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RIP Viktor Antonov

News has sadly broken that Viktor Antonov, the artist and visual designer on video games such as Half-Life 2 and Dishonored, has passed away at the far-too-young age of 52.

Born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1972, Antonov got his start in the video game business as an artist. He worked on Redneck Rampage (1997) and its various mission packs, followed by a Quake II expansion and Kingpin: Life of Crime (1999), with its gritty, crumbling tenement locations. He started working with Valve whilst Half-Life 2 (2004) was in development and quickly became the game's art director. He spent a lot of time looking at locations in his native Bulgaria, as well as other Eastern European countries, to serve as reference points for the game's sprawling City 17, the neighbouring settlement of Ravenholm and more. Half-Life 2's recent 20th anniversary saw Antonov interviewed about his work on the game.

Antonov was feted for the incredible world design of Half-Life 2 and was hired by Arkane Studios to work on the city of Dunwall for Dishonored (2012). Antonov again knocked it out of the park, creating a realistic, immersive steampunk city of crumbling buildings and diesel-punk-ish brutalism. Antonov then moved into consultancy work, advising on the visual design of Fallout 4 (2015), Dishonored 2 (2016), DOOM (2016) and Prey (2017). He returned to full-time art direction with "Project DG," a game for Eschatology Entertainment, a company he himself had co-founded in 2022.

Visual and graphic design is a key component of video games, but most games are made by art teams and committees. Antonov was unusual in putting his unique touch on a game's environments that was immediately recognisable as his own. Anyone playing Half-Life 2 or its expansions, or Dishonored or its sequel, knows immediately they are in an "Antonovian" landscape. Hopefully he did enough work on "Project DG" that we'll be able to spend at least some more time with one of his worlds.

A great artist who specialised in creating worlds that fused the fantastical and the realistic, he will be missed.

Netflix and Wizards of the Coast put FORGOTTEN REALMS live-action show into development

Netflix and Wizards of the Coast have joined forces to put a Dungeons & Dragons TV project into development, tentatively called The Forgotten Realms. The show will be set in the D&D game's most popular world, the recent setting for hit video game Baldur's Gate III and the well-received movie Honor Among Thieves.

Shawn Levy, the producer of Stranger Things and director of movies including Date Night, Night at the Museum and Deadpool & Wolverine, will executive produce the show via his existing deal with Netflix, and will likely direct several episodes. Drew Crevello will write and showrun. Crevello previously worked at Fox on the X-Men franchise and the first two Deadpool movies, and co-wrote and produced the mini-series WeCrashed.

There have been multiple attempts to get a Dungeons & Dragons multimedia franchise off the ground in recent years. Baldur's Gate III has been the biggest success, selling over 20 million copies since its August 2023 release and becoming one of the highest-rated video games of the last decade, if not more (PC Gamer US gave the game its highest rating in over twenty years). Honor Among Thieves landed with impressive critical scores and rave audience reviews, but moderate box office; the film failed to recoup its costs at the box office, but a long tail on physical media and streaming has helped in the longer term. At various times, Hasbro and Wizards have looked at developing projects in both the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance worlds. Paramount+ was the logical destination for the project after the studio's collaboration on Honor Among Thieves, but the service's increasingly shaky performance led Hasbro to reconsider and start putting out feelers with Netflix.

Discussions with Netflix have been underway for some time, and at one point it was rumoured they were considering an adaptation of the Baldur's Gate video game trilogy. However, that idea seems to have cooled. The current proposal seems to be for an original story following new characters, with the door left open for popular franchise characters from the roleplaying source material, video games and novels to make an appearance.

The Forgotten Realms world was created by Canadian writer Ed Greenwood in the late 1960s as a setting for his own stories (the city of Baldur's Gate first appeared in a tale written to amuse his father in 1967). In 1978 he started playing Dungeons & Dragons and adapted the world for his home campaign. He started contributing articles to Dragon Magazine and quickly started referencing the world, its heroes, villains and iconic locations. In 1986 TSR decided to adopt a new "standard" fantasy setting to replace Greyhawk and Dragonlance, and agreed to purchase the Forgotten Realms from Greenwood.

The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting appeared in print for the first time as a boxed set in 1987. New editions of the campaign setting core product appeared in 1993, 2001, 2008 and 2015, with two new campaign books planned for later this year. More than 250 other sourcebooks, adventures, board games, boxed sets and gaming materials have also been released. Forgotten Realms is notable as the only D&D campaign setting to remain continuously in print since its first launch, and to have new products for it launched almost every year since its first release.

A range of novels simultaneously launched, with R.A. Salvatore's The Crystal Shard (1988) rapidly attracting huge sales for his iconic hero, the renegade dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden. More than 35 million Drizzt books have since been sold, and the Forgotten Realms novel line has reportedly sold almost 100 million copies. Greenwood himself became a bestselling author with his novels about the iconic wizard Elminster the Sage, with other bestselling authors in the setting including Troy Denning, Doug Niles, Jeff Grubb & Kate Novak, Paul Kemp, James Lowder, Elaine Cunningham and Erin Evans.

The first Forgotten Realms video games were released in 1988 from Strategic Simulations Inc., and were followed by a large number of successful titles. The most notable early success was the Eye of the Beholder trilogy from Westwood Games. In 1998 the Canadian company BioWare teamed up with Black Isle and Interplay to release Baldur's Gate. The game was an immediate smash hit, and was followed by Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn in 2000 and Neverwinter Nights in 2002. Black Isle themselves developed Icewind Dale (2000) and Icewind Dale II (2002), also set in the Realms and using the same engine as Baldur's Gate. After Interplay's collapse, Obsidian Entertainment (made up of Black Isle veterans) released Neverwinter Nights II in 2006. The online roleplaying game Neverwinter was released in 2013, followed by Sword Coast Legends in 2015. Baldur's Gate III, developed by Larian Studios and released in August 2023, is easily the biggest and most successful video game in the setting to date.

This new project is only in development for the time being, with a pilot written. It remains to be seen if Netflix chooses to move forward with a series order.

RIP Chris Moore

Esteemed British science fiction artist Chris Moore has sadly passed away at the age of 77. Moore is best-known for his memorable covers for Gollancz books, including for their SF Masterworks line, and his frequent art for the likes of Alastair Reynolds and William Gibson.

Picking a single representative piece of art for Chris Moore is impossible, but his cover for Steven Erikson's debut novel Gardens of the Moon was very striking.

Moore was born in Rotherham, South Yorkshire in 1947. He was educated at Mexborough Grammar School and Doncaster Art School. In 1972 he joined forces with Michael Morris to form Moore Morris Ltd., and worked on graphic design and cover art for book, magazine and record covers, operating out of Covent Garden in London. The partnership dissolved in 1980, when Moore moved out of the capital. During his time there he'd created cover art for artists including Rod Stewart, Journey, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo, Pentangle and Rick Wakeman.

Moore's artwork for the SF Masterworks edition of The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.

In 1974, art director Peter Bennet suggested that Moore start creating covers for science fiction novels, a genre Moore had little interest in or knowledge of (outside of seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey). But Moore agreed and was soon producing art for new books and reprints alike of Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Anne McCaffrey, Clifford D. Simak and Arthur C. Clarke. Heading into the 1980s, he also become a preferred cover artist for mainstream authors including Jeffrey Archer, Jackie Collins and Wilbur Smith.

Moore's minimalist cover for Alastair Reynolds' debut novel Revelation Space helped make the novel a huge success.

In 1989 Moore was sought out to produce concept art for Stanley Kubrick's A.I., but Kubrick took against Moore's agent and tried to go around him to employ Moore directly, which Moore felt was unethical so passed on the opportunity.

Moore's cover for a 1980s reprint of Philip K. Dicks' Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, drawing on the movie version Blade Runner for inspiration.

A full list of Moore's iconic artwork is impossible to write with any kind of conciseness, but his 1980s and 1990s artwork for Philip K. Dick reprints and Arthur C. Clarke were particularly memorable, along with his work on the SF Masterworks series in the 2000s. He was particularly closely linked with Alastair Reynolds, with his moody, minimalist designs of spaceships and asteroids backdropped against planets giving the Reynolds books an immediately recognisable design.

Chris Moore passed away at home on 7 February. A very fine artist with a great eye for SF visions, he will be missed.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

The planet Gora has no reason to exist other than just having the fortune to exist in close proximity to five wormhole terminuses. The planet has become a place for travellers to rest briefly before moving on. But a freak satellite cascade crisis stops all ship departures. The crews of three ships are forced to take refuge in one another's company, for good and ill.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is the fourth and apparently concluding book in Becky Chambers' Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers series, following on from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit and Record of a Spaceborn Few (Chambers has a superb facility with book names, it has to be said). This isn't a series in the traditional sense with continuing characters and narrative elements, more something like Iain Banks' The Culture with a shared setting and occasional references to the events of other books but each volume can be enjoyed fully as a stand-alone.

Like the other books in the series, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a very relaxed novel. There is personal jeopardy but it is brief and limited. The book's primary interest is more about how people - in this case examples of multiple different alien species - interact and work together in the face of adversity. It's something of a space disaster novel, where the disaster is very brief and isn't going to kill anyone after a short period, but its consequences take days to play out during which our protagonists have to figure out how to endure.

Basically, this is science fiction mashed with the structure of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club, and it works really well. We get to know the three alien visitors, the owner of the space hotel they have to stay in and her son, and none of the characters are human, which is surprisingly rare in science fiction. Each one of the four species the characters belong to gets a lot of development in terms of their personal characterisation and also worldbuilding related to their different species, and how this limits their interactions. One of the species relies on colour cues to determine the other person's mood and intents, whilst another can only leave their ship in an environment suit. Being space travellers - wayfarers - means they have some natural curiosity about other species, but sometimes find it hard to deal with those with a very different worldview to their own, informed by a totally different biology and history.

If the book has a theme, it's probably the rotest of the Star Trek rote: to understand one another's differences and find ways of getting along. It feels like a well-explored idea, but also a universal and constant one, and one it never hurts to revisit. Especially here with the circumstances well set-up to facilitate that story.

Chambers always walks a tightrope between her books being chill and enjoyable, and boring, and Record of a Spaceborn Few started tilting alarmingly towards the latter. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (****) tilts back towards the former. For those who need action, intrigue and lasers in their space opera, steer clear. For those who are more interested in worldbuilding and character dynamics, this is a fine and enjoyable slice of lived-in science fiction. The novel is available now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER legacy sequel series in development

A new Buffy the Vampire Slayer project is in development at Hulu. This is not really surprising, with multiple attempts to resurrect the franchise having been discussed since not long after it concluded the first time around in 2003. However, this attempt appears to be closer to a pilot deal than any of the others, and is the first to have Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, attached in an official capacity.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer started as a movie script written by Joss Whedon. The resulting film, released in 1992 and starring Kristy Swanson and Donald Sutherland, did poorly at the box office but found a dedicated cult fanbase on home video. This led to a TV show being picked up by Fox in 1996, for airing on The WB starting the following year, with Whedon as showrunner and Gellar in the starring role. Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran for seven seasons (ending in 2003) and 144 episodes, winning both critical and commercial acclaim for its canny mixture of supernatural fantasy, horror, drama and light comedy. Its spin-off show, Angel, ran for five seasons and 110 episodes from 1999 to 2004.

Although the story continued in comics, attempts to resurrect the franchise in other formats failed. Spin-offs focusing around the characters of Spike (James Marsters), Giles (Tony Head) and Faith (Eliza Dushku) were in development at one time or another, but none made it off the ground.

In 2010 an attempt to reboot the franchise as a new movie series foundered, whilst a 2018 attempt at a total reboot with Whedon producing and Monica Owusu-Breen showrunning also failed to gain traction. Whedon's subsequent fall from grace for alleged toxic behaviour on the sets of his various projects seemed to stall any further development on projects closely associated with his name.

Sarah Michelle Gellar distanced herself from the show after its conclusion, not attending conventions and gently discouraging speculation over a reboot or sequel with herself involved. She starred in two Scooby Doo movies with husband Freddie Prinze Jr., as well as Cruel Intentions and The Grudge, and occasional TV work, most recently Paramount+'s Wolf Pack. She has mainly focused on business interests outside of television and film. However, she recently spoke of Buffy more warmly having sat down to watch the show with her own children for the first time, and found the experience rewarding.

The new iteration of the show being discussed is a successor series which will focus on a new regular cast, with Gellar's Buffy and possibly other actors from the original series appearing in recurring roles. Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao (Eternals, Nomadland) is being touted as a producer, writer and possibly director for some episodes. Nora Zuckerman and Lila Zuckerman (Poker Face, Prodigal Sons, Agents of SHIELD, Fringe) will produce and showrun. Rights-holders Fran Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui (who produced the 1992 film) will produce alongside Dolly Parton, whose production company worked on the original series. Whedon is not involved at this time.

The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended with Buffy finding a way of creating more Slayers, allowing others to take over the burden of saving the world and allowing her to have a vacation. Some of the spin-off media posited that Buffy would effectively become a mentor to a whole new generation of Slayers, and working more in the capacity of a general directing her forces against larger threats. Whether this project would go in a similar direction, or return to the status quo of a single Slayer, remains to be seen.

Netflix's THE SANDMAN to end with Season 2

Netflix has confirmed what has been strongly rumoured for a good two years now, that the upcoming second season of The Sandman will the final one.

Despite early reports that Netflix were eyeing three to four seasons for the show, the first season's just-good-enough performance (which saw an unusually long delay before the second season was commissioned) and the impending problem that main character Dream plays a smaller role in many of the storylines in the middle and latter part of the graphic novel series, barely appearing in some issues, saw Netflix move to make the second season the final one. The series will continue to adapt the primary story arc of the comics, but in an abridged format, with some of the middle-series storylines and episodes likely to fall by the wayside.

Extremely fortuitously for Netflix, they made this decision before filming and a long time before accusations of sexual misconduct were made against Sandman creator/author Neil Gaiman by eight women. These accusations, which Gaiman has strenuously denied, has seen both publishers and another production company, Amazon Studios, cutting ties with the author.

Netflix has not yet confirmed a broadcast date for Season 2 of The Sandman beyond "2025."

Rebecca Yarros sells 12 million copies of her EMPYREAN series in under two years

Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean fantasy series has sold (non-paywalled reference) a startling 12 million copies in less than two years, marking it as one of the fastest-selling fantasy series of the 21st Century. The first book in the series, Fourth Wing, was published in May 2023 and was followed by Iron Flame in November 2023 and Onyx Storm in January 2025. Two more books are projected to bring the series to a conclusion.

Onyx Storm itself is the fastest-selling adult novel published in the last twenty years, shifting 2.7 million copies in its first week on sale. Onyx Storm saw bookshop midnight openings, launch parties and other events that haven't been seen since the release of the final Harry Potter novel in 2007, without the dual adult/child appeal of that book.

For comparison, Yarros' sales in two years are approaching half those of Brandon Sanderson's non-Wheel of Time books in twenty (Sanderson has sold 40 million books, with over 12 million of those being his three Wheel of Time novels, for approximately 28 million sales of his solo work). Yarros has sold approximately a quarter of the total sales of her colleague Sarah J. Maas, who has sold just over 40 million books in thirteen years. 12 million is also approximately the same number of books that George R.R. Martin sold of his Song of Ice and Fire series before the TV adaptation began.

The only author who can be said to had a more impressive debut was Patrick Rothfuss, who shifted over 10 million copies of his debut novel The Name of the Wind alone (though nowhere near as fast).

With two more books to come and an adaptation of the books underway at Amazon MGM Studios, it's clear that these figures are only going to continue rising in the future.

What will be interesting to see is if this influx of new readers benefits the rest of the fantasy genre, but it does confirm that Romantasy's current sales dominance is no danger of ending soon. 

New MURDERBOT editions criticised for poor quality

As I noticed previously, readers have been calling for omnibus editions of the critically-acclaimed Murderbot Diaries science fiction series for some years. The series, by Martha Wells, consists of five novellas and two short novels which has been positively festooned with awards, praise and strong sales, but their high prices for a short page count have put them out of the reach of more frugal SFF fans.

The books have been reissued in the last few weeks in new omnibus editions to hopefully address the issue. Whilst the format is still not generous - with only two books per edition rather than a more appropriate three (the first three novellas combined only come to 450 pages) - it was still a marked improvement over prior editions in terms of value for money. Unfortunately, the new editions have been called out for terrible proofing and formatting.

The problem appears to be that the books have been released in a print-on-demand format, with all the hallmarks of shoddy formatting and/or corrupted files being used. Given the publisher is Tor Books, the largest and most popular SFF publisher in the United States, and its UK off-shoot, the poor quality of the books is most surprising, especially given they are charging the price of a full, properly-formatted and edited paperback edition.

Images from Amazon

The three omnibus volumes are each a different height and size to the others, with the cover images not aligned correctly, and in the interior there is an inefficient use of space.

Multiple reviewers have pointed out the problem on the Amazon review pages, and via BlueSky, noting they have returned the books for a full refund.

Hopefully this problem can be fixed quickly; as one of the highest-profile science fiction book series of recent years, and with an imminent TV adaptation on Apple TV+, it would be a shame for new readers to be put off by poor quality books. The series, and readers, deserve better.

Age of Empires II Definitive Edition Chronicles: Battle for Greece

The Aegean Sea and its coasts are the battleground between the two great powers of antiquity: the vast Persian Empire and the Greek city-states, led by the two rivals of Athens and Sparta. Armies march, huge navies are constructed and the powers clash over a century of warfare, with the dominance of the ancient world in the balance.

Back in 2019, Microsoft released Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, a comprehensive remake of the classic 1999 real-time strategy game. The result was probably the best video game remake ever created, which not only updated the original game's graphics, controls and userface whilst fully retaining the spirit and style of the original, but also added a massive amount of new content. This was then expanded through no less than six new expansions: Lords of the West, Dawn of the Dukes, Dynasties of India, Return of Rome, The Mountain Royals and Victors and Vanquished.

This latest, seventh expansion marks a shift in format. Chronicles: Battle for Greece follows in Return of Rome's footsteps by adding civilisations from the ancient world to the game. Whilst Return of Rome remade some of the campaigns from the original Age of Empires game, Battle for Greece is a wholly new campaign built from the ground up. It adds the civilisations of the Achaemenids (the Persian Empire), Athenians and Spartans, but the game eschews the traditional expansion format, with 5-7 missions for each civilisation, largely separate in time and setting. This time around the game has a fully voiced, expansive, 21-mission sequential campaign which moves between the three sides. There are fully-animated cutscenes (though heavily stylised, Blizzard's cinematic department can sleep easily here, but still very nice), full voiceovers and a story that unfolds across the game. The feeling is more like Age of Mythology (which recently also saw a comprehensive remake via Age of Mythology Retold) than any prior Age of Empires campaign, with a strong narrative and character focus.

The story is appropriately epic, spanning almost the full century of the Greco-Persian Wars, which saw the Greeks square off against the Persians (not for the last time) before fighting an internal conflict, the Peloponnesian War, over which Greek city would come to dominate the rest. This is a much more zoomed-in campaign than normal, with minor battles and campaigns being featured alongside the much more famous ones like Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae.

Most of the 21 missions are huge, taking multiple hours to complete apiece with numerous twists and turns. The expansion took me 27 hours to complete on moderate difficulty. Some missions have timers, some missions require you to undertake operations without a home base, and some have you relying on allies to provide troops whilst you fight with them in the field. The few times you do get a town centre and can play a "normal" game of Age of Empires both feel like a relief but also an acknowledgement of the game's limitations; those missions are usually the easiest and most straightforward. Some of the missions are intricate puzzles with you having to work out how best to hit targets in the optimal order. One memorable mission has you having to win a democratic election (this is Greece, after all), meaning you have to keep the people happy, which you can do by fair means (hosting lavish games, winning glorious victories) or foul (smearing your opponent's name through rumour-mongering). Most of the missions are inventive, showing once again how to get surprising results out of what is still, under the 4K sheen, a 26-year-old game.

The game can also be frustrating. The campaigns do feel like a 2024 design hosted on a 1999 foundation, but those foundations sometimes shine through: a few too many missions have you completing the last mission objective only to be "surprised" by a final twist objective, usually some variant of "fight off this massive enemy army which has appeared outside your city with no warning, somehow." It's the type of cheap mission design I'd hoped we'd have seen the last of somewhere around 2005. The game's traditionally eyebrow-raising pathfinding and AI awareness issues are also present and correct. The expansion has changed a lot about how the game works, especially naval forces, but underneath it's Age of Empires II through and through.

The narrative focus could be of interest to people who perhaps find the traditional Age of Empires II campaign a bit remote and hands-off. The stories here are more personal and more engrossing, reflecting the massive events happening through individual ambitions and failings. It's a strong success, leading to one of the strongest expansion campaigns we've seen for the game. However, the campaign does feel a little on the long side, with some very bizarre difficulty spikes that can be deeply frustrating. The expansion also ends on a cliffhanger, confirming there will be a follow-up focusing on the life of Alexander the Great.

Age of Empires II Colon Definitive Edition Subcolon Chronicles Subsubcolon Battle for Greece (****) is a good time, and an easy recommendation for Age of Empires II fans who want more Age of Empires II (even granted this game has more content for it than almost any other video game ever made, after a quarter century of expansions and updates). Those who've perhaps not tried out the game before may find the narrative focus of this expansion are more compelling way of playing the game, although the mission design often assumes experience with how the game already works. Some frustrations and annoyances ultimately do not derail what is a nice twist on the Age of Empires formula. The expansion is available right now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.