JAMES SWALLOW

The Official Site of Bestselling Author James Swallow - COMING SOON!

Games

Ghost Recon Wildlands: Fallen Ghosts – Out now!

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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!

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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

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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.

You Are Hearing Me Talk…to Front Row

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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!

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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.