Fallout 3 - More Coverage

Two new Fallout 3 items today.  First, VideoGamer.com has a preview, covering the same presentation we've all seen before.  A bit on weapons:

There's far more to weapons combat than just targeting an enemy and pressing fire. For one, weapons can take damage and jam during use, meaning you need to keep them in tip-top condition if you're entering a dangerous area. You can also acquire schematics for special weapon variations of each gun in the game - although these will take some finding. One area, set in what looked like trenches, saw numerous grenade traps. Peter was able to avoid them, but the pursuing super mutants weren't so lucky. Fallout 3 isn't a game for kids, so expect plenty of gore too, with limbs flying off in all directions.

...and IGN has an interview with Pete Hines:

IGN: Moral choices play a large part of the Fallout experience – how does this compare to games such as BioShock?

Pete Hines: I thought BioShock was terrific. It obviously draws some amount from Fallout, which is part of the reason why I like it, in that they borrowed the holo-tapes and stuff like that. I think the thing about Fallout that's unique is that is very much open-ended and up to the player in that there's moral choices and they're not in linear fashion, so you feel you have a lot more choice in terms of where you're going to go and what you're going to do. BioShock is very much a linear experience, you can harvest the little ones or you can save them, but still at each point you're going point to point and making that decision. To that end, that's where the difference in ending comes about. If you harvest the first little sister but save the rest of them, you still get the bad guy ending, and there's no ending for the guy who started harvesting little sisters but then had a change of heart and decided to save them as the story went on – where's that ending? That's where the 500 endings of Fallout come into play, we want to take into account if you started playing the game really evil and then turn into a good guy, then the story that you told is very different. Those endings are all different flavours to how you played the game, as opposed to whether you were good or you were evil.