More Peter Molyneux talking. Here he goes, talk, talk, talk. And when he's not talking about his new game Fable 2, he's talking about other stuff. Today's other stuff is his opinion of RPG Oblivion and comparing it to Fable 2. According to Molyneux:

Well, Oblivion was a fantastic achievement. But for me, that was a true 'blood and guts' RPG. 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.

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Sony Computer Entertainment announced two new entries in its "the Best" series: Patapon for PSP the Best and Oblivion for PLAYSTATION 3 the Best. Patapon is out September 25th for ¥2,8000 ($US 26) and Oblivion is out September 4th for ¥3,800 ($US 35). Wonder if you can get them cheaper used...

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Having made both Oblivion and Fallout 3, when asked which of the two was the better game, you'd think Bethesda would remain a little impartial, no? Keep thigs civil, keep things amicable between the two franchises? Nope. Speaking in London last week, Bethesda's Peter Hines went on record saying Fallout 3 > Oblivion.

I have no doubts in my mind that, at its core and for everything that it provides that Fallout is a better game than Oblivion was. For sure...I don't have any doubts that on the whole, and I think this is a belief universally shared on the team that Fallout is a better game.

Better than one of the best games of all time? Oh Bethesda, you sure know how to set a man's heart aflutter.
Bethesda: 'Fallout is a better game than Oblivion' [Videogamer]

Leave it to Yahtzee to make me feel bad about a game I spent over sixty hours exploring. I could have sworn I had thoroughly enjoyed myself back then, but now I'm not so sure. I suppose this is the double-edged sword of reviewing older titles. The week before last's Painkiller review made me dig out my copy of that game, and now he has me pondering burying Oblivion.

Of course no one has that much power, and I never did complete that last Shivering Isles godhood quest...

Zero Punctuation [The Escapist]

Worried that Fallout 3 may be a little too dumbed down for your tastes, PC fans? Course you are. The same allegations were levelled against Oblivion, if I remember correctly. Bethesda would have heard your cries, but the sound of millions of dollars in Oblivion sales kinda drowned you out. As for Fallout 3, no, they're not worried about dumbing down a PC game for console gamers at all. Well, they are, but they're equally worried about making a game too complex for console gamers! Classic rock/hard place scenario. Fallout 3 lead Emil Pagliarulo isn't worried about rocks or hard places, however, telling Next-Gen:

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Gamasutra currently has an in-depth interview with Bethesda marketing VP Pete Hines all about Fallout 3 and just how the team plans to meet sky-high expectations for the game. Hines says that while you can't please 'em all, they try to think of the fans as much as they can:

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Your computer would explode. That's what. So let's just play hypotheticals, then, and check out this clip showing what the Imperial City and surrounding countryside look like running on Crytek's CryEngine. The city assets are dropped straight in from Oblivion, but the natural stuff and lighting, that's all new. And gorgeous.
Oblivion To Crysis [Crymod, thanks Will!]

Bit-tech went and asked itself this very question, considering no amount of tarot card reading, crystal ball gazing or deciphering of entrails would provide a reliable answer.

To this end, the hardware review site not only reviewed Vista SP1, but vanilla Vista with hotfixes installed. This way, it could see whether SP1 was just a massive bunch of previously-released hotfixes, or if Microsoft had included some independent performance tweaks.

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The virtual worlds within RPGs are getting bigger by the day, but as an ex-girlfriend once asked us, how big is too big? Fallout 3 is reportedly building a world that, off the cuff, is about 50%-80% the size of Bethesda's last opus, Oblivion. While I enjoy exploring as much as the next guy, given the size of Oblivion, that 50%-80% sounds plenty big to me.

But what would you prefer, to explore humongous, varied worlds with a little content in each place, or a smaller, more compact world with more a higher quest/location ratio?

Fallout 3 [Gameplayer via GamingToday]

GDC's Jamil Moledina has updated his "Director's Cut" blog with details on four new sessions that will be taking place at next year's conference. Here's the summary, for those not into the whole reading thing:

• A talk by Ken Rolston and Mark Nelson of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion discussing collaborative writing
• A talk by Rob Pardo, VP of Design for Blizzard, about the company's approach to multiplayer game design, both what they've learned through titles like World of Warcraft and how they're applying them forward
• A talk with Harmonix's VP of Product Development, Greg LoPiccolo that is a postmortem of a postmortem - a first for GDC - of course, about Rock Band
• A talk with Haden Blackman of LucasArts about the convergent pipeline used in making the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

I find all of these pretty interesting, but top of my list is the Harmonix postmortem postmortem, that could be quite interesting.

A Few of Our Favorite Things [GDC]