Unlike most role playing games which feature your character as the star of the screen, Fallout 3 is played from a first-person perspective like a shooter.
 
Bethesda's Pete Hines says the first-person viewpoint was chosen because "we felt this was the best way to really immerse the player in this world. You can get up close to all these iconic elements from the original game."
 
You can play in third-person as well, but it will be very difficult. "We have this new over-the-should third-person camera," enthuses Hines, "and it is kinda cool seeing yourself walking around in the vault jumpsuit."
 
In addition to the real-time combat, the game has a system called V.A.T.S. - Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System, which even the most adept first-person shooting fans are likely to want to make full use of.
 
Triggering VATS instantly pauses the action and lets you target specific areas of the enemy such as limbs or the head, queuing multiple moves.
 
Your choices cost action points, and each point on the enemy's body displays a percentage likelihood of damage from your strike based on your skill with that particular weapon.
 
Once selected, your assault is played back using cinematic camera angles, often showcasing gory dismemberment in graphic, slow-motion detail.
 
VATS adds an important tactical element to the combat. You can cripple an opponent's limbs (handy for immobilising an opponent with a melee weapon, for example) target the weapon they are holding, or try killing them with a clean headshot. You can even use it to shoot grenades that are hurled at you.
 
Hines says Bethesda is currently balancing the VATS system so it is not too powerful.
 
At present, you can obviously try to cheat and run up to creatures and then use VATS to increase your chances of a successful strike, but they will do plenty of damage while you are charging towards them, which should be enough of a deterrent.
 
Hines believes VATS really adds to the game's dramatic tension.
 
"I've got enough ammo and health packs to keep myself alive, but in the game all that stuff is fairly hard to come by, so we really want to play up that idea like you're down to your last clip of ammo, you're low on health, you queue up some moves in VATS, and you're like: 'Please, God, let this guy die with this shot...'"
 
During focus testing sessions, most Fallout 3 players have used a combination of both real-time and VATS combat, keeping VATS for encounters with more difficult enemies.

Australia,  July 3, 2008 - Bethesda's marriage of the immense playground that was Oblivion with the acclaimed Fallout series is a union we've all been anxiously awaiting. From what we've seen so far Fallout 3 appears to meld Oblivion's open-world freedom with Fallout's atmospheric post-apocalyptic wasteland to create one of the most absorbing and compelling experiences yet. We'll get to see a whole lot more of this intriguing FPS/RPG combo in a couple of weeks at E3 but before that we were lucky enough to sit down with Bethesda's Pete Hines and pick his brains on how the development is progressing.
 
IGN AU: What did you learn from making Oblivion? What didn't work?
 
Pete Hines: There's no giant 'we can't ever do that again' stuff. It's more how do we design quests, what kind of choices do we let the player make, how do we account for things we think the player might try and do and anticipate those? So that they're like 'Oh, I wonder what happens when I do this?' And then there's actually something in the game that acknowledges it and takes it into account. And they go 'that's really cool that I got to finish this quest in a really unique way and the game recognised that and gave me a satisfying response.'
 
In Oblivion the most extreme example is the bandits, who's armour keeps going up and up as you're playing through the game. Suddenly they've got glass armour and amazing weapons. It was an obvious thing that didn't feel right. So we've spent a lot of time on making sure that the player has the ability to go where they want and do what they want, but to also provide them with situations where they're getting in over their head – so they've got to leave and come back. Or they're getting into situations where they're further through the game and their character is really tough and they get in there and they kick ass and feel like a bad ass for a while because they've spent a lot of time buffing up their character.
 
"What a lightweight. He only had one beer and already he's legless."
 
We've certainly tried to put more stuff on the screen in front of the player to make the world more believable. The dialogue is much more specific to those characters, as opposed to generic lists of things they can talk about. A lot of it is just tweaking and refining stuff that the player won't even notice. Stuff that we're doing behind the scenes to improve the way the game performs. A lot of it is taking those lessons and learning how to apply them better.
 
You know, Fallout is a very different game [to Oblivion]. You've gone from swords and melee weapons and one ranged weapon to now where you've got lots and lots of ranged weapons. It almost flips the gameplay balance stuff.
 
IGN AU: Surely a post apocalyptic wasteland is a tough thing to make look sexy. Were the visuals a challenge?
 
Pete Hines: Absolutely. That level of detail when you're talking about destruction… and you get down to those DC areas where you've got bars sticking out of concrete and you're rendering out everything… or you've got Megaton with all those wires… Those little details are hard to render and pull off well. But you know for us the benefit is that this is our second go around on this hardware.
 
The last time (except for the last couple of months) we were doing it on hardware that was changing all the time because it was still in development. So to develop on something that's now stable and we know how it works and we know what we can and can't do… And we've learnt a lot of new tricks about how to make things look better, run faster and have more detail on the screen than before and have all of that run at an acceptable frame rate. I think we've just benefited from several more years of working on stable hardware.
 
And to your point, it definitely was a challenge to do blown-up destruction as opposed to a forest. I mean they're both challenging but I think Fallout 3 has been more challenging for sure, in terms of being able to put all that on the screen.
 
IGN AU: How do the choices you make about whether you play as a good guy or a bad guy affect the game?
 
Pete Hines: I don't think there are enormous differences. It's more the choices you make on a quest by quest basis. Whether or not you want to play them as a good guy or a bad guy and what the end result of that choice is. So it's not so much about people not talking to you because you're a bad guy with bad karma, as much as it is about using the karma to keep track and keep score on the kind of character you're playing. We want that reward and that payoff to be more in the choices you make and have it be more immediate. 'I'm playing this quest. I chose this path to try and finish the quest this way and how fun or interesting or rewarding was that experience based on the choices I made.' Or if you're playing as an evil bastard we want you to feel like the quest played out in a really satisfying way for me trying to be an evil bastard…
 
It's okay to love your pets, just don't love your pets.
 
IGN AU: Tell us a little about how the health system being tied to water levels has evolved in Fallout 3.
 
Pete Hines: It certainly plays off the original games where water was a big focal point - a theme. We've continued on that legacy. Water is a big, important resource in this world. Where you get it and what kind of radiation you take from it and what kind of health you draw from it.
 
We're playing up this idea that you're in this post apocalyptic world with all this radiation around and how it is affecting you as a player and what sort of impact is it having on you and what you're able to do. It gives you something else to manage and keep an eye on as you move through the world.
 
IGN AU: On the radiation point, if you're choosing to carry the Fatman gun (a mini nuclear bomb slingshot) and use it heavily, will that add to your radiation level?
 
Pete Hines: The Fatman itself doesn't but if you go into any of the locations where one of its nukes has gone off then that will give you radiation. So if you shoot an enemy over there and an explosion goes off and you wander into it, then there will be radiation in that area for a period of time that you will take damage from.
IGN AU: Was it tough balancing the RPG and FPS elements so that both felt right?
 
Pete Hines: We certainly spent a lot of time on that because we felt that the shooter element, what you're doing minute-to-minute, has to look good and feel fun. If that's all you do for ten minutes it has to feel good. There is all this other stuff you can do behind the scenes. It's not just a shooter. It's not that limited. But the shooting has to be good. Because 99 per cent of people at some point are going to pick up a gun and start shooting stuff and if it doesn't feel right and doesn't look right then we have a big problem. We did spend a lot of time on that because we felt it was important to get it right.
 
I think from our internal play-testing, and from some folks who've been able to play it recently, the feedback is that it feels pretty good. It's clearly not just a shooter but it holds up well when you're just running around shooting stuff.
 
"You think the Washington Monument's impressive? Check this out!" (Unzipping sound.)
 
IGN AU: Is it possible to make the stealth elements as exciting as just running and gunning?
 
Pete Hines: I don't know about 'exciting'. If you're trying to avoid combat or sneak past stuff it's tough to make that as fun or as visceral as running around blowing something's head off but at the same time if you're rewarding the player with something that's really unique and different, that you're never going to see if you don't play that way, then that's the big thing. If you played it that way then you get to see a robot melt a couple of super mutants' heads off and there's some hilarious dialogue there and you get to see something that you never would have seen otherwise.
 
The important thing is that the payoff is there and that the gameplay doesn't feel like it's bogged down. It's important to allow the player to play that way and feel like they have the option as opposed to 'I'm playing the game as a stealthy player and there's nothing else for me to do other than to sneak past and avoid everyone all the time.
 
There're going to be occasions where it's not robots. Maybe you're turning on some turrets and it's killing everything in the tunnels because you snuck past some stuff and hacked into a terminal and turned on the turrets. You feel like you're getting to make choices and do things that feel right for the player you're playing. That's what's most important.
 
You can't always make sneaking fun and visceral every second but if the overall experience feels like 'I'm getting to do what I want' and it's satisfying, then we feel like we've been successful.
 
IGN AU: Is it a balancing act between scripting cool, cinematic scenes versus giving players freedom?
 
Pete Hines: I think the freedom can be up to that point. In other words, you can have different elements and scripted stuff that still feels natural within the context of whatever the player is doing because the important thing is not whether or not you ran across the scripted thing but whether we force you down one alley where there's only one thing to see and everybody sees the same thing. You don't have to do that. All the choices that you made up to that point were real choices. You could have decided to go in guns blazing. You could have decided to just never go there and gone somewhere else. You could have got through the area a different way.
 
So, it's more like making the player feel like they have their own path. As opposed to, 'I'm in this level. It looks like there are a lot of ways to go but it turns out that every alley I go down is a dead end, every door I try is locked and there's only really one way I can go.' That feels a lot more heavily scripted and constraining. And that's what we try and avoid.
 
You can do whatever you want. We might have told you to go somewhere but if you don't want to be doing this you can go off and do something else. You don't have to do the main quest if you don't want to. We try and focus more on that as opposed to should we ever use a scripted thing that's going to happen in a certain place. It just depends on what it is and whether this is something we think is really important and we don't want anyone to miss, or whether it's just a little Easter egg that only 10 per cent of people are going to find. You don't want to put a lot of effort into something that's really great and have the vast majority of people miss it.
 
Megaton looks Mega-fun... Sorry.
 
IGN AU: The third-person view didn't feel as slick in Oblivion. How did you develop the first-person versus the third-person views in Fallout 3? Did you focus test both?
 
Pete Hines: For Oblivion we didn't specifically focus test the third-person view. We did some focus testing and let people play however they wanted to play. For Oblivion you could play it in third-person but it wasn't designed to be a separate way to play the entire game. In Fallout it really has been, particularly because it's gun combat. So things like accuracy become much more important. When you're shooting with a gun, the crosshairs and where the bullets are going have to line-up. Whereas when you're using a sword, if I'm swinging here [gestures at his shoulder] versus here [gestures at his stomach] I'm still swinging at you.
 
We definitely spent more time on third-person as a real, viable, 'play the whole game in this way' mode. And it is becoming more popular – the third-person, over the shoulder. I definitely think it's a much more playable, viable option than before.
 
IGN AU: I was intrigued by the custom weapons. The example you gave of the Rock-it Launcher (combination vacuum and a rocket launcher that can suck up and use any object as ammo). Is it possible to use a rock as ammo in the slow-motion VATS shooting mode and watch it cause different animated damage compared to say a bullet?
 
Pete Hines: I don't want to spoil everything. But we take lots of things into account. We spent a ton of time on VATS and making sure that it's fun and unique. There are still a few things for VATS that we've not talked about yet that add more layers of fun and coolness to that mode.
 
IGN AU: You mentioned that your canine side-kick Dogmeat can be killed off. Are there main characters in Fallout 3 you've chosen to make invulnerable, as you did in Oblivion, for scripting purposes?
 
Pete Hines: In very few cases we may have folks who either permanently or momentarily can't be killed. In Oblivion there were a lot of guys who got flagged because we didn't want you breaking quests but in Fallout we try and account a lot more for quests being able to continue on without characters being alive. So here's this quest going on. 'Now what happens if the players kills this person?' 'Oh well, then this happens.' 'Well, then, what happens if they kill this person and that person?' 'Well, then this happens.'
 
We do want to make sure you can continue along the main quest and not fundamentally break your game, but we're able to do that without flagging most folks as essential. This time there's a much larger number of people who can be killed while you still keep playing your game.