Star Wars and Its Weird Recent History of Director Drop-Outs

The news that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have exited their planned Star Wars trilogy at Lucasfilm was surprising… and yet not all that surprising. Not only had the pair recently inked a very lucrative contract with Netflix, which would seem to conflict with making three Star Wars movies in terms of the duo’s schedule, but also the execs behind our beloved galaxy far, far away have established at this point quite a history of hiring and then firing or otherwise losing directors for their films.

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Luigi’s Mansion 3 Spooktacular – NVC 481

Welcome to a spooky edition of NVC, IGN’s weekly Nintendo show! This time, join the crew for an in-depth discussion of Luigi’s Mansion 3, including all of the Gooigi goodness you could ever ask for. Then in the news, hear about the PlayStation 4 passing the Wii’s lifetime sales, a Halo artist joining the Metroid Prime 4 team, how Pokemon Sword and Shield won’t support cloud saves, and more. Finally, the panel tackles your questions on a Halloween-themed entry of Question Block.

Timecodes!

Disco Elysium Makes Its Way To Consoles Next Year

Following its October 15 launch on PC, ZA/UM’s detective RPG Disco Elysium is preparing to make the jump to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One sometime in 2020.

USgamer sat down with designer and writer Robert Kurvitz, who confirmed the in-development console port. “[W]e are going to port the game to consoles so you can play on your PlayStation and Xbox. So, you know, that’s my message to you guys for 2020,” Kurvitz said. “It plays really, really nicely on a controller because […] you don’t need to click around and give specific tactical commands, which the controller isn’t very good at.”

Bringing Disco Elysium to consoles isn’t the only job developer ZA/UM is currently working on. In conjunction with the console port, a Chinese localized version of the game is also in the works. Further, an art book with new behind-the-scenes art is in development, as well as an official release of the game’s soundtrack.

Disco Elysium launched on GOG and PC earlier this month. The game puts you in the shoes of a detective tasked with interrogating characters, cracking murders, and solving mysteries. It allows you to construct your own detective persona. You can be a hero, a prophet, or a madman, with plenty of choices to make and copious mistakes to contend with.

Nintendo Switch Sales Reach New Heights, Here’s How They Compare To PS4

Japanese gaming giant Nintendo has announced that Nintendo Switch sales have climbed to an impressive 41.67 million units, with 6.93 million units shipped in the latest quarter. These are big numbers, but how do they compare to other consoles?

Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad shared a helpful graph on Twitter that shows the cumulative global console shipments for most of the major systems. Looking at the numbers, after 31 months on sale, the Switch is on a similar growth trajectory as the PS4 and PS2, which are some of the best-selling systems of all time. Only the Wii got off to a faster start.

Helping improve Switch sales was the recent introduction of the Switch Lite. It sold nearly 2 million units in its first 11 days to get off to a very good start for Nintendo.

The graph doesn’t include Xbox One, and that’s because Microsoft no longer announces sales numbers for its consoles.

Looking at Nintendo consoles alone, the Switch is selling about as well as the original DS over its first few years. Ahmad notes that it “will be tough” for the Switch to match pace with the DS in 2020. DS sales picked up with the introduction of the DS Lite in 2006.

In other news about console sales, Sony announced recently that PS4 sales have climbed to 102.8 million units, which surpasses the Wii (101.63 million) to become the second best-selling system in history. The PS2, with its 150 million units shipped, remains the best-selling console in history.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Switch Performance Patch Now Available

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night’s long-awaited Nintendo Switch Graphics and Performance Update is now live and focuses on four areas of improvement; Input Lag, Visual Quality, Crashes, and Load Times.

The version 1.03 update that brings all these improvements was detailed on Bloodstained’s forums and is in response to the serious frame rate and optimization problems that appear on Switch, but not on the other platforms.

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HBO’s Watchmen TV Show: Ozymandias’s Squid Plan, Explained

HBO’s Watchmen is full of all sorts of nods and references to the original comic book series–what else would you expect from the creator of Lost adapting one of the most famously dense graphic novels of all time?

The show certainly doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to playing in the Watchmen sandbox, which can be a little intimidating–but don’t panic. That’s why we’re here. Whether you’re still on the fence about diving into each episode or you simply want a refresher of the comics, we’re going to break down the Watchmen mythology for you piece by piece. First up? Ozymandias, giant squids, and the end of the Watchmen story in the comics.

Obviously, major comics spoilers from here on out, and some minor spoilers for the first two episodes of HBO’s Watchmen. Please proceed with caution!

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In the show, there are squids everywhere in Tulsa, and presumably, the rest of the world, if the headlines about “interdimensional attacks” and “hoaxes” on newspapers like The New Frontiersmen are any indication. They occasionally rain down from the sky. Kids learn about them in school. So, what’s the deal?

It all relates back to Ozymandias’s grand scheme to avoid nuclear annihilation and end the Cold War back in the 1980s. In a twist on the typical supervillain tropes of the superhero genre, Adrien Veidt, one of the smartest people in the Watchmen world, had concocted a plan that would, in his mind, be the only real way to prevent the Doomsday Clock from actually ticking down to midnight. By way of careful manipulation and liberal use of his public persona as a billionaire genius and former superhero, he set up what essentially amounted to a long con. He would stage a massive “alien invasion” with the help of experimental tech developed in secret by his company, in New York City. The “alien” creature–a giant squid-like monster–would teleport in, seemingly from another dimension or planet, and kill thousands upon thousands of people, both from the sudden destruction caused by its body appearing in the middle of Manhattan and because of a “psychic blast” it would emit that would fry onlookers’ brains up to miles away.

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In reality, the creature wasn’t an alien, or even from another dimension at all, but a genetic mutation Veidt himself had developed in a lab. The teleportation wasn’t a gateway to another world or an attack, but teleportation tech Veidt had invented that would move objects from point A to point B, in this case with “point A” being one of Veidt’s secret labs and “point B” being New York City. The psychic blast, however, was real–the creature Vedit designed did very much have the ability to fry people’s brains, and it did. The resulting loss of life numbered in the millions.

The goal of the squid was, for all its frills, pretty simple: The “attack” would functionally force every major government superpower in the world to stop looking at one another as enemies and immediately pivot their attention to this looming extraterrestrial threat. By Veidt’s calculation, humans are simply not designed to be peaceful; they can only have their aggressions redirected and refocused on things that aren’t one another–in this case, an enemy that they will never actually be able to find, much less fight or kill, because it doesn’t actually exist. In that way, the squid attack had to be completely and 100% believable–the sort of wild goose chase that would keep every country in the world so distracted and fixated that the idea of blowing each other up wouldn’t even be on anyone’s radar anymore.

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Sure, the whole thing cost millions of innocent lives, but better that than a full-on nuclear holocaust, right?

Of course, the graphic novel ends almost immediately after the attack. We get to see the dust beginning to settle, and it seems that Veidt was correct. Almost instantly, Russia and the United States come to a peace agreement, characters comment on the community’s abrupt mood swing from anxiety and fear to peace and love, etc. But what we learn in the TV show is that things aren’t that simple. For one, Rorschach–one of the only people to fully uncover Veidt’s plan–did indeed have his journals published by the New Frontiersman. Unfortunately, Rorschach was also a known sociopath with a criminal record and a reputation for psychotic delusions, so the details he was able to lay out about Vedit and the attack were never widely accepted.

In fact, rather than debunking the squid, the publication of Rorschach’s journals really only managed to galvanize radical groups like the white supremacist organization The 7th Kavalry in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and provide dogma for conspiracy theorists.

Interestingly enough, somewhere in the 30-year time jump between the end of the Watchmen comics and the start of the Watchmen TV show, someone involved in Veidt’s plan–or perhaps Veidt himself–apparently engineered some sort of failsafe. Tiny squids rain down harmlessly from the sky in “transdimensional attacks,” presumably meant to keep everyone on their toes–but where they’re coming from or how they’re happening remains a mystery. Veidt himself is missing and has recently been declared dead, but knowing what we know about his hoax, it’s safe to assume that these squid rains are not random and certainly not actually coming from another dimension. Someone must be pulling the trigger somewhere.

The question is who? And what would happen if, 30 years later, Veidt’s carefully stacked house of cards were to come crumbling down? Would the peace he sacrificed so many to earn survive the collapse? Was it ever really peace at all?

With any luck, these questions and more will be answered on the show in the future. HBO’s Watchmen airs Sunday nights at 9PM.