Last week's rumours have been confirmed: Baldur's Gate III is coming from Larian Studios.
The Baldur's Gate series is regarded as one of the finest computer roleplaying game series of all time. Consisting of the titles Baldur's Gate (1998), Tales of the Sword Coast (1999), Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000) and Throne of Bhaal (2001), the series was set in the Forgotten Realms fantasy world and used a derivation of the 2nd Edition of the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons rules. It launched the career of developers BioWare and has been credited with paving the way for the renaissance of the Western roleplaying game genre.
Larian Studios are the developers of the critically-lauded Divinity: Original Sin series. Baldur's Gate III will use technology developed for that series and will be a party-based adventure (controllable by a party of players in co-op or a single player) drawing on the 5th Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons rules system. The game will be set in the present day of the Realms setting, 122 years after the events of Baldur's Gate II, and will see the heroes gathering together to face down an illithid invasion of the city of Baldur's Gate.
No release date has been set for the game; some reports suggested it would be available for the launch of the Google Stadia service in November this year, but this has not yet been confirmed.
Obsidian Entertainment's science fiction roleplaying game The Outer Worlds has been given a release date: 25 October 2019.
The game, an original title in a brand new universe, sees the character (who can be fully customised by the player) waking up from cryo-sleep in the remote Halcyon system, which is dominated by powerful corporations. The player finds themselves embroiled in a struggle between the different factions and can choose which side to support and which characters to align with.
Created by the team behind the original Fallout and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, the game will be available on PlayStation 4, X-Box One and PC via the Windows and Epic Game Stores (with a Steam release to follow in 2020).
Over seven years after first announcing it, CD Projekt Red have finally provided a release date for Cyberpunk 2077, which is either the most eagerly-awaited video game of the next year or the most eagerly-awaited entertainment product of all time, depending on your hype level.
To commemorate the date, CD Projekt Red have released a new cinematic trailer. They have also confirmed that Keanu Reeves will be playing the iconic role of Johnny Silverhand, an ex-rock star who is now deeply immersed in the world of corporate espionage. Reeves voices the character and also had his likeness digitally scanned.
Set in Night City, California, in 2077, Cyberpunk 2077 tells the story of a hacker who gets in over their head. Unlike their previous Witcher games, Cyberpunk 2077 will allow players to create their own protagonist and customise them extensively to tackle a long, branching storyline which responds to their actions with numerous sub-quests.
Cyberpunk 2077 will be released on 16 April 2020 on PC, PlayStation 4 and X-Box One.
At 01:23:40, Moscow Time, on 26 April 1986, the core of Number. 4 Reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in the Soviet Union exploded. A vast fire took hold and started belching plumes of radioactive smoke into the air. Radioactive particles eventually fell as far afield as northern Scandinavia and Britain. In the aftermath of the disaster, nuclear experts were sent to the site to lead containment and clean-up efforts, among them Valery Legasov. Legasov's actions and those of the scientists with him helped prevent a turbine steam explosion of much greater proportions, and allowed the clean-up to proceed. But Legasov's investigation revealed a fatal design flaw in the reactor design, one still used at a dozen other stations across the USSR, and his struggle to warn the world and lead to reform was challenged by a bureaucracy where accountability and passing the buck are the norm, and truth and lies were seen as only theoretical concepts.
Chernobyl is a co-production between HBO and Sky TV which attempts to recreate the worst nuclear accident in human history, explain why it happened and what happened afterwards. Written by Craig Mazin (the Scary Movie and Hangover franchises, believe it or not) and directed by Johan Renck (Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Halt and Catch Fire, and music videos for New Order, Madonna, Beyonce and David Bowie), Chernobyl is an impeccably-researched series which veers between outright body horror, taut character drama and hauntingly beautiful scenes rich in atmosphere and melancholy.
The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was one of the defining moments of the era. Years later, Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that it may have been the event that marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, as the implacable visage of Soviet engineering competence was fatally cracked. Following the Three Mile Island incident in the United States, it caused the world to reassess its relationship with nuclear power and dramatically slowed the building of new reactors. To what extent this was an overreaction is something the series itself debates, with it noted that Soviet-era reactors lacked the containment vessels and other safety features enjoyed by Western designs that would have prevented the same kind of accident from occurring.
The series is focused on the real-life character of Valery Legasov, perfectly played by Jared Harris. Harris has been one of the most reliable and astute actors of modern times, fantastic in Mad Men, The Crown, Fringe, The Expanse, The Terror and many, many other productions, but he's not been a household name. Chernobyl should change that, and if Harris doesn't walk off with a ton of awards, there is no justice in the world. His more famous co-stars Stellan Skarsgård and Emily Watson are also utterly fantastic, and scenes between these three actors are worth their weight in uranium. The entire cast is excellent, with Paul Ritter (best-known in the UK for his comic role on Friday Night Dinner) particularly making the most of his small but crucial role as Anatoly Dyatlov, the assistant chief engineer whose bull-headed approach was at least partially responsible for causing the chain of events leading to the explosion.
The five episodes are divided broadly between two narrative strands. The first and most consistent focuses on Legasov's investigation, aided by Ulana Khomyuk (Watson), a composite character of a dozen or so scientists who worked on the disaster, and the attempts by Boris Shcherbina (Skarsgård) to give them political cover and allow them to work. The relationship between Legasov and Shcherbina is fascinating, moving slowly from mutual dislike and antagonism to respect and support with total conviction.
The second narrative strand is more of an anthology, following several characters whose lives are impacted by the disaster. These include Lyudmilla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley), the pregnant wife of a fireman who works on the blaze on the first night and is subsequently moved to a hospital of horrors in Moscow; Andrei Glukhov (Alex Ferns), the head of a gang of miners drafted in to help contain the damage; and Pavel (Barry Keoghan), a young soldier called in to help clean out the evacuation zone of civilians. These subplots allow the sheer scale and scope of the disaster to be understood, and the way it affected millions of people.
The decision to start the first episode at the very moment of the explosion and then delve into the events afterwards feels a bit odd at first, but it turns out to be a stroke of utter genius, as it means we know about as much as Legasov as to what's happened, and learn about preceding events when he does. It's only in the finale episode, when Legasov has a full picture of events that the drama rewinds to the hours and days before the explosion and counts down to the event, allowing the sheer magnitude of the disaster to become more apparent to an audience who now knows that graphite-tipped fuel control rods are a bad idea and the significance of the safety test being run at the time of the accident.
Beautifully-written, impeccably-directed, cast to perfection and with a timely message on the intersection of science, the environment, facts, opinions, propaganda and the truth, Chernobyl (*****) sits comfortably alongside the likes of Threads and Edge of Darkness as fantastic examples of drama acting also acting as a powerful warning. It is available to watch on HBO in the United States and on Sky and Now TV in the UK. The Chernobyl Podcast, which goes behind the scenes of each episode in detail, is also essential listening.
The End Times have arrived. The world is counting down to destruction and the legions of hell and heaven are massing their armies. The demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale are old enemies, so old they're also actually good friends. Faced with the annihilation of humanity and the end of their cushy life of teas at the Ritz and long drives in Crowley's Bentley, they make a pact to help avert the apocalypse and let the human race survive. The problem is that there's been a bit of a mix-up with the Antichrist and now no-one knows where he is. Fortunately, one woman knows exactly what's going on. Less fortunately, she died in the 17th Century.
Good Omens is a six-part television adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's 1990 novel of the same name. The history of getting the novel to the screen is itself epic, with Terry Gilliam trying for years to develop it for both film and TV before giving up. Unfortunately, it took the untimely and far-too-early death of Sir Terry in 2015 to spur the project forwards and finally get it made. Neil Gaiman himself wrote the script, updating it for the modern day, removing elements from the book that didn't work (or were too expensive) and introducing new scenes to make the story work better on screen.
At the heart of Good Omens is the relationship between Aziraphale and Crowley, played to note perfection by Michael Sheen (Masters of Sex, Twilight) and David Tennant (Doctor Who). This relationship is the fulcrum around which the show revolves and it is excellently handled throughout, with the two characters engaging in both humorous banter, mutual support and affectionate sniping at one another like an old married couple. The series highlight is the opening of the third episode, which dedicates a full half of its runtime to exploring the characters' backstory and relationship across six thousand years of human history. Sheen and Tennant's chemistry is palpable and a constant delight.
This relationship is central to the show's success, but it can also feel like a crutch. The other performances are also mostly excellent, but the characterisation feels flatter. Some of this is inherited from the book, such as the feeling that Anathema Device (Adria Arjona) and Newton Pulsifer (Jack Whitehall) should really be the protagonists but the writers realised the demon/angel conflict was far more interesting and pivoted to focus on them. Anathema and Newton remain somewhat underdeveloped on TV as well, despite the best efforts of the actors to make them work, which is an issue when they play a vital role in the resolution of the story. Similarly, the young gang of children feel undercooked as well. Ideally we'd get a Stranger Things vibe going on with them but instead their storyline comes across as bland.
Another slight misstep is the presence of God as the narrator, voiced by Frances McDormand. In some scenes this is effective, but in too many others it's incongruous, over-explaining jokes that don't need explaining or dragging scenes out far too long. Having God explain how the babies get mixed up is an odd choice when we can visually see what's going on and it doesn't need expansion. Good Omens has occasionally been criticised for being a bit too Douglas Adams-like in tone and voice, and the narrator doing the same job as the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (but with far less in-universe justification) certainly contributes to that feeling. The pacing feels like it could be either a little tighter or a little looser. At four or five hours the end-of-the-world countdown tension would have been stronger, but the story would have needed to have been cut a lot more; at nine or ten we've have had more time to develop the secondary characters. But at six hours, enough to polish off in a couple of evenings, it's hard to complain.
Fortunately, everything else is pretty much on fire. Nick Offerman and Jon Hamm do a huge amount with small roles, and the production design, visual effects and location filming are all superb. There's a joy in the attention to detail as the centuries roll by and the protagonists' fashions change only moderately. Most of the jokes land on screen as well as they did in print, and there is a sense of enjoyment from seeing something so quintessentially British (occasionally veering towards tweeness, but being intercepted before it gets there) being rolled out for the entire world on a massive budget and being handled so well.
Good Omens (****) certainly isn't a flawless adaptation, but it is fun, doesn't outstay its welcome and its lead performances are for the ages, even if the rest of the characters sometimes struggle to keep up. It is available to watch now on Amazon Prime.
In sad news, it's been confirmed that actor Paul Darrow has passed away at the age of 78. A veteran of stage and screen, he will forever be associated with the infinitely-quotable character of Kerr Avon on cult space opera TV show Blake's 7.
Born in Chessington in 1941, Darrow studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He picked up his first screen roles in the 1960s, appearing on medical soap opera Emergency - Ward 10 as well as contemporary series such as Z-Cars and Dixon of Dock Green. He also played the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1975 BBC adaptation of The Legend of Robin Hood.
In 1970 he appeared as UNIT Captain Sam Hawkins in the second Jon Pertwee Doctor Who serial, The Silurians (Season 7). He returned to Doctor Who fifteen years later to play Tekker in the Colin Baker story Timelash (Season 22). He subsequently appeared as Kaston Ialdo in the Kaldor City sub-series of audio dramas (2001-04), set in the Doctor Who universe but not involving the Doctor.
In 1978 Darrow was cast as Kerr Avon in Blake's 7. Writer Terry Nation wanted a second lead, a coldly logical, amoral and cunning foil to the idealistic heroism of lead character Blake (Gareth Thomas). Darrow debuted in the second episode, Space Fall, and appeared in every subsequent episode until the end of the series; only Michael Keating as Vila appeared in more episodes than him. Darrow played Avon as ruthless, conniving and sometimes even treacherous, but with a massively-buried sense of decency that emerged at inopportune moments. Avon rapidly became the most popular character on the series, mainly thanks to his tendency to puncture the heroic speeches of his fellow rebels with cutting sarcasm or devastating one-liners.
Gareth Thomas left the series at the end of Season 2, leading briefly to conversations that the series might have to end (with the question, "Can you have Blake's 7 without Blake?" logically being asked). Avon was effectively promoted to lead character, continuing the revolution without its leader. Darrow noted this would cause a huge case of conflict for the essentially selfish character, and for the remainder of the series portrayed Avon as effectively cracking up from the stress caused by him trying to lead a cause he didn't always believe in. The writers picked up on this conflict and used it to drive some of the most dramatic moments in the series, culminating in the series finale where Avon mistakenly believes Blake has betrayed him and has an effective mental breakdown. The series ended after four seasons with Avon either dead or captured by the Terran Federation, a cliffhanger that was never resolved because the BBC oddly cancelled the show, despite huge ratings.
Following his work on Blake's 7, Darrow continued to act mostly in the theatre (where this writer caught him in an excellent staging of MacBeth in 1996), including a run as Sam Vimes in the touring play version of Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards!
Darrow also developed a side-line in working in video games. He was particularly excellent as Walker in the superb 2001 strategy game Hostile Waters, where he acted alongside fellow Blake's 7 alum Glynis Barber and former Doctor Who Tom Baker, in a script by Warren Ellis. He also played Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: Empire at War, Zarok in MediEvil and Overseer Tremel in Star Wars: The Old Republic.
However, Blake's 7 continued to overshadow Darrow's career, something he did not resent but in fact actively embraced. He acquired the rights to the series in the mid-1980s and worked on several projects to bring the series back, initially as a sequel but later as a reboot. At different times ITV, Sky TV, SyFy and Microsoft worked on different versions of a reboot but ultimately all passed on the project. Darrow continued to be involved in the production of audio dramas, several times reprising his role as Avon, and wrote a novel, Avon: A Terrible Aspect, in 1989. In 2006 Darrow penned his autobiography, You're Him, Aren't You?, which he also recorded the audiobook for.
Darrow suffered an aortic aneurysm in 2014, which required the amputation of both of his legs. Despite being restricted to a wheelchair, he remained active and appeared alongside fellow Blake's 7 actor Michael Keating on the quiz show Pointless just last year.
This is sad news, as Darrow's performance on Blake's 7 was a magnificent display of portraying a selfish, amoral and unlikable character but making the audience root for him anyway through sheer charisma. He will be missed.
The Russo Brothers, directors of multiple Marvel movies including Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Civil War, Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame (which should imminently become the highest-grossing movie of all time), have pivoted to Netflix and animation, where they are developing a Magic: The Gathering TV series.
Magic: The Gathering is a card game where players engage in battle using cards to represent spells and summoned creatures. Designed by Richard Garfield and originally released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast, the game was an immediate smash hit, selling millions of cards in a short space of time. The game made Wizards of the Coast hugely successful, leading to them buying TSR (the creators of Dungeons and Dragons) in 1997. Wizards in turn were bought out by Hasbro in 1999. In 2015 it was believed that more than 20 million people worldwide had played the game.
The game has expanded far beyond its original incarnation to incorporate video games and novels. Some of the settings from the card game have also been developed as campaign settings for the current Dungeons and Dragons rules set.
Hasbro were keen to develop the property as a movie, point tapping Game of Thrones writer Bryan Cogman to write a script in 2014. However, the project stalled and appears to have now pivoted to television, with Hasbro's Allspark Studios working on the project. Joe and Anthony Russo are working on the project alongside Henry Gilroy (Star Wars: Rebels) and Jose Molina (The Tick), who will serve as the head writers. The series will apparently follow the adventures of a band of planeswalkers, including Chandra Nalaar (pictured in the concept art above), a popular character from the fiction.
No production timeline has been released, but I imagine we'll see this project in 2020 at the earliest.
Netflix are also collaborating with Hasbro on War for Cybertron, a Transformers prequel TV series aimed at older viewers.
A massive space hulk, an accumulation of thousands of vessels long lost to the warp, has emerged in the Realm of Ultramar, close to the agricultural world of Iax. The Ultramarines land on the hulk in force, planning a thorough reconnaissance before destroying it. They find signs of the taint of heresy, but also incredibly technological resources which could reinforce their battle against the enemies of mankind. Reluctantly, Chapter Master Marneus Calgar allies with both the Inquisition and the Adeptus Mechanicus to explore the hulk and seize its secrets in the name of the Emperor.
Calgar's Fury is the second book in a trilogy which explores the history and backstory of Marneus Calgar, Chapter Master of the Ultramarines and one of the most famous warriors in the Warhammer 40,000 setting. The first book, Calgar's Siege, depicted how Calgar stood fast against the orks at the gates of Zalathras in a massive siege involving tens of thousands of troops.
The scale of Calgar's Fury is smaller, with a hundred or so Space Marines and allies dropped onto the space hulk Fury to delve into its secrets. This makes for an immediately much more claustrophobic and tense story. Exploring a space hulk has been a cornerstone of the Warhammer 40K setting ever since the release of the Space Hulk board game in 1989, followed by the Space Crusade game of a year later. Drawing influences from the likes of Aliens and Starship Troopers, the trope pits well-trained and well-armoured troops against overwhelming odds in tight corridors on an ancient spacecraft that could collapse at any time.
Kearney enjoys himself to the full here, painting the various characters in great depth and taking advantage of the competing interests (the Ultramarines, Inquisitions and Adeptus Mechanicus each have their own agenda) to create drama among the human characters. There's also a refreshing approach to the cliches of 40K here. Most space hulk stories pit humans against genestealers (an offshoot of the tyranids) or Chaos, but Calgar's Fury blurs the lines between the factions and makes for a more morally murky and uncertain story, an area where he thrives.
There is indeed a lot of action and fighting in the book, but it takes a surprising amount of time to arrive. The opening section of the book is a masterclass in slowly building, mounting dread as the Imperial characters investigate the mystery of the hulk and only gradually become aware of what it is they are dealing with. There are also several splendid plot twists and reversals that keep the reader guessing at what is going to happen next. The pacing is excellent, with Kearney letting the story last as long as it needs to and then clearing out without much fuss.
Calgar's Fury (****½) is a spendidly superior slice of science fantasy, tense and atmospheric building anticipation where the action, when it arrives, does not disappoint. It is available now in the UK and USA.
Scriptwriter John Rogers has completed his writing for the first season of Showtime's Kingkiller Chronicle prequel TV series.
Rogers announced the completion of the writing on Twitter, and that he is now working on revising the overall season arc to make sure it all hangs together.
Showtime greenlit a TV series that will serve as a prequel to The Kingkiller Chronicle last year, although Rogers has been working on the project since 2016. The series is expected to be set decades before the novels and will feature Kvothe's parents as important characters. Lin-Manuel Miranda is serving as executive producer and composer for the TV series, and has already delivered several songs for the first season.
A trilogy of movies which will directly adapt the books is also in development, but suffered a blow when director Sam Raimi, who was being courted for the role, chose to move on to other projects. Without a major director helming The Name of the Wind, it's less likely that the project will move forwards. However, with the third and concluding novel in the series still unpublished, time is not a critical factor at the moment.
Rogers' previous credits include writing or co-writing the movies Catwoman, The Core and Transformers, and working on TV series such as Leverage, The Librarians and The Player.
According to Rogers, the first season of the show will consist of ten episodes. It will start filming before the end of this year for transmission on Showtime in 2020. The Kingkiller Chronicle is part of Showtime's aggressive plan to reassert themselves in the genre TV space, where they've been outshone by HBO (Showtime rejected the Game of Thrones pitch in 2007, presumably to their regret), Starz and AMC in recent years. As well as Kingkiller, they are working on a big-budget Halo TV series which is in the casting phase.
The crew of the Wayfarer are a tight unit with a complicated history. Rosemary Harper is a newcomer to the vessel, having to find a way of fitting into the crew whilst also avoiding her own past. But all of the crew of the Wayfarer have their secrets and their demons. When the ship accepts a commission to fly all the way to the galactic core (a journey of a year) to build a new hyperspace tunnel, these secrets will come spilling out.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is the debut novel by Becky Chambers and the opening volume in the Wayfarers series. The novel was crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2012, a result of Chambers not being able to find a publisher for the book, and it has since been a huge success. It was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke, British Fantasy Award and Kitschies, and its two sequels and the series overall have been nominated for Hugo Awards.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet opens in a highly familiar manner, with a cast of mistmatched characters living together on a spacecraft being established. From Blake's 7 to Farscape to Firefly to Colin Greenland's Tabitha Jute trilogy to Chris Wooding's Ketty Jay series, this remains a rich and engaging way of establishing character relationships and drama, and here is no different. What is slightly more unusual is the structure. There's relatively little in the way of space heroics or daring-do, with instead the focus being more on character exploration. Through successive episodes, we learn more about each of the characters on the ship: new clerk Rosemary, reptilian navigator Sissix, the medical officer/cook Doc Chef, the navigator Ohan, fun-loving engineers Kizzy and Jenks, buttoned-up algaeist Corbin, ship's AI Lovelace and Captain Ashby.
Despite it's moderate length (just over 400 pages), The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is therefore more of a themed anthology or mosaic novel, a collection of short stories focused on each character with their shared mission (to the titular angry planet) cohering the fragmented narratives into a whole. It's a successful structure, meaning we get to know the crew in great depth before they come together to confront a crisis at their destination.
It's also a refreshingly non-violent space opera. There are moments of jeopardy and danger, but Captain Ashby is a pacifist who doesn't carry weapons on his person or his ship, so they have to think their way out of each situation rather than opening up with guns blazing. It's a more old-skool form of space opera in that sense, with people out-thinking their opponents rather than nuking them.
On the negative side, the chill pace of the novel means the ending explodes almost out of nowhere, with the entire plot wrapped up in near-indecent haste. That's not necessarily a huge problem - the book is very literally all about the journey, not the destination - but the ending of the story does verge on the perfunctory, although the individual character arcs do have satisfying endings. Some may also find it odd that we spend an entire novel building up the characters only to promptly abandon them: the sequels A Closed and Common Orbit and Record of a Spaceborn Fewpursue (mostly) different casts of characters in other parts of the galaxy. However, the Wayfarers series is ongoing and we may revisit these characters further down the road.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (****) is a highly entertaining space opera, with a laudable focus on rich characters and a refreshing desire to avoid the cliches of the subgenre. The book's relaxed pace and lack of tension may not be to everyone's liking, but it makes for a different and enjoyable focus to the book. It is available now in the UK and USA.
