Star Wars: Andor

[Celebrim]

There is a clear pattern here where the bad guys are simply incompetent when it matters.

The clear pattern is the bad guys are incompetent when facing against player characters/protagonists. And I can work with that. They are in fact highly competent when facing off against NPCs.

The Storm Troopers absolutely overwhelm Rebel Navy Troopers in the opening scene. It's not even close in terms of casualties, hit rates, etc.

The Massassi group in their X-Wings ("Gold Squadron" and "Red Squadron") are some of the most formidable fighter pilots in the Outer Rim, but when they attack the Death Star, the Tie Fighter pilots hold their own. There is not in fact a lot of evidence that the kill ratios in those dogfights are much different than 1:1. The Rebels are getting wiped out.

And Rogue One actually fixes the plot hole with the Death Star's vulnerability, which, let's face it isn't that vulnerable since it took Luke spending a force point to actually exploit it. The Rogue One novelization actually goes into detail how Galen Erso hid the vulnerability from the Empire, and it's really dang clever and exploits realistic vulnerabilities that a centralized fascist bureaucracy would have.

Empire Strikes Back has the Empire winning the entire movie, leading to the famous, "Did the bad guys just win?" moment as the lights go on that was so dramatic and revolutionary at the time.

Return of the Jedi repeatedly shows the battle at Endor hanging in the balance with heavy losses on both sides. Any incompetency can be explained simply, as Luke noted, "Your over confidence is your weakness." The Empire was being hampered at Endor by the insanity of a megalomaniac sociopath.

In short, the incompetency of the Empire not nearly as bad as the memes make it out to be. The incompetency tends to be a fridge logic moment, and isn't the experience most first time watchers of the film have or had. In fact, the first time emotional response tends to be just how frightening and intimidating the Empire seems to be, especially compared to how villains had been portrayed before.

Now I do agree with you that a big difference in the new movies is that the 1st order is "hilariously" incompetent, aka its actually played for laughs. The empire was far more serious, but just as incompetent.

This is enough of a difference for me. I can make a serious game out of the later, but I can't make a serious game out of the first.

 

[MarkB]

Sure, but I'm probably going to be the nit pickiest critic you can possibly get in terms of grounded. I'm literally asking, "Does this game in my Star Wars D6 game?" It doesn't have to be realistic. It just has to be plausible enough to be accepted within a game. So for me, getting defeated by Ewoks is no proof of incompetency. It's just proof that if you fight 100,000 angry intelligent chimpanzees in a game universe where the rules skew in favor of melee combat (see lightsabers as one of many examples), you are probably going to have problems. It works in a game even better than it works on the screen owing to the limitations of the special effects in the 1980's because the Ewoks in the game universe really can move like chimpanzees with claws where as the Ewoks in the movie move like little people in costumes. If you accept the most powerful warriors in the universe are swinging laser swords, you can accept that even an elite soldier is going to have problems when a half-dozen chimpanzees with sharp objects jump out of the trees like mythical drop bears and start pounding on him. Many storm troopers died when there helmets were ripped off and their throats ripped out by Ewok teeth. They just didn't show that to you in a family movie.

The biggest problems in those scenes are the biggest problems in the entire otherwise incredibly staged battle sequence - the 1980s special effects could not deal with a battle of the scale that was being shown. They couldn't show an entire legion of storm troopers, much less the tens of thousands of Ewoks that had gathered to kill them. They couldn't show a rebel fleet large enough to actually threaten 80 star destroyers. It was considered phenomenal at the time that they had 80 moving objects on screen at the same time using practical effects only. The reality is that both sides had literally hundreds of fighters in that battle. The reality is that the Storm Troopers weren't incompetent, they were just outnumbered in difficult terrain that entirely favored the native population that was heavily adapted to it.

And on top of that, I'm biased by my game world's expectations. I'm running a game in the same era in which the PC's are also criminals and are going into a mission that will also bring them in contact with the Imperial military. Plus, one of the tropes of my game is that despite the fact that many of canon special effects make the universe seem in many ways more primitive than modern reality, it's not actually. The game universe is more real than the special effects. Those computers aren't primitive. Things you see on screen have capabilities exceeding what is available now in 2022.

And one of the things that is cool about 'Andor' is it is combining the aesthetics of the original trilogy with casually displaying that no really, this is a high tech world. I loved every ones datapad in the ISB board room scene was basically a laptop.

There is no 'reality'. This telling of fictitious events is all we get.

And Star Wars has always been internally contradictory in its technological levels. They have droids and spaceflight and shields and lasers, but in every other respect their tech level isn't even 1970s-equivalent - it's 1940s-equivalent, because Star Wars is basically meant to be World War II IN SPACE.

 

[Celebrim]

There is no 'reality'. This telling of fictitious events is all we get.

Speaking as a gamer, that's simply not true. The game space is a shared reality. We tell fictitious events in it, but there is a noticeable difference between fiction that is gameable or generated within a game and fiction that isn't.

And Star Wars has always been internally contradictory in its technological levels. They have droids and spaceflight and shields and lasers, but in every other respect their tech level isn't even 1970s-equivalent - it's 1940s-equivalent, because Star Wars is basically meant to be World War II IN SPACE.

I agree that Star Wars has internal contradictions, especially when it comes to scale and especially those related to visually perceived speed on screen. And indeed, this is very much tied to the presentation of Star Wars as "World War II in Space", in as much as the movement of snub fighters on the screen mimics that of WWII fighters shooting tracer bullets at each other. But this I I think a more general problem having to do with people being simply unable to imagine the scale of space and the scale of space making for undramatic combat when it is presented on the screen. There are similar problems with how close together modern Star Trek combat is presented. In many ways, TOS is more realistic because the ships are represented as being thousands of kilometers apart and never on the screen at the same time, even though in reality the main reason for that was the limitations of the available special effects. It just makes for more intuitive space combat if we see a ship moving for several seconds over the hull of a kilometer long ship, instead of the sort of real interception and passing rates we'd expect of space combat when closing speeds might be in dozens or hundreds or even thousands of kilometers per second. Even sci-fi with a commitment to hard sci-fi like 'The Expanse' has trouble presenting realistic space combat at realistic time frames and realistic distances, and occasionally takes short cuts for dramatic purposes.

So yes, there is a, "Don't think to hard about the space combat." element to Star Wars that is less of a problem in Babylon 5 or the Expanse where in Star Wars ultimately it is impossible to make the scales work if you try to define how fast things are moving or should be moving. Star Wars simultaneously depicts sub-light travel at a non-trivial percentage of light speed and at 200 mph at the same time depending on the frame of reference.

But that's not the same as being 1940's equivalent tech or even 1970's tech. That's a wholly different problem you'll probably run into with most Sci Fi games set in space.

 

[MarkB]

Speaking as a gamer, that's simply not true. The game space is a shared reality. We tell fictitious events in it, but there is a noticeable difference between fiction that is gameable or generated within a game and fiction that isn't.



I agree that Star Wars has internal contradictions, especially when it comes to scale and especially those related to visually perceived speed on screen. And indeed, this is very much tied to the presentation of Star Wars as "World War II in Space", in as much as the movement of snub fighters on the screen mimics that of WWII fighters shooting tracer bullets at each other. But this I I think a more general problem having to do with people being simply unable to imagine the scale of space and the scale of space making for undramatic combat when it is presented on the screen. There are similar problems with how close together modern Star Trek combat is presented. In many ways, TOS is more realistic because the ships are represented as being thousands of kilometers apart and never on the screen at the same time, even though in reality the main reason for that was the limitations of the available special effects. It just makes for more intuitive space combat if we see a ship moving for several seconds over the hull of a kilometer long ship, instead of the sort of real interception and passing rates we'd expect of space combat when closing speeds might be in dozens or hundreds or even thousands of kilometers per second. Even sci-fi with a commitment to hard sci-fi like 'The Expanse' has trouble presenting realistic space combat at realistic time frames and realistic distances, and occasionally takes short cuts for dramatic purposes.

So yes, there is a, "Don't think to hard about the space combat." element to Star Wars that is less of a problem in Babylon 5 or the Expanse where in Star Wars ultimately it is impossible to make the scales work if you try to define how fast things are moving or should be moving. Star Wars simultaneously depicts sub-light travel at a non-trivial percentage of light speed and at 200 mph at the same time depending on the frame of reference.

But that's not the same as being 1940's equivalent tech or even 1970's tech. That's a wholly different problem you'll probably run into with most Sci Fi games set in space.

Nope, it's not just in space, it's every aspect, from the individual-scale gunplay to the land based battles to the clunky design of every gadget. Heck, the Gungans-versus-droids battle in Episode I is WW2 tanks which can hover vs catapults throwing glowy balls, all at point-blank range.

 

[Celebrim]

Nope, it's not just in space, it's every aspect, from the individual-scale gunplay to the land based battles to the clunky design of every gadget. Heck, the Gungans-versus-droids battle in Episode I is WW2 tanks which can hover vs catapults throwing glowy balls, all at point-blank range.

I disagree that this is the problem you claim, but even more so that even if you were to make this argument convincing that this was any proof at all of Star Wars tech being analogous to 1940's tech - which is your original claim.

The clunky design is not an attempt to mimic 1940's tech, but is the result of prioritizing artistic appearance over form. AT-AT's are definitely not WW2 tanks, clunky mechas though they may be. But like all mecha, they definitely look cool. The Millennium Falcon may have a terrible shape for a freighter, but it definitely looks cool on screen. Weapon systems in the Prequels are all over the place, drawing from basically every period of human history and adding fantasy elements in many cases. The visual precedence for the battle on Naboo is probably Spartacus and not Battle of the Bulge. Indeed, the whole movie 'The Phantom Menace' is heavily inspired by "Swords and Sandals" especially Ben Hur, Cleopatra, and Spartacus. Again, Star Wars the movies are trying to make the visual presentation unique and compelling. It has nothing to do with the tech level being 1940s and especially in "every other respect".

And heck, you are going to have this problem even in movie presentations of 1940's tech. "Fury" and it's presentation of WWII tank combat is not realistic, but the ways in which it is not realistic are designed to make the presentation more visually appealing and relatable to the non-technical audience. The same is true in many ways to (don't laugh) "Girls und Panzers", which while it massively more realistic than "Fury" in some aspects - consider the detail it goes into explaining to the audience how to aim a tank gun and engage an enemy tank at realistic ranges - but also has those tanks move around with the agility and speed of rally cars to make for more visually impressive combat.

 

[Stalker0]

The Rogue One novelization actually goes into detail how Galen Erso hid the vulnerability from the Empire, and it's really dang clever and exploits realistic vulnerabilities that a centralized fascist bureaucracy would have.

So apparently we just need to wait for the Andor novelization which will in detail explain how the rebels avoided those sensors for you

 

[Celebrim]

So apparently we just need to wait for the Andor novelization which will in detail explain how the rebels avoided those sensors for you

Yeah.

Seriously, I got a copy of the Star Wars novelization when I was 7, and it contains all the deleted scenes since it was based on the original screenplay. So it was kind of like getting a preview of the 'Extended Edition', only better because it also contains the Toshi Station scene with the critical early dialogue with Biggs Darklighter when he tells Luke that he's going to join the Rebellion. The actual 1977 released version has very choppy story editing and is a little bit incoherent, so much so that my wife says she never really understood the story of the movie until she saw the Extended Edition in the theaters. But the novelization features some awesome character building moments.

So whenever I watch a good Star Wars movie, I always like to get the novelization to get the details that didn't end up in the movie for pacing reasons.

 

[pukunui]

So whenever I watch a good Star Wars movie, I always like to get the novelization to get the details that didn't end up in the movie for pacing reasons.

Meanwhile, RA Salvatore’s novelisation of the worst Star Wars movie (Attack of the Clones) doubles down on the stupid by including all the deleted scenes, several of which are redundant.


(I do really like the novelisation of Revenge of the Sith, though. I feel it goes a long way towards explaining Anakin’s behavior – e.g. the reason he throws a tantrum about being put on the council without being made a master is because only masters have access to the restricted section in the temple library, and he’s been convinced that the secrets he needs to save Padme’s life are hidden away in there.)

 

[Celebrim]

Meanwhile, RA Salvatore’s novelisation of the worst Star Wars movie (Attack of the Clones) doubles down on the stupid by including all the deleted scenes, several of which are redundant.

Well, there are two reasons I never read the novelization of Attack of the Clones.

 

[Zardnaar]

Well, there are two reasons I never read the novelization of Attack of the Clones.

Prequel novels don't have the same reputation as the movies. Apparently RotS is good and TPM is decent. Not sure on the AotC novels.