Friday 25 March 2011

GAME OF THRONES and ICE & FIRE news round-up

HBO have released four high-res images of locations in the series: one of King's Landing (see below), one of the Wall and two of Winterfell. These are pretty smart and worth a look.

King's Landing, with the Red Keep prominently displayed. The Great Sept of Baelor can be seen on the far right.

Still with the TV series, HBO has released a new trailer, this one entitled 'Power'. This trailer seems slightly more aimed at people who haven't read the books.



On the computer game front, Cyanide have released the first screenshot from the second game, the RPG, due in summer 2012 on PC and console. They've also spoken about it a little for the first time, revealing that the game will alternate between two characters, Mors Westford (a member of the Night's Watch and skinchanger) and Alester Sarwyck, a noble heir returning to Westeros after years travelling the east, during which time he became a priest of the red god. The game takes place close to the time period of the novels, and some characters from the books like Varys will make an appearance.

"You appear concerned, Lord Commander."
"Indeed. Are we actually in the GoT RPG, The Witcher 2 or Dragon Age? It's hard to tell."

In addition they have released two new screenshots from the real-time strategy game, Genesis, which is due later this year.



I have to say these screenshots are very unimpressive. Early fears that they are aiming more for an Age of Empires-style, stylised approach to the game appear to have been realised, with out-of-scale units and buildings and seriously unambitious ideas for the Wall and the Eyrie (which in the game appears to sit on a rather mild hill rather than on a shoulder of a 17,000-foot-tall sheer mountain).

On the book front, the new editions of the first four novels should now be readily available in the USA, along with the TV tie-in edition of A Game of Thrones (this edition should hit the UK in the middle of next week, and may already be on sale in some areas). On the Dance with Dragons front, George R.R. Martin's editor has published a picture of the manuscript for the novel (or the 95% of it submitted so far):

The manuscript is so huge it generates its own gravitational field, and has consumed the books it formerly shared the shelf with.

HarperCollins Voyager are also now listing their estimated hardcover page count as 1,040 pages, whilst Bantam in the USA are still only predicting 1,008. A final page count is waiting for the delivery of the last couple of chapters, but these estimates confirm the book is expected to be gargantuan. Unfortunately, some further controversy has been caused amongst UK purchasers by the news that Voyager is publishing the hardcover at a recommended retail price of £25.00, or about £5 more than the price of a standard hardcover (both The Way of Kings and The Wise Man's Fear, which are not far off ADWD's length, were £20 in hardcover). However, the novel will still be heavily discounted before release and during the first few weeks on sale.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You can always trust Cyanide to ruin a licensed game. Try checking out the Blood Bowl farse. They may not be solely responsible, but you can trust them have their collective head up their *** and put as little effort as possible into it.