EA announced this week that it had enlisted British Science Fiction writer Richard Morgan to pen the story for Crysis 2, the sequel to its "successful" and beautiful PC first-person shooter. Successful is in quotation marks there because Crysis didn't actually sell that many copies and a lot of those sold were never played because of the extreme hardware requirements needed to get even decent frame rates on the game. That won't be a problem with Crysis 2 as it will be released on the Xbox 360 and PS3 and be optimized to run on less than stellar PCs. Despite needing to run on consoles, the new engine is looking great (as these screenshots--courtesy of EA---show).
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The move to an urban setting really makes this look like a whole new property, and EA likely saw te need for stronger writing given the more recognizable setting. Richard Morgan stormed onto the sci-fi scene in 2002 with the publication of his well-received Altered Carbon, a cyberpunkish thriller with a voice lifted from noir detective fiction. He has continued to publish regularly and seems to have continued with the idea of blending different genres. His latest, The Steel Remains is basically a sword-and-sorcery novel that feels like it takes place on a different planet and with sorcery that really seems more science-based than supernatural.
Crysis 2 is Morgan's first foray into the video game world, but his first novel has been optioned by Hollywood, so his work will soon be exposed to two, much larger than the sci-fi base, audiences.
The history of genre authors teaming up with video game developers isn't exactly great, but Morgan can certainly do nothing to lessen the quality of first-person shooter writing.