Bethesda confirm that STARFIELD and ELDER SCROLLS VI are in development

Following the presentation of Fallout 76, a controversial online-only spin-off from the popular single-player RPG series, Bethesda Game Studios also confirmed long-standing rumours that they are developing two new single-player epic RPGs.

First up is Starfield, the first new franchise launched by Bethesda Game Studios since the original Elder Scrolls: Arena in 1994. Details were thin on the ground, but Starfield will be in the science fiction genre and will be set in space and on alien planets.

Long-standing rumours about Starfield suggest that the game will be set predominantly on a gigantic space station, with the player undertaking missions and solving quests in the standard Bethesda manner. At key points, the player can also leave the space station and travel to other planets to undertake extra mission objectives. This makes the game sound very similar to the Mass Effect franchise from BioWare, although presumably Starfield will use Bethesda's traditional first-person perspective and will focus more on solo play than forming parties. The same reports claim that Starfield is set in the far future of the Fallout franchise and may link that universe to the Elder Scrolls setting, although this sounds less likely, especially after Todd Howard's insistence that this is an all-new and totally new franchise.

Starfield has no release date as yet, but late 2019/early 2020 seems feasible given that the game has been in full-time development since Fallout 4's release in 2015, and was in pre-production for some years before that.

Secondly, and far further in the future (as the game is listed as only in "pre-production"), is The Elder Scrolls VI, the follow-up to the immensely successful Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which has sold approximately 40 million copies since its release in 2011, making it one of the most successful individual video games of all time. Apart from a logo, a brief burst of the series theme music and a landscape flypast, the teaser video didn't reveal very much. Fan speculation based on the landscape seems to be that the game will be set in High Rock - the southern coastal region of which appeared in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall back in 1997 - with Valenwood as an outside, alternative possibility.

Bethesda confirm that FALLOUT 76 is an online-only game, for release in November 2018

In a major showcase event at the E3 video games conference in Los Angeles last night, Bethesda Game Studios confirmed that their new Fallout game, Fallout 76 will be an online-only game set in West Virginia. The news surprised many commentators, as previous comments had suggested that Fallout 76 might still be a single-player-focused RPG with some kind of optional co-op or multiplayer component.

Fallout 76 is set in 2102, just 25 years after the nuclear war that wiped out civilisation in the Fallout universe, and long before any of the other games in the series (Fallout 4, by comparison, is set in 2287). The game casts the players as residents of Vault 76, a nuclear fallout shelter in West Virginia. The game opens on Reclamation Day, with players setting out to re-colonise the surface by building new settlements, defeating monsters and coming into conflict with one another.

A more in-depth and fleshed-out versions of the settlement-building mechanics from Fallout 4 is present, with a strong focus on players working together to build up impressive outposts, forts and possibly entire towns in the wasteland.

Something that has elected a lot of praise is the map and environmental graphics. Although still using the positively decrepit Creation Engine (originally the GameBryo Engine and first used by Bethesda for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, released in 2002), the engine has been revamped to allow for larger forests. The game map is huge, a full four times the size of the Fallout 4 map, and covering the entire state of West Virginia. Players will be able to visit the ruins of the State Capitol in Charleston in the south-west of the state, the Greenbrier Resort (which in real life has a nuclear fallout shelter in the basement) in the far east of the state and West Virginia University in Morgantown, on the far northern border of the state. Point Pleasant, the site of the mysterious Mothman sightings of 1966-67 (a creature in the game appears to have been inspired by the fictional entity), and the New River Gorge Bridge are also present.

During the presentation, Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard suggested it would be possible to play the game solo, but later confirmed that there are no human NPCs in the game. Instead, everyone you meet will be another player, with the only computer-controlled entities being monsters. Apparently the game will have some quests and missions in the game, likely assigned by the Vault 76 Overseer, but otherwise the best single-player gamers can likely expect is radiant AI quests generated at settlements, as seen in Fallout 4 (of the infamous "another settlement needs your help!" meme).

The decision to make Fallout 76 an online-only game has proven controversial, especially among those who hadn't been keeping up with the rumours and had been expecting a proper follow-up to Fallout 4 in a similar fashion to how Fallout: New Vegas was a follow-up to Fallout 3. The online-only nature of the game also elicited a negative response from the modding community, as the game will likely not allow substantive modding. Previous Bethesda games have been released in a buggy or subpar state and it's fallen to modders to fix the games and add new gameplay features whilst waiting for Bethesda to release official patches.

Fallout 76 will be released on 14 November 2018 on PS4, XB1 and PC.

WESTEROS: TOTAL WAR released

After twelve years in development, Westeros: Total War has finally been released.

Westeros: Total War is a free fan-made mod for the video game Medieval II: Total War and its expansion Kingdoms. It originally started development in early 2006 as a mod for the original Rome: Total War, but quickly transitioned to Medieval II when it was released later that year. The game has been completely revamped with several whole new teams since then.

The game has been released in a beta state, meaning it is complete but some bugs may be present which should be fixed. The team hope to expand the game with new features later on, but clearly given the immense amount of time taken to reach this point this is not guaranteed.

Due to changes in the Total War game engine since Medieval II's release, this kind of "total conversion" is no longer possible for more recent games in the series (like Attila, Rome II, Warhammer II and Thrones of Britannia). You require a copy of Medieval II and Kingdoms, or the complete pack, to play the game.

HIS DARK MATERIALS TV series casts James McAvoy as Lord Asriel

The BBC and Bad Wolf Productions have tapped James McAvoy to play the role of Lord Asriel in their upcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

Asriel is one of the main antagonists of the novel series (although that's probably simplifying his role too much). He was played by Daniel Craig in the unsuccessful 2007 movie version of the first book.

Also joining the project is Clarke Peters, who is best-known for playing Lester Freamon on The Wire. Peters will be playing one of the masters at Oxford who raises Lyra.

As previously announced, Dafne Keen (Logan) is playing the role of Lyra and Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton) is playing Lee Scoresby.

The BBC and Bad Wolf Productions are collaborating on the series, which they envisage as unfolding over four eight-episode seasons. Netflix and Apple TV are reportedly in a clash for the international streaming rights.

HBO orders GAME OF THRONES prequel pilot from Jane Goldman

HBO has pulled the trigger on their plans for a Game of Thrones spin-off series, ordering a pilot from writer/producer/showrunner Jane Goldman.

The First Men and the Children of the Forest forge the Pact on the Isle of Faces, thus beginning the Age of Heroes, four thousand years of peace that would end in the chaos and horror of the Long Night. Artwork by Magali Villeneuve for The World of Ice and Fire.

The spin-off series will be set in the Age of Heroes, the time period that began with the Pact - a peace treaty - being signed between the Children of the Forest (the original inhabitants of the continent of Westeros) and the invading First Men, and ended thousands of years later in the Long Night and the first war against the White Walkers. This is an intriguing time period, many thousands of years before the events of the series, with very little "canonical" information to go on. This will allow Goldman and her team of writers to create all-new stories in a much more primitive setting.

George R.R. Martin helped brainstorm ideas for the series as part of his longterm development contract with HBO, will be credited as a producer and will get a "story by" credit on the pilot, but will not take an active role in the series as he is focusing on completing the long-gestating sixth and (apparently) penultimate novel in the book series, The Winds of Winter.

Jane Goldman's involvement is particularly interesting. An experienced writer and producer, she wrote or co-wrote the scripts for Stardust, Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Woman in Black, Kingsman and Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Game of Thrones producer Vince Gerardis will also work on the show as a producer, and Daniel Zelman (Damages, Bloodline) will also be working as a producer on the project. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are likely to get an executive producer credit, but will have no day-to-day involvement as they will be moving from Game of Thrones' final season to developing a new Star Wars movie series for Lucasfilm next year.

The series doesn't have a title yet (although Game of Thrones: Age of Heroes sounds like it could work, in a sort of Masters of the Universe way...actually, they should think of something better) but it does have a logline:

"Taking place thousands of years before the events of Game of Thrones, the series chronicles the world’s descent from the golden Age of Heroes into its darkest hour. Only one thing is for sure: from the horrifying secrets of Westeros' history to the true origin of the White Walkers, the mysteries of the East to the Starks of legend… it's not the story we think we know."

Game of Thrones: The First Spin-Off will likely shoot its pilot next year and, if it gets a series order, will likely air in 2020 or 2021.

HBO are continuing to evaluate no less than four other pilot pitches for series set in the same world. Previously HBO have said they are likely to only order one to pilot, but this depends on the quality of the scripts they receive.

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Earth has just discovered that it is not alone in the universe. There's a multitude of alien races out there, not all of them very nice, and they recently only just avoided annihilating one another in the Sentience Wars, a conflict driven over what races were and were not intelligent. To replace interstellar warfare, they have introduced the Metagalactic Grand Prix, essentially a world-spanning singing contest. In order to prove itself worthy, Earth must send its finest musical artists to literally sing for the planet's survival. Unfortunately, the only artists acceptable to the aliens are washed-up has-been Decibel Jones and Oort St. Ultraviolet, whose brief superstardom years earlier has left both of them in very different conditions. To save the world, they have to put the band back together.

Space Opera is a comic SF novel written by Catherynne M. Valente, inspired by Douglas Adams and the Eurovision Song Contest, that kitsch and silly musical talent show which has replaced armoured warfare as the primary means of measuring international competition on the European continent. As the book is careful to make clear, this means it should be zany, crazy, neon-drenched, glitterball-kicking fun. And to be fair, Catherynne M. Valente has a go. There's a lot of invention in this novel, various original alien species and entertainingly bananas planets that are described with inventive glee.

The problem is that the book tells you it's going to be crazy fun, but never really kicks off into being zany fun on its own merits. It also tells you that it's inspired by Douglas Adams but doesn't really learn any of the lessons of Adams' work, which is centred in a dry wit, and a lot of English restraint which occasionally cuts loose in bananas set pieces which will leave you giggling in your chair like a loon. Instead, Space Opera has to settle for generating the occasional wry smile.

The book is oddly structured. At 290 pages of both large and very well-spaced type, it's very short (which is good, as the premise is too thin to support a prolonged narrative) but bizarrely lopsided. Approximately the first 200 pages of the book are dedicated to lengthy profiles of each alien race, the history of their worlds and the history of the Metagalactic Grand Prix. We're also introduced to our two protagonists and a couple of other alien characters, who explain the situation and travel to the planet where the Grand Prix is being hosted and, er, that's it. The actual plot of the book is rounded off in a mere 90 pages, the bulk of which is taken up by a drinks reception. The actual singing competition is over in a just a few pages. A compelling narrative this does not make.

The writing is meant to be witty and funny, but this is made difficult by the book being almost entirely written in long paragraphs, run-on sentences and an inventive but nonstandard use of commas (i.e. mostly forgetting there is any such thing as commas). It feels like this book should have been written in shorter bursts which made its points more succinctly. As it stands, despite the book's short length, reading it and parsing the enormous blocks of text feels like far more work than it should be for a book that is, by design, supposed to be short, zany and disposable fun.

The character work is fine, by which I mean protagonist Decibel Jones is a monumental tool it's hard to have much time for, but Oort St. Ultraviolet is a well-motivated fellow and we get some well-defined band dynamics. Mira is by far the most interesting character in the book, but gets the least amount of development by dint of having died some time before it starts. The story is okay, but so extremely brief that I wonder if this was originally supposed to be a short story and was padded out to novel length for commercial reasons.

A fairly major problem for the well-read SF and fantasy fan will be the nagging feeling this has been done before, and much better: Terry Pratchett's Soul Music and Robert Rankin's The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code are both amusing and finely readable musical-influenced genre novels (although neither are the author's best). In fact, I kept wondering what madcap monk-genius Rankin would have made of this premise on one of his good days. I suspect it would have been a lot more entertaining. Rick and Morty also produced a reasonably entertaining episode with a similar premise a couple of years back, which was fine (although again not one of the show's best).

Space Opera (**½) is a weirdly-paced, oddly-structured novel which is nowhere near as amusing as it wants to be, manages to raise a few laughs here and there, but is also overwritten and overwrought with a thin story. A quintessentially non-essential read. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Peter Jackson confirms he IS involved with Amazon's LORD OF THE RINGS prequel series, but won't be in charge

UPDATE: After the below was reported, Jackson clarified that he is involved in the new Amazon TV series, but he won't be acting as showrunner due to a lack of experience. Instead, he is advising and helping Amazon put the TV production crew together but otherwise will take a hands-off role on the project.

ORIGINAL STORY: According to The One Ring, Peter Jackson has confirmed that he is not working on Amazon's Lord of the Rings prequel TV series.

To recap, Amazon are developing a TV series set before the events of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (but, thanks to New Line's involvement, still using the same aesthetics) and focusing on the adventures of a young Aragorn. This series is being developed with the blessings of the Tolkien Estate, but they have not given Amazon the rights to use any new material (such as licensing The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales) beyond the rights to The Lord of the Rings they already have, licensed from New Line and Warner Brothers. They also don't have any rights to The Hobbit (which are held by MGM, who apparently complicated the filming of the Hobbit trilogy to the extent that no-one is keen to work with them again).

Previously, it had been reported that Jackson had talked to New Line and Amazon about the project. If so, it appears that those talks have not led to Jackson signing on in any major capacity. According to The One Ring, the miniatures, costumes and surviving sets from the films may be re-used, and it's possible that Weta will work on the project.

It is possible that Jackson may end up in some kind of advisory role, and I suspect Amazon will shovel money at him to direct the first episode, but it sounds like he will not be the showrunner.

Due to licensing issues, the Lord of the Rings TV series needs to enter production in 2020, likely for a 2021 broadcast, or Amazon will lose the rights. Given that this is the most expensive TV licensing deal in history, Amazon need to find a showrunner, writer and production team sharpish.

Grimoak Press to publish limited editions of the RIFTWAR and EMPIRE trilogies

Grimoak Press have announced they are releasing new, limited and illustrated editions of Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga and the Empire Trilogy, co-written by Feist and Janny Wurts.

Fantasy artist Don Maitz will be handling both cover and interior artwork. Magician, Feist's seminal first novel, is first up for the treatment and will be followed by Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon. Feist and Wurts' Empire Trilogy, usually acclaimed as one of the best epic fantasy trilogies of all time, will follow: Daughter of the Empire, Servant of the Empire and Mistress of the Empire.

Although much can be said about how the later books in the Riftwar Cycle (the 29-volume mega-series of which the Riftwar Saga and Empire Trilogy are the opening parts) went massively downhill, these early books are still exemplary, fun fantasy, the Empire Trilogy in particular impressive for its non-European setting, female protagonist and use of non-standard fantasy tropes.

BABYLON 5 Viewing Order & Chronology

I've covered this before in a few different ways, but I thought it'd be good to put this one to bed by combining two distinct orders for Babylon 5 - the ideal viewing order and the actual chronological order of the episodes - into one post.

All episodes/TV movies are listed in optimal viewing order. I list next to them their chronological dates (where known) so viewers can assemble a chronological date if they really want to.

For the benefit of Amazon Prime viewers, you need to select the pilot episode, The Gathering, from the "Season 1 Bonus Features" at the bottom of the season list, and then watch Episode 1 (Midnight on the Fire Line) afterwards and go from there. The six TV movies and spin-off series Crusade are not yet available on Amazon Prime but apparently are on their way.


Optimal Viewing Order

The Gathering (original pilot movie)

Season 1 in order.*

Season 2 in order apart from making sure A Race Through Dark Places goes before Soul Mates and that Knives goes before In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum, as both Soul Mates and Z'ha'dum depend on character motivations changing due to events in the episode before.

Season 3 in order.**
Season 4 in order.

In the Beginning and Thirdspace (TV movies)

Season 5 in order.

River of Souls and Call to Arms (TV movies)

Crusade in one of the orders listed on the Wiki page. The precise order for Crusade is highly debatable.

Legends of the Rangers and The Lost Tales (TV movies)

Some fans will suggest holding back the final episode of Season 5 proper, Sleeping in Light until after everything else as it is set later and puts the final capstone on the Babylon 5 arc. This is a viable moderation to the viewing order.

Chronological Order of Episodes (spoilers)

This is not a viable viewing order, because the prequel movies and so on spoil events from chronologically later episodes. However, this may be of interest. Confirmed dates - ones given in dialogue, captions or can be inferred by the episode's relationship to episodes with confirmed dates - are given in bold. All other dates are speculative or unknown.

Please note that SPOILERS FOLLOW for new viewers so only click past the jump if you're sure:

BABYLON 5 hits Amazon Prime in the USA

Babylon 5 arrives on Amazon Prime in the United States as of today! You can watch the entire series right now for free if you're an Amazon Prime customer.

There are a few caveats. Amazon Prime's deal only includes the pilot movie, The Gathering, and the five seasons of the show itself. The six other TV movies (In the Beginning, Thirdspace, River of Souls, Call to Arms, Legends of the Rangers and The Lost Tales) are not included at present, although some reports are saying they may be added next month. Spin-off series Crusade is also not included at this time.

Also, awkwardly, Amazon have not placed The Gathering at the start of Season 1. Instead, it's listed under "Bonus Material" at the bottom of the Season 1 list, after the Season 1 finale. You should watch The Gathering first, followed by Midnight on the Firing Line and then on from there.

Babylon 5 is a great show, but it takes a while to really start firing on all cylinders. The early episodes are there to set up the world and characters, and some of them aren't great on their own terms. If you get to Episode 4, Infection, and find it's unwatchably awful, the show's creator agrees with you noting that he occasionally wishes the negatives would fall off a pier somewhere). Season 1 starts really taking off with episodes like The Parliament of Dreams (Episode 5), And the Sky Full of Stars (Episode 8) and Signs and Portents (Episode 13), and the last few episodes of the season are all absolute hum-dingers.

My own episode guide to Babylon 5 starts here and may be of interest (and yes, I need to go back and do Season 5 which can also be hard going).