OH MY GOD, THERE’S A NEW ELDER SCROLLS COMING OUT!  Ever since Oblivion, I’ve been eagerly awaiting any news on a new Elder Scrolls game.  Sure, the expansion packs for Oblivion provided hours of adventuring and fantasy combat, but I need a full-on sequel.  This new Elder Scrolls entry will be called The Infernal City, and will revolve around a mysterious floating city that is raising corpses to kill the living.  Sounds pretty cool.  It’s already available for pre-order on Amazon, which describes the new adventure thusly,

“Four decades after the Oblivion Crisis, Tamriel is threatened anew by an ancient and all-consuming evil. It is Umbriel, a floating city that casts a terrifying shadow–for wherever it falls, people die and rise again. And it is in Umbriel’s shadow that a great adventure begins, and a group of unlikely heroes meet. A legendary prince with a secret. A spy on the trail of a vast conspiracy. A mage obsessed with his desire for revenge. And Annaig, a young girl in whose hands the fate of Tamriel may rest…”

Wait, it’s a BOOK?!?!  DAMMIT!

Alright, fine, so there’s not a new Elder Scrolls game coming, but a novel based on the ES universe.  This will be the first of two novels that will explore the huge world of the Elder Scrolls, and is written by Greg Keyes, who has previously written books in the Star Wars: New Jedi Order series, as well as a Babylon 5 trilogy and several books in the sword and sorcery genre.

Despite its lack of a dynamic combat system, an explorable open-world environment, or branching storylines, I may check this book out.  The Elder Scrolls universe is an incredibly rich and deep fictional reality, and I’m actually pretty surprised that it hasn’t gotten the novelization treatment before.  I’m really curious to see if the book will make it into a future Elder Scrolls game as one of a million readable in-game tomes.

Now, where’s that sequel?