Lionhead boss Molyneux has said that Oblivion was so vast in giving gamers around 60-70 hours of gameplay it almost becomes a ‘book’ you can’t finish.
He says the game was a ”fantastic achievement” but for him it’s just too long a story length as a designer. Oblivion was ”about me killing things,” Fable empowers consequence.
”Well, Oblivion was a fantastic achievement. But for me, that was a true ‘blood and guts’ RPG,” said Molyneux in an interview with T3.
”There was an initial dungeon that you went through that was fantastic - but then you came out into that open world, and I just thought: “What the hell do you do now? Where do you go? Who am I? What do I stand for? Who am I against?” And there was this huge, vast rolling story. And to finish Oblivion would take sixty or seventy hours.”
Bethesda’s Oblivion was hailed as a vast open-world where players could explore to their hearts content to find hidden treasures and nasty beasties. Its main story was never imposing and you could just as easily bugger off and do your own thing for hours on end, just like in Fable.
”Now for me, as a designer, if I hear ‘sixty or seventy hours’, then in my mind that is the equivalent of giving me a book that is twenty thousand pages long,” he explained. ”And if I said to you, here’s a fantastic book, go and read that… Are you likely to finish a twenty thousand page book? No.”
Molyneux says that in Fable 2, ”the story lasts thirteen to fourteen hours and by the end of that story what you are like, what you look like and how the world treats you is completely up to you.”
”If you want to be evil or good or kind or cruel, then that’s totally up to you. With Oblivion it was basically all about me killing things.”
Click here to read the full interview between Peter Molyneux and T3.
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