.
“It really is Dickensian,” Gilroy says. “Multiple characters, multiple plots, multiple intrigues; everybody’s adventure stories colliding with one another. The idea is to start extremely small, and we are going to get huge … you have a long way to go.”
Andor, Gilroy explains, “endeavors to be a 1,500-page novel by the time it’s done.” When Gilroy’s star and co-producer Diego Luna called Andor “different” and “smart” Star Wars, this is what he was talking about. But what he didn’t talk about was the sheer Death-Star size of the thing now emerging from hyperspace.
Credit: Lucasfilm
“We essentially made four new Star Wars films,” Gilroy says of the epic 12-hour Season 1. “And we’re gonna make four more.” Memo to every director attached to a potential Star Wars trilogy that hasn’t seen the light of day for years: Gilroy just casually leapfrogged you and will likely lap you.
He had toyed with the idea of doing five seasons, Gilroy confirms: one for every year between the start of the show and Rogue One. But that would be too much scale, even for him.
“At the end, you’re gonna go ‘wow, they would die before they could do this five more times,'” he says. Besides, “Diego would be in his 60s by the time we finished them” — somewhat older than he’s supposed to be in Rogue One.
Galactic scale
You can get a sense of the Andor scope widening in the first three episodes that Disney+ made available in the show’s first week, as the plot builds from Cassian’s family background and personal problems to (mild spoiler alert, but why haven’t you watched yet?) tense scenes of workers rebelling against corporate cops, who are as humorless, hapless, and brutal as any official in Dickens’ workhouses.
Luther Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) arrives in transit literally next to a classic cockney character, and becomes a very Dickensian kind of mentor to Cassian — mysterious, morally ambiguous — replacing his stepmother Maarva Andor (Fiona Shaw). Maarva — controlling, stuck in a room — is an archetypal Dickens stepmom.
Credit: Lucasfilm
As reviewers who have already seen episode 4 can confirm, next week’s Andor widens the scope even further. It’s no spoiler for anyone who’s studied the trailers that one of the intrigues to come involves Galactic Senator and future rebel leader Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly).
“And by the time we get to [episodes] 5 and 6,” Gilroy says, “it’s just like a full orchestra playing at that point.”
“To make it about Trump would be trivial”
Gilroy started writing Andor in 2018, slap bang in the middle of what we can now look back on (knock on wood) as the Trump era.
His is a story of struggle against a growing dictatorship — one that is being embraced by petty officials in the Corporate Tactical Forces (tagline: “the Empire’s First Line of Defense”) who dream of imposing law and order by rescinding rights and cracking skulls. Fiona Shaw has called it a “great, scurrilous take on the Trumpian world.”
But Gilroy straight-up denies that he was thinking about The Former Guy when he wrote Andor. Why? Because again, that would make his scope too small.
“To make the show about Trump would be trivial,” Gilroy says. “It’s not about politics at all. It’s about history. Nothing to do with the specifics of what’s going on now.”
Indeed, Andor never feels like it’s preaching, even in those “cops vs. workers” scenes. Like Dickens, who exposed the workhouses by showing not telling, Gilroy is an entertainer first. He’s simply showing us a parade of “real people” that feel universal, no matter what galaxy or historical age you’re in.
The corporate cops are surprisingly three-dimensional: Note how, for all their big talk, they freak out when they actually shoot a worker. Stormtroopers, these are not.
Credit: Lucasfilm
“The five years we’re curating here are when the Empire is consolidating its power,” Gilroy notes. “We’re going to see that oppression and that squeeze come down in every variation, everywhere. The first one is on a corporate planet; [the Empire] will take the excuse of what happens and say ‘We’re nationalizing all the companies.’ They’re tightening up their supply lines. They’re passing all their versions of the Patriot Act in the [Galactic] Senate.”
By comparison to what the Empire is doing, Gilroy says, this corporate tactical force of meek little wannabe fascists will “look kind of sad at the end of days.”
Unusual characters abound at ground level in Gilroy’s galaxy. Some are figures of fun, but Andor is in deadly earnest. “We don’t ever stop and wink at the audience,” Gilroy says. “It’s a real, serious story about people under pressure as a revolution is fomenting.”
That’s a story many of us can get behind for many different reasons. Whether distracted modern audiences have the patience for 24 chapters of it, let alone a 1,500-page novel, remains to be seen.
But if Gilroy can successfully keep our interest through this parade of 200 characters? Well, that’s a top-notch entertainment outcome to please the Force Ghost of Charles Dickens.
Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel Deck Guide: Best Cards After Banlist
Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel continues to thrive, since our last banlist guide. With more players joining each month, the game having in-game events that have implemented special rulings, and the continual release of new cards and packs such as the Adventurer Token engine, it’s a good time to be a Master Duel player. This game is the best way to play a digital Yu-Gi-Oh format thanks to the many quality-of-life additions based on card usage, modes, rewards, and more.
Konami does not always provide exact or even vague reasoning for its banlist implementations even in the trading card game (TCG) itself. Hopefully, this guide will grant you a clearer understanding of why certain cards became forbidden, limited, or semi-limited.
Before we start with the forbidden cards, there were a few buffs with an increased rate of use for three cards. Night Assailant, which was at one copy before is now unlimited at three copies. Altergeist Multifaker, which was also previously at one copy allowed, is now semi-limited to two copies in decks. Similarly, Salamangreat Gazelle had been limited to one copy but is now semi-limited to two copies. Cards such as these have had their rate increased due to being power crept out. (Power crept means that older cards are just not as strong as newer cards that have been released and/or cannot contend with the current higher top-ranking or meta-defining decks on the ranked ladder.) To aid in making certain decks more prevalent in the game, in this case, the Altergeist, and Salamangreat archetypes, this provides additional playability with much more efficient synergy alongside combo potential or opportunities to win a duel.
Company of Heroes 3: How to Master Tactical Pause – IGN First
For ages, real-time strategy has been a genre where the number of things you can physically do per second has a major impact on how effectively you can play. And while there’s something to be said for that, Company of Heroes 3 is trying to expand the appeal of its tactical gameplay to those who would rather sit back and think through every move carefully, perhaps with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a mouse in the other. Tactical pause, as they call it, isn’t any less harrowing of an experience for your soldiers who are being sent to charge a machine gun emplacement. But it is a much less chaotic and, dare I say, more luxurious experience for a commander.
Pausing a single-player mission in Company of Heroes 3 will bring up an action queue for each of your units, which allows you to issue a series of sequential orders that will all be carried out when you unpause. So you could tell an infantry squad to run to cover, throw a grenade, and then continue advancing without missing a beat. Issuing a complex chain of orders to several units at once will see them march off like a well-conducted orchestra of destruction, making it possible to pull off some maneuvers that might only have been possible for an esports pro before.
I was a little skeptical about this idea at first. In the past, playing against the AI in an RTS has always been a bit of an asymmetrical warfare situation. I, as a human, am much more intuitive and capable of abstract thinking. In turn, the computer is capable of split-second calculations and can issue many more orders at once. With Tactical Pause, that second advantage is taken away. But I honestly haven’t found that it makes things too easy. Sometimes I’ll still go through whole missions without it, while in others it feels practically essential. But most commonly, I take advantage of it as needed when I feel a bit overwhelmed and need to get a grasp of the battle.
Suspended Animation
Setting up an assault or a flank, or reacting to an enemy advance, are two of the most common times I’ll smash that space bar. But it’s also really useful for lining up abilities like air strikes and, especially, avoiding enemy ones. Grenades in Company of Heroes 3 have a pretty short fuse, so unless you spot it right as it leaves the enemy’s hand, you probably won’t have time to get out of the blast area. With Tactical Pause, you might actually get your guys out of there before it goes off.
There were two kinds of missions in particular where I found it particularly critical. The first is defending a strategic point against an enemy capture attempt. We’ll use Salerno as an example here, as one of the first towns you’ll liberate in Italy and one of the first places you’re likely to face a counterattack. If you look at the amount of ground we have to hold here, and the number of different defensive options we have – from engineers setting up fieldworks, to aiming all of our big guns the right way – we would quickly run out the grace period before the attack comes if we had to do all of this in real time.
Hold the Line
With Tactical Pause, though, there’s so much we can get done before the assault hits us. I can make sure everyone knows what they’re doing, too. When I tried to play this mission without Tactical Pause, there were always some stragglers somewhere I’d forgotten to give orders to. It’s just too much to reasonably keep track of. And as the enemy pushes forward, pausing can allow me to coordinate an orderly retreat, rather than just spam-clicking to get everyone the hell out of there.
The other mission where I found the feature to be a game-changer was Tobruk, one of the largest and most complex battles in the North African campaign. Leading an assault as the Deutsches Afrikakorps, there are always several things going on across this large, wide open battlefield once the action gets going. In past RTSes, my solution would have been to try to create one or two strong defensive points that I hopefully wouldn’t have to babysit while pushing forward with my main group. Now, though, I don’t even have to have a main group. Everyone can be on the attack, and reacting to attacks, at the same time.
Modern Warfare
Tactical Pause is being billed as a way to ease new players into the RTS, and that’s certainly one of the things it could do. But even as a veteran who has been playing this genre since before I learned my multiplication tables, I appreciate it as simply a different way to play a tactical World War II game. It doesn’t necessarily even bring down the skill requirement. It merely puts the focus on a different set of skills.
And honestly, having that option available simply makes each operation a bit more pleasant to play. At least, as pleasant as all-out war can be. Not having to feel like my brain has to be keeping track of so many different things from the moment I hit go is a breath of fresh air. I do crave chaos sometimes, but I don’t necessarily want to sit with it for the length of an entire campaign.
Following ‘Anal Bead Scandal,’ Chess Master Rematch Ends in Resignation
The 31-year-old Norwegian chess Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen performed as close as you can to the digital equivalent of a table flip Monday, closing his stream and walking away from his 19-year-old U.S. opponent Hans Niemann on his second move of their first actual match.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection microtransaction plans ditched
New password manager does away with master passwords once and for all
Sword Master Reacts to MORE Chivalry 2 Weapons
The Rings of Power’s latest mystery is a master of orcs
Sauron? Or just Some-guy-ron?
Frylock, Meatwad, and Master Shake return to the big (see: small) screen in Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm this November
The gang is getting back together, again, for the last time, again