Fallout 3 - 3rd Party Q&A

Briosafreak's Fallout 3 blog has collected a ton of answers from the Bethsoft and NMA forums that were written by Ron Burke from GamingTrend, based on what he saw from the press demo. The forum question range from the insightful to the silly and the answers are, of course, limited to having seen a press demo but there are some useful tidbits for those interested. A sample:

Did you see any kids in the demo? If so did they die?
No, we didn’t get to see any kids. Todd said they’d be in the game, but I read in an interview that they are unsure of how they’ll handle them. I think if you have kids and can kill them it is an automatic AO rating, so that probably won’t happen.
One more from me: what’s the weather like? In the screenshots it’s all kinda cloudy and grim - have you seen any blinding and burning sun with these yellowish colors a’la Fallout 1?
It was certainly bright and blinding coming out of the cave. I believe they are using the light technique where your eyes ‘adjust’ to varying levels of brighness (the name escapes me right now) but most of what we saw was the dreary scorched sky.

More information.

I think the whole controversy about kids being able to be killed in the game is stupid. Other games have had killable kids and there wasn't a mention about it and kids get killed in movies and there isn't a big controversy about that.

Well, it's a matter of timing, subtlety etc. etc. Bethesda can't do it, not without getting an AO rating slapped on them. I don't like it, but I can't blame them for it.

Can I ask what movies explicitly show kids being killed? Teenagers yes, but I don't think it is exactly common to see 10 year olds getting their throats sliced.

Didn't some kid die during the first few minutes of "Last Action Hero"?

Anyway, I though we were at the point where you could kill as many people as you wanted, as long as the cute little puppy survived.

They don't actually show the kids dying. They either die off screen or in a huge explosion where you can't see anything.

In a video game you would actually be seeing the child die, unless they could think of some imaginative way for the camera to pan away which seems unlikely.

Why is there so much talk around this anyway? Who wants to kill kids in computer games, or in movies, or anywhere at all? I don't think I've ever had the thought "hmm, time to kill some children!" whether I was playing a computer game or not.

It's nice to have child npcs in games, but just make them immortal, there is no reason to kill them unless you're roleplaying a complete and utter psycho.

Just in case my newspost gets misinterpreted, I couldn't care less. I just chose an early quote. Of all the Fallout 3 "issues", this is the least significant IMO.

This obsession with being able to kill children is disturbing.

Part V is up, thanks to Ron Burke of GamingTrend for the time he spent answering these questions.

Hmm..has anyone asked if Fall Out Boy will do any music for the game? That's seems like too obvious a question though.