But by far the most structured bit of my wandering was at a town northeast of Vault 101. Upon entering the city limits I found two peculiar figures arguing with one another. One was dressed in an ant suit, flanked by several giant ants, and called herself the AntAgonizer. The other wore a bucket on his head and some metal armor, had several protectron robots at his side, and referred to himself as the Mechanist. After a brief exchange of bitter words, the two flung their minions into battle, and I learned that robots with lasers are pretty good at wiping out giant ants. After the skirmish, the two characters took off.

I was able to take advantage of my character's shady skills as an amateur thief and pick the locks of some chests and safes. Picking locks does take a bit of time to get used to, as you have to manipulate a bobby pin with the left analog stick while applying a gentle amount of force to the lock via a screwdriver from the right analog stick. Too much force and you can either snap the bobby pin into the lock, requiring you to start over, or potentially break the lock, forever entombing the items within.

On my hunt for the Family, I ran into a handful of different places of interest. Remember how Oblivion featured dozens and dozens of...two different locations? There were Elven ruins, and there were caves. Ad nauseam. From what I saw so far, Fallout 3 seems to offer a whole lot more diversity in the interior areas you'll encounter. There was a bombed out old drive-in movie theater, a subterrannean industrial complex being used as a hideout by some raiders, an abandoned transit station with a boobytrapped subway tunnel, an old supermarket... Just like the wide range of NPCs, it seemed like every place I found on the map had a different appearance and character to it. (Also, just like in Oblivion, you can fast-travel to any place you've been before just by selecting it on the map.)

On my way there, I stumbled upon an old train yard and ran into a group of mutated radiation victims called ghouls, people with horrifying scars and mutations that make them look more like zombies than people. Apparently they've got quite the complex, because they were trying to make me feel bad about my looks (calling me "Smooth Skin") and guilt-tripping me for being in a rush to get to Minefield. No matter how polite I was, these guys just wouldn't let me off without some snide comment. "Oh, thanks for not killing us hideous monsters. You're sooo kind." Jerks.

XE: What kind of downloadable content can we expect?

Pete Hines: We're planning on doing a substantial amount of DLC for 360 and Windows.

Shack: So what about Steam? Are you guys thinking about getting Fallout 3 on there?

Pete Hines: We're thinking about a lot of stuff. I don't actually know if any of that is set in stone yet, but hopefully there will be multiple digital distribution options for folks that want to go that route.

Shack: Did you put a lot of work into optimizing the PC version, and accounting for people with older machines?

Pete Hines: Yeah, we've been working with folks like Nvidia and having them do compat testing and optimization stuff, and looking at how the game plays on Nvidia cards. We've been doing some stuff with Alienware, specifically testing on different configurations of their machines. So we are trying to do our due diligence on the PC and make sure it runs as advertising.

But the problem on the PC, it's just not--you have a 360, you have the same thing that everyone else has. When you talk about a PC, how much RAM you have, do you have the right video card driver, the right sound card drivers, are you running all kinds of applications in the background that are eating up memory or trying to interrupt the process of the game and makes the game crash--you don't have any of those problems on the 360 or PS3.

So we try as much as we can for account for everything that we can account for, but the killer is all the variables you have no control over. I don't even know if I have the right drivers for anything on my home PC. It's something that you have to spend a bit more effort as a consumer.

Shack: Would you say the PC platform is something you plan on supporting in the long run?

Pete Hines: I think we are. We've been a PC developer for 20 some years now, more than most of the folks that are still around in this industry. That's where we got our start from, and we still think there's a market for it.

We try and take a global view. So while here in the US the consoles definitely do really, really well, globally there are still a lot of places where people still like and enjoy PC games.