Fallout 3

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Your ending will also be greatly affected by how you choose to carry yourself. Bethesda was careful not to spoil anything for us, but they emphasized that the game will contain literally hundreds of different possible endings, based entirely on how you play the game. Every key moment from your quest will factor into it, creating a unique, yet definitive conclusion. It sounds incredibly ambitious and perhaps a little insane, but Bethesda says they've pulled it off. Here's to hoping.

The last two levels shown to us in our demo displayed a number of combat sequences against different types of foes. The first was the office building inhabited by ghouls we mentioned before. These ghouls are emaciated, rotted humans that are the result of heavy radiation poisoning. A few select ghouls still have some semblance of humanity buried within their frail bodies, and these creatures will be NPCs with which you can interact. The rest are purely animalistic, more zombie than anything else. They come in two varieties: standard ghouls and glowing ghouls. The glowers are walking radiation, and when you encounter them a strange thing happens: A quick flash through their eyes shows what life was like at the final moments before their environment was destroyed. We didn't get a clear explanation of what exactly causes this, but clearly there's something going on there.

Combat itself is an interesting animal. Obviously the game is running on the Oblivion engine, but since this is a world of guns and blunt objects as opposed to a world of swords and magic, you'd be right to wonder how it would all come together. The result seems to be a hybrid of the role-playing genre's odds-based combat functionality, and straight-up shooter action. When wandering around an environment, you can simply choose to shoot at any enemy that comes your way in real time or you can opt to use the VATS targeting system.

Short for the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, VATS allows you effectively pause combat and target individual places on an enemy's body. Percentages display to show your likelihood of hitting each spot. Once you've inputted your command, your attack commences outside of your control, and if the dice roll in your favor, you'll kill whatever's coming at you. It sounds slightly bizarre, almost like an automatic death every time, but that's not the case, thankfully, since you have to maintain action points to use the VATS system. Action points are shown in a meter on your HUD, and using VATS attacks depletes it. It replenishes over time, so you just have to keep an eye on it.

Combat looked pretty intense from what we saw. The scene in the building with the ghouls featured plenty of gory, brutal battles, though even more were on display in the sequence set in downtown D.C. Here, we encountered super-mutants: gigantic, hulking creatures with massive armor and heavy weaponry. These dudes don't mess around. They shoot guns, fire rockets, and come at you with giant hammers, all while you're ducking in and out of trenches, trying to make your way to the Capitol building. These sequences also gave us a look at some of the different weapons you'll get to use, from submachine guns to mini-guns to rocket launchers and, our favorite, the Fat Man. This weapon essentially launches a miniature nuke at whatever you're aiming to obliterate, and its destructive power is hysterically entertaining. If watching mutants blow apart or seeing burnt out cars explode with spectacular effect ever gets old, then we'd like to grow old right along with it.