THE DIVISION 2 is out now!

Today marks the official global release of Tom Clancy's The Division 2, the action-packed videogame sequel from Ubisoft Massive, and I'm thrilled to have been a part of the writing team on this dynamic new project...

 

If Washington D.C. falls, Humanity falls.
Washington D.C. is on the brink of collapse. Lawlessness and instability threaten our society, and rumours of a coup in the Capitol are only amplifying the chaos. All active Division agents are desperately needed to save the city before it's too late.

The capital in crisis.
Unlike anything before it, The Division 2's Washington D.C. is a 1:1 representation of the real city, making the game world more authentic than ever. The game's map offers up-close-and-personal views of landmarks, natural landscapes, neighborhoods, and enemy hideouts.

Enemy factions at your doorstep.
Various factions, vying for power in the wake of the crisis, are aiming to claim D.C.’s future for themselves. Only Division agents are equipped to take on these new threats and protect the civilians that remain.

Gear Up. Save DC.
You are a member of the Division, an elite group of civilian agents charged with being the last line of defense. With DC at risk, it's time to gear up and use your unique skills to take on this new threat.

The Division 2 features a strong narrative element distributed throughout the core storyline.

 

As well as being a long-time reader of the Tom Clancy novels, I’ve also been a dedicated player of the videogames created under the author’s name. Last year I worked on the Ghost Recon Wildlands open-world shooter game, and having expended a lot of hours on the first iteration of The Division, I was excited to be involved with the sequel. 

 

My contribution to The Division 2 comes in the form of the "endgame" faction, a deadly group of lethal special ops soldiers known as Black Tusk, who become the key enemy for players in the later phases of the game. My scripts for the Black Tusk faction are just one component of a huge project, involving several other scriptwriters and a great many talented people.I hope gamers will have as much fun playing The Division 2 as I had working on it...

2K18 Games

And my annual year-end blogs conclude with my list of games played and enjoyed/endured/shouted at/otherwise engaged with...

I hit 33 titles in 2018, an improvement on 2017’s 22 – although once more I returned to games from earlier years for a lot of play (key among them Destiny 2, The Division and Ghost Recon Wildlands). But by far the new games I put the most time into during 2018 were Horizon Zero Dawn and Far Cry 5.

Top picks for this year: Abzu, Tacoma, Horizon Zero Dawn and Marvel’s Spider-Man.

Here’s the full list:
Sniper Ghost Warrior 3: The Sabotage, We Are Doomed, Pocket Ops, What Remains of Edith Finch, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Tacoma, Night in the Woods, Call of Duty: WWII, Reigns: Her Majesty, Assassin's Creed Origins, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, NieR: Automata, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Horizon Zero Dawn, Trackmania Turbo, OnRush, Space Station Continuum, Grip, The Division 2, Far Cry 5, Far Cry Arcade, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, WipeOut Omega Collection, Sky Force Anniversary, LEGO Marvel Superheroes 2, Rainbow Six Siege (PS4 version), Space Hulk Tactics, Hyper Sentinel, Abzu, Space Hulk Deathwing (Enhanced Edition), Far Cry 5: Hours of Darkness, Far Cry 5: Lost on Mars, Marvel's Spider-Man, The Crew 2, Elite: Dangerous (PS4 version), Far Cry 5: Living Dead Zombies.

Space Hulk Tactics strikes!

A few months back, I mentioned that I'd been doing some scriptwriting work on a new Warhammer 40,000 videogame - and this week Space Hulk Tactics deep-strikes its way on to Xbox One, Playstation 4 and PC platforms for all players...

Space Hulk Tactics is a turn-based strategy game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, pitting squads of Space Marine Terminators against swarms of alien Genestealers aboard a massive amalgamation of abandoned starships - the gargantuan Space Hulk known as The Forsaken Doom...

Based on the classic Games Workshop boardgame, Space Hulk Tactics lets you pick between these two factions in full campaigns, solo vs. AI, or via competitive online play. 

The game has two narrative campaigns (scripted by me), one from the point of view of the venerable Blood Angels chapter and one casting players in the role of the rapacious alien Genestealers. 

Here's a link to a developer blog I wrote about the storylines. 

A "card" system enhances the turn-based strategy gameplay, ensuring no two games are ever the same and giving you many more tactical options on every turn. There's also a versatile map editing tool, so games can create and upload their own scenarios. 

Check out the official Space Hulk Tactics website right Here, for more details, along with ordering details. The game is released on 9th October, but pre-orders will get bonus custom content.

 

Mission to Malmo

A couple of weeks back I was chatting with another author about the inescapable value of “walking the territory” – that is, the importance of visiting a place to get the sense of it, to make your writing feel as authentic as possible. It got me thinking about my own research jaunts, and so partly inspired by the travelogues of fellow thriller writer JF Penn (check out her great website Here) I thought I’d post some observations from one of my most recent trips...

Ever since I was kid, airports have always been intertwined in my mind with thrillers. I think part of it is the whole romance of travel/thrilling locations stuff right out of a James Bond novel, mixed with my love of the classic “airport novel” that fills the shelves of duty free bookstores. And what’s cool for me is that now my books get to fit in that space...

I was heading to Malmo in Sweden, under a non-disclosure agreement, on a two-day flying visit to talk about a new videogame project connected to one of the thriller world’s biggest names. But the quickest way there is actually through Denmark. So my route in was via Copenhagen airport....

...and then across the Øresund Bridge by train. 

And it was neat for me to look down the carriage and see this gentleman and think... Hey. That book cover looks familiar... (What are the odds?!)

My first real glimpse of Sweden through my window was an orchard of wind-farms, a strange and slightly alien sight rising up from the straight along the coastline. I have to admit that my perception of what to expect in Sweden was warped a little by the work of an artist named Simon Stålenhag... Check out his stuff Here and you’ll see what I mean. He's just had a TV show based on his stuff green-lighted by Amazon.

His art fuses a 1980’s view of the world with odd, invasive technologies that look like they come from some alternate reality, and wandering through Malmo I soon understood how this country influenced him.

Malmo reminded me of the kind of brutalist, concrete-cube architecture that was all new and futuristic when I was growing up in the 1970's, the buildings that were the backdrop of austere dystopian SF movies - Farenheit 451, Alphaville, THX 1138 and the like – but with flashes of artistic weirdness here and there.

One morning I woke up and realized that the hotel I was staying up reminded me of City 17, the location of the game Half-Life 2 - check out the similarity Here.

All this might make Malmo sound a little distant and unwelcoming, but it wasn’t! 

I loved the artwork and the river winding through the town, the great restaurants and numerous craft beer places. I also want to highlight the Science Fiction Bokhandeln for accommodating a quick drive-by signing by me, and The Bishops Arms pub off Gustav Adolf Square for having an amazing book-laden snug in the back that was very conducive to a glass of scotch and some writerly company.

But I was here to work; I’d come to Sweden to meet with Massive Entertainment, developers of The Division 2 – the sequel to the hit action game under the Tom Clancy franchise banner. 

As well as being a long-time reader of the Clancy novels, I’ve also been a dedicated player of the videogames created under the author’s name. Last year I worked on the Ghost Recon Wildlands open-world shooter game, and having expended a lot of hours on the first iteration of The Division, I was excited to work on the sequel...

Details on the elements I contributed to The Division 2 haven’t been announced yet, but I can say my part is just one component of a massive (ha ha) project, involving several other scriptwriters and a great many talented people. 

(Also, as some fans of the game have asked, I should make it clear I’m not writing a Division novel or a comicbook – as cool as that would be! – but writing scripts for the game itself). 

48 hours later, and I was done. While the trip was short, I liked the city enough to want to come back and see more of it. And while I don’t (right now) have plans to write something set in Malmo, I’m pretty sure I’ll make use of my exposure to the city somewhere down the line. 

Writers store all this experiential stuff away and it rises back to surface when you least expect it. I never intended to draw on my trip to Madeira as detail for a 31st century planet of vintners in my Horus Heresy novel Nemesis, or my visit to the Maltese “silent city” of Mdina in my latest Marc Dane thriller Ghost, but both places inspired me and helped me make those stories feel authentic. Travel doesn’t just broaden the mind, it stimulates it.

If you enjoyed this travel blog and you'd like to see more of the same, let me know in the comments below or via my Twitter feed...

You are hearing me talk...to BBC Radio 5 Live

Way back in the distant days of 1988, I started running a pencil and paper roleplaying game campaign that would go on to last over a decade, based on the world of Cyberpunk, a sci-fi RPG produced by R.Talsorian Games. One of my players was Adam Rosser, who has since gone on to become the award-winning producer-presenter behind BBC Radio Five Live's Game On, and I've been pleased to be a regular voice on his show talking about my work in the games industry and as a prose writer.

In this week's show, m'colleague Adam has interviewed me about Ghost, the new novel in my Marc Dane series of action-thrillers, and we talk about the challenges of writing of fiction against the backdrop of a real world filled with geopolitical intrigue, and making the thriller work in a post-Cold War era.

And with the recent unveiling of the first full trailer for Cyberpunk 2077, a videogame based on that original RPG we loved so much, Adam and I could not let the opportunity pass to talk about our hopes for this upcoming release.

Check out the episode here via the BBC Radio Five Live website, which will be available to download for the next thirty days. 

Game On - James Swallow, old school cyberpunk
 
The third book in James Swallow's 'Marc Dane Series' - Ghost - is out now and he joins Adam Rosser to talk about building a technothriller series and then two old chombattas cast a rheumy Kiroshi optic over 'Cyberpunk 2077'...

Click Here to visit the site.

 

The Division 2

Last month I was over in Sweden to visit the offices of Ubisoft Massive in Malmo, one of the developers of The Division 2 - the sequel to the hit game from the Tom Clancy franchise, which will be out on all platforms in March next year.

This week was the big E3 videogames trade show and the first official trailer for The Division 2 dropped...

 ...along with some in-game footage showing one of the games "control point" side missions. I got to play through this myself while I was in Malmo, and it was pretty cool. As a fan of the first game, I'm looking forward to this new iteration of the franchise.

I'm excited to be contributing some scripts to this game, joining a team made up of several great writers and talented, passionate developers. The elements I'm working on haven't been revealed at this point, but I'm sure I'll be talking more about it in the months ahead. Also, just to clarify as some folks have been asking - I'm not currently working on a novel or a comic tie-in... although that would be cool!

To learn more about The Division 2, check out the official website right Here.
 

 

Space Hulk Tactics

Having been working on videogame projects since 1999 and written for the grim dark future of Warhammer 40,000 since 2003, it was clearly fated that one day I was going to get to combine the two...

...and so I am pleased to announce that I have teamed up with Cyanide Studios and Focus Interactive, to work with them on the narrative for their forthcoming turn-based tactical game Space Hulk: Tactics!

Bringing a unique twist to the classic gameplay of the cult board game, engage in bloody battles through an immense Space Hulk - a twisted mass of asteroids, wrecked ships and debris – as either a squad of Terminator Space Marines or the deadly alien Genestealers. Which side will you choose?

Battle through two distinct, narrative-driven campaigns, from the points of view of two different factions: one campaign puts you in control of a Blood Angels squad, which you will customise and upgrade as you progress, while the other puts you in control of the Genestealers for the first time in a Space Hulk game!

Test your skills against other players in the expansive online competitive multiplayer, letting you command a swarm of Genestealers or a custom squad of different unit types from one of four Space Marine Chapters – the Blood Angels, the Space Wolves, the Ultramarines, and the Dark Angels. Multiplayer modes and tools offer a rich and deep online experience, and include an intuitive map creation tool, which gives players everything they need to create original maps with custom objective, and share them with other players to play either online or against the AI, all from within the game!

Space Hulk: Tactics will be released later in 2018 on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 platforms, and you can find more details about the game at the official website Here.

2K17 Games

Number three in my annual year-end blog list assembles my gaming playlist for 2017. This year I decided to add analogue games to the list (as in board games, card games and the like), because why the hell not? 

Most of my gaming was on the PlayStation 4, and again it was my favoured genre of FPS titles that dominated. A big part of 2017 for me was getting to work on one of my favourite game franchises - Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon - creating the Fallen Ghosts DLC for the Ghost Recon Wildlands release, and I spent a lot of time rampaging through a virtual Bolivia. Later in the year, I rinsed out the whole of Just Cause 3 for stuff-blowing-up, a great title I got as a freebie with my PSPlus subscription. I also went back to The Division, another Ubisoft/Clancy game, playing that in team-game mode for hours on end - but that's a 2016 title and I'm only listing new plays here. My top pick for the year goes of Subsurface Circular, a short but perfectly formed sci-fi detective conversation game.

Here's my full list:
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare; Star Trek Panic; Tokaido; The Crew (PS4 version); Ghost Recon Wildlands: Narco Road; The Crew: Calling All Units; Type:Rider; Ghost Recon Wildlands: Fallen Ghosts; Life Is Strange; Sniper Ghost Warrior 3; Destiny 2; Just Cause 3; Spartacus; Fortnite Battle Royale; Ogre; Star Wars Battlefront II; Ghost Recon Wildlands: Ghost War; Hitman: Sniper; Subsurface Circular; Rocket League (PS4 version); Gaming Quiz; The Chase Family Board Game; Sniper Ghost Warrior 3: The Escape of Lydia

Seventeen (Again?)

It Me

Before I sat down to write my usual year-ender blog, I re-read last year's edition and I was struck by how things have moved on - and stayed the same. Here's a direct quote: "Last year was really a rollercoaster for me. Externally, pressures about the world at large, political fears reawakening and a general sense of what-the-hell-is-happening put a drag on everything else..." 

I can pretty much cut-and-paste this comment about 2016 straight into my 2017 blog with a perfect fit. It has been, with no sense of exaggeration, a rather mad year. I've tried hard to concentrate on the good and not get caught up in the crazy, looking at the important personal stuff rather than raging at things I can't change...

And on that, things have been going well for me. Building on the success for my first original thriller Nomad, the second book in the series - Exile - came out in the summer in hardcover, with a paperback release at the end of December. Exile looks set to do as well as Nomad did, if not better, so once more I want to thank everybody who supported my work by buying a copy. 

I've finished work on book three - Ghost - for release in May, and if all goes well, my ex-MI6 agent hero Marc Dane will return for a fourth adventure in 2019. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself; like I said last year, I'm taking this one step at a time. At a Q&A this year, someone asked me if I was angling to cash out in some big Hollywood movie deal, and I said not bloody likely; I'm hoping to keep telling Dane's stories for a long while yet.

Coincidentally, the title "Ghost" kept coming up in 2017. As well as the new Marc Dane book, I worked on a novelization of the live action adaptation of the anime/manga Ghost in the Shell, which was an...interesting...experience. I'll say this: I couldn't do all the things I wanted to do with the GitS novel, and I only took on the project because I am a big fan of Masamune Shirow's original comics, so I'm disappointed that we ended up having to go a bit vanilla with it. The final version of the book, which I couldn't finish up because of other commitments, was taken on by Abbie Bernstein to handle the last pass and edits and she did a great job under testing circumstances.

The other big "Ghost" project of mine was Fallen Ghosts - a downloadable content, story and mission expansion for the Tom Clancy franchise videogame Ghost Recon Wildlands. This was hard work and often challenging, but looking back now it is done and dusted, I'm pleased with how things came together and I liked working with the team at Ubisoft Montpellier - a self-professed gang of 'punks' who welcomed me into a team characterised by honesty and passion. Most rewarding of all, Fallen Ghosts was a big hit with the Wildlands player community, and as a long-time Ghost Recon fan (all the way back to the 2001 PC original!) that meant a lot to me. Fallen Ghosts wasn't the only videogame project I worked on in 2017, but the other two have still not been officially announced, so I won't be talking about them until later this year...

My other writing projects for 2017 were tie-ins; in the world of Warhammer 40,000, my two Sisters of Battle novels Faith & Fire and Hammer & Anvil were finally gathered under one cover, along with an adaptation of the audio drama Red & Black, in Sisters of Battle: The Omnibus, and to add a little something extra to the collection I wrote a brand new original short story called "Heart & Soul". I'd hoped at one point to write a third Sisters novel, but that's not on the cards at the moment, so for now this is my "definitive" Adepta Sororitas collection. My other 40K outing was Corsair: The Face of the Void, an audio drama project that spun out of me wanted to write something a bit different in the Grimdark Future of the 41st Millennium; this is essentially the pilot episode for an ongoing series of audios set aboard the rogue trader starship Corsair, featuring renegade captain Athene Santiago and her misfit crew. I'm hoping listeners will take to it enough to warrant future stories...

And speaking of starships, there was one other tie-in that I signed on to write back in December of 2015 which took a year to get done and announced - Fear Itself, an original novel based on the Star Trek Discovery series. It was tough keeping this one under wraps while the show debuted and everyone was talking about it, having to bite my tongue when the books were being promoted at the big Star Trek cons in the USA because I couldn't say anything about my particular part of the project! I had to work for months on this under near-total secrecy, paralleling the production of the TV episodes as I put together the storyline for the book. Fear Itself will be out in the summer, and I'll be talking about it in more detail in the months ahead.

The rest of 2017 I filled up with some fun travel and cool events, including the ReFramed games festival in Brighton, the Trek-On convention in the summer, the Black Library Weekender and a bunch of library Q&A's with m'colleague Ben Aaronovitch. I was nominated for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Prize, visited the Red Bull Soapbox Rally and Drone Racing League world championship finals, not to mention spending a week in Santa Monica with the ace folks from League of Legends creators Riot Games and a packed trip to Iceland that was cool in both senses of the word.

On the edge of the Faxi waterfall in Iceland

Here's to more of that for 2018, and less of the other stuff!

What I Did In 2017

Another busy year....!

Ghost Recon Wildlands: Fallen Ghosts - Out now!

Fallen Ghosts, the new DLC pack for the tactical action shooter videogame Ghost Recon Wildlands is available from today...

I wrote the script for this new storyline, in which the elite special forces unit known as the Ghosts return to the jungles of Bolivia to confront a ruthless band of mercenaries intent on taking over the country...

Check out the trailer above or watch some of the livestream video that accompanied the launch today (and my thanks to producer Benjamin Dumaz for the namecheck and the plug for my novel Nomad!) 

 

GHOST RECON WILDLANDS: FALLEN GHOSTS announced!

This week, Ubisoft's newest videogame under the Tom Clancy banner is released - Ghost Recon Wildlands is an open-world military shooter title for one to four players, casting gamers as members of the Ghosts, a covert special forces unit of the US Army who have been sent into Bolivia in order to neutralize the Santa Blanca drug cartel by any and all means.

The core game will be followed up with a bunch of additional downloadable content, including two new story DLCs, Narco Road and Fallen Ghosts. I spent most of last year working with the team at Ubisoft Montpellier in France writing the mission narrative and scripts for Fallen Ghosts, and I'm pleased to be able to talk about it now it has been officially announced.

 

 

Fallen Ghosts takes place after the events of the main Wildlands storyline and Narco Road; during an evacuation mission, the Ghosts' chopper is shot down and the squad will need to adapt as they’re tracked down by an elite group of ruthless mercenaries. Players will fight a new powerful enemy, learn new skills and unlock new weapons to complete their mission.

I've always been a big fan of the Tom Clancy games, and the Ghost Recon series is one I've been playing since the very first title released way back in 2001, so it it was very cool for me to participate in the project! Check out the trailer for the DLC and all the other additional content below...

 

 

For more information on Ghost Recon Wildlands, visit the official site Here.

2k16 Games

My number two year-end list is games, and this year I’ve also added board games and card games to the list just for the heck of it.

I got myself a Playstation 4 in 2016, so most of what I gamed was on that platform, although the PC got a workout too as I almost doubled the number of titles I played from the 2015.

Three games I worked on this year – Fractured Space, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and No Man’s Sky – all came out in 2016 and I had a blast with all of them; I also got hands on with the next Ghost Recon title, which I’ve been writing for (more on that in the months ahead!)

I revisited a few familiar virtual worlds in 2016, going back to Destiny and Star Trek Online for the PS4, and my favourite non-digital title was Car Wars: The Card Game. Bests of the year include the excellent puzzle titles Mini Metro, 0rbitalis and Deus Ex GO, and my time-sink award goes to The Division, which kept me in a snowbound NYC for most of the year.

Here’s the full list:
Car Wars: The Card Game; Pandemic; Transistor; Rocket League; The Long Dark; The Logo Board Game; Skyliners; Fractured Space; Purble Place; Warhammer 40,000: Regicide; Batman Fluxx; The Division (PC and PS4 versions); Battleship; Battlefleet Gothic Armada; Mini Metro; Codenames; Ghost Recon Wildlands; Counterspy; Battleborn; Red Bull Air Race: The Game; Destiny: The Dark Below; Mad Max; The Expendabros; Star Wars Battlefront (PS4 version); Tron RUN/r; Doom [2016]; Destiny: House of Wolves; The Division: Underground; 0rbitalis; Ultratron (PS4 version); Deus Ex GO; Battlefield 4 (PS4 version); Battlefield Hardline (PS4 version); Deus Ex Breach; Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (PS4 version); No Man's Sky; Star Trek Online (PS4 version); Destiny: The Taken King; Drone Racing League Simulator; Transformers: Devestation; Inversus; The Bunker; Invisible, Inc: Console Edition; Hyper Void; Carmageddon Max Damage; Alienation; Hitman; Overwatch Origins Edition; Uncharted 4: A Thief's End; The Division: Survival.

What I Did In 2016

*phew*

I kept busy...

You Are Hearing Me Talk...to Front Row

Radio 4's Front Row is one of the BBC's most popular and well-regarded magazine shows on arts and entertainment, so it was pretty neat to be asked to come on and talk about writing for videogames for an audience of listeners who are likely to be outside the wheelhouse of most things games related...

This month has seen two big new releases in the video gaming world: the highly anticipated No Man Sky, which promises an infinite, constantly regenerating universe for players to discover, and the latest instalment in the sci-fi blockbuster franchise Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. From an economic perspective, games have outperformed other creative industries for years, and they're also nurturing the best creative writing talent. 

 

So how do writers fit in to this multi-billion pound industry? Novelist and scriptwriter James Swallow, whose game writing credits include Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and No Man's Sky, and scriptwriter and story designer Rhianna Pratchett, whose credits include Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, discuss.

 

Samira Ahmed interviewed m'colleague Rhianna Pratchett and I on last Friday's show, where we talked about our work on the Tomb Raider and Deus Ex games, as well as the nature of narrative design and the future of game stories; check out the show here via this Link - Rhi and I are on from the 13:26 mark...

DEUS EX DAY!

The wait is over; it's time to get augmented and return to the dark world of cyberpunk and conspiracy in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided....

The year is 2029, and mechanically augmented humans have now been deemed outcasts, living a live of segregation on the fringes of society. Adam Jensen is now an experienced covert operative, forced to work in a world that has grown to despise his kind. Armed with a new arsenal of state-of-the-art weapons and augmentations, he must find a path through a wilderness of secrets and learn who to trust, if he is to unravel the vast conspiracy that threatens to control the future of all humanity...

Back in 2008 I was recruited to work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution with the Eidos Montreal studio, starting a working relationship with the EM team that I am proud to still be a part of eight years on. DXHR was a hit that earned us great criticial acclaim, including several award nominations (among them a personal BAFTA nom for Best Story!); I got to follow that up with original fiction in the novel Deus Ex: Icarus Effect and the eBook novella Deus Ex: Fallen Angel, along with story work on the mobile title Deus Ex: The Fall.

But now the next iteration of stories in the Deus Ex world have arrived, and it has been my pleasure to contribute to the critical path storyline for Mankind Divided - available today on PC, Playstation 4 and XBox One platforms. Also officially available today is Deus Ex: Black Light, my original novel that spans the gap between DXHR and DXMD, and Deus Ex: Hard Line, an exclusive digital novella available with the DXMD Day One and Collector's Edition releases.

 

For more information about the world of Deus Ex, check out the official site Here.

Deus Ex: Black Light is available from Titan Books Here.

Your Universe Awaits

No Man's Sky is here!

Today's that day the hype becomes real and the gateway to a galaxy of 18 quintillion explorable planets opens; I've been fortunate enough to write some of the lore for No Man's Sky, contributing key text to the game itself and writing "Ashes & Iron", an original short story for Adventures In No Man's Sky, a pulp SF collection that comes packaged with the game's Limited Edition release - and I am hugely excited to have been part of this ambitious new gameworld.

Check out my earlier posts about working on the project Here and Here.

You can pick up No Man's Sky on the PS4 in the ordinary or Limited Edition versions Here, via Steam for the PC Here, or get the exclusive Explorer's Edition Here.

Writing Under No Man’s Sky

August is going to be a packed month for cool videogame releases (certainly for me!), and it kicks off next week with the arrival of No Man’s Sky, the hotly-anticipated science-fiction exploration epic from Hello Games.

I’ve talked about NMS previously, because of my involvement with Adventures in No Man’s Sky, an original fiction collection published by Dark Horse Comics that comes packaged with the game’s PlayStation 4 Limited Edition collection.

 

 

I was lucky enough to be invited to contribute to the lore of the NMS universe along with famous artists like Angus McKie and Dave Gibbons.I got to write a short story called “Ashes & Iron”, for which Dave has drawn some fantastic illustrations in the style of the old classic SF pulp magazines like Galaxy, Astounding and Amazing Stories.

 

But what I haven’t talked about until now is that I was also invited by Hello Games producer Sean Murray to join his team and contribute some writing to the game itself.

The universe of No Man’s Sky contains many mysteries for players to unravel and much to explore – I am reliably informed that the game contains 184446744073709551616 planets. As much as that number looks like I just mashed my hand on the keypad, I am assured it is accurate (!)

I got to write a little of the material that intrepid explorers will find in abandoned locations across these myriad worlds, as well as lore that will peel back some of the unknowns around the strange phenomena known as the Atlas – and I can’t wait to get in there myself and start visiting some alien vistas.

No Man’s Sky is out on PS4 on August 9th, and PC a few days later. Check out the official website here.

New Book(let) Day: No Man's Sky

New book day is always the best day!

Check out the cover art for Adventures In No Man's Sky, an exclusive anthology featuring the comic strip "Cargo" by industry legends Dave Gibbons and Angus McKie, and the prose story "Ashes & Iron" by me...

 

Adventures In No Man's Sky will be available as part of the No Man's Sky Limited Edition release for the PlayStation 4, and you can learn more about that Here.

You Are Hearing Me Talk...to BAFTA Guru

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) have been doing a lot over the past few years to make videogames an important part of their organization, and most recently there was a whole day of games-related events as part of the BAFTA Guru program - as the official site Here says, "Guru is bursting with advice from the best creative minds in the industries so whether you're an actor, a games developer or a cinematographer, we've got something for you."

I was pleased to be part of the Guru Live event last month, where I took part in a panel called "The Storytellers", along with Meg Jayanth (80 Days) and Rob Yescombe (The Division), hosted by Guy Cocker, where we talked about the various challenges of writing for interactive media. You can click on the panel below or go Here to listen.

 
BAFTA Guru have now put up all the audio recordings from the games day and you can check out the rest of them Here.