Something tells me that Bethesda’s Fallout 3 will own my soul when it hits store shelves next fall. How do I know this? Well I was lucky enough to sit-in on a pretty lengthy demo and question and answer session late last week. Afterwards I came out with a new appreciation for both the Fallout series and Bethesda.

Now I know a lot of people out there are huge Fallout fans, as the series has something of a rabid following. Sadly I can’t speak to how this game does in the canon of those that came before, because honestly I never played the first few Fallout games. I know that loses me some geek cred but it’s something I’m working to fix, trust me. But the creators of Fallout 3 took great pains to mention numerous times what big fans they are of the original games, and that this game will satisfy the old fans while opening it up to new fans as well.

I see this game as the spiritual successor to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. But I can say that what I saw of this game was mindblowing and even at this early stage looks better than Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Also, it ought to be noted that while they repeatedly said load times weren’t optimized they were already worlds faster than Oblivion.

You start the game at your birth in an underground vault, and over the course of a tutorial get older and choose what your skills will be. You’ll choose your stats in-game by taking your G.O.A.T’s (General Occupational Aptitude Test). It’s a cool way to handle a tutorial without feeling like you’re sitting there being lectured. When you reach adulthood you wake up to find your Father missing and you break-out of the vault to try and find him (thus ending the tutorial). You’ll have one last chance to change any of your stats before leaving the vault, but once you’re out… you’re out. What you find on the surface of Earth is a scorched mess, the remnants of a long past nuclear war.

The demo made it’s way across the wasteland, on the way killing some enormous bugs. As an added bonus you can shoot the fusion engine in the broken down cars to do both explosive damage and radiation damage. Radiation, it seems, it going to play a pretty large part in your day to day activities. You’ll need to constantly need to be on the hunt for fresh water, and will need to balance your water intake with your radiation exposure. Water on the surface has a higher level of exposure than what you’ll find deep underground.

We come upon the town of Megaton (named after the unexploded bomb in the center of town). The detail in the structures and in the town in general is really amazing, far beyond what Bethesda was able to do in Oblivion. To show the wildly different paths people can take we’re given the option of either disabling the bomb forever or rigging it to blow, essentially choosing whether this entire town lives or dies. There are characters here, and quests and plot points that will be forever closed if we blow it up. Vice versa an entire quest line will be shut off if we don’t agree to do it. It’ll be those kinds of decisions that will make the game hit home when you’re playing it (For the sake of the demo they ended up blowing up the town, and it looked awesome). Kotaku has an in-depth take on the demo here.

I’d like to focus on a few things I noticed during the demo that I think fans are really going to like. First is the fully functional 3rd person mode. Unlike in Oblivion when 3rd person was essentially a broken mess this time it’s being integrated well enough that you could play the entire game in 3rd person if you wanted to.

Second up is something they’re calling the V.A.T.S. (Vault Assisted Targeting System). What you’re able to do is freeze the game and choose where on your enemy you’d like to attack. So you can go for a head shot for max damage (but low probability of hitting) or aim for the arms/legs/torso. So you can cripple guys running at you with melee weapons and shoot the arms of those guys trying to handle firearms. You use a pool of points to pull off these maneuvers and you’ll have to let them recharge over time, so it’s not something you’ll be able to totally rely on.

There’s tons more and I’m sure over the next few months we’ll be hearing more and more. Even though the game isn’t set to launch until Fall ‘08, this one shot towards the top of my “hotly anticipated” list. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one from now until it comes out for the 360, the PS3 and the PC. Bethesda does it again!