I played several hours yesterday so . . .
the Fallout games are less so about their (not-so-good) gameplay and more about the world/lore/story that is pretty good (you just don't have many post apocalyptic games). Is there still a lot of dark humor around (I heard it's there just not very often), is the story arcs in the quests good (or just bland/basic), etc, this type of stuff is stuff I'm interested in and if you guys who have it could expand that'd be gr9.
Note that I like Oblivion a lot and Fallout 2 is my favorite PC game. This is relevant!
The writing is surprisingly good! The NPCs in the world are pretty interesting to talk to. Talking to NPCs is pretty fun, actually. It is set up like Fallout and not Oblivion in that you can't talk to everyone - you can only talk to people who are productive to talk to (Quests etc). The dialogue trees are written reasonably well, and even though the choices are as obvious as ever (you always respond with good, evil, neutral, and selfish etc), I'll sometimes get a bit of a chuckle reading through my options. You will definitely spend a lot of time talking to people and as long as you turn subtitles on you can read through quickly and it's more or less just like old-school Fallout. There are always like 5-8 choices to scroll through, which isn't obvious in screenshots. I was worried I would only ever have like three things to say and I was wrong. The quests I have gone on always offer several different solutions, often have different benefactors (quests typically have several interested parties and you have to choose who to please. If you are clever you can often double-deal and betray various interested parties, playing them off of each other.
The much-maligned combat is really awesome, in my opinion. Think of it less like Oblivion, and more like Secret of Mana. You wait for your AP to charge up (they will always be charged up at the start of battle so you have a huge advantage over the AI in combat), and you then go into an aiming system just like the old games. You are free to use the aiming system before your AP charges up, but you will get fewer shots in. A key factor here is that you do much more damage if you use the targeting system versus shooting a target in real-time, even if you hit the enemy in the same place, so not using the targeting system is a waste of ammo. Unless, of course, the enemy is super weak and you can kill it in one shot. The rhythm of the combat ends up feeling like an ATB system from a Final Fantasy game, or the delayed charged attacks system used in Secret of Mana. It really doesn't play like combat in Oblivion because of both this and the absence of magic. Melee combat is a lot like Oblivion, but you can still use the aiming system to ensure critical hits. Melee combat is kind of boring and limited actually!
An interesting minor detail is that Karma is separate from reputation. You can gain a reputation for your actions through whatever things you do that people see, good or evil. Karma is a personal thing, though, and is related to personal guilt. If you break into someone's home or steal, you will lose karma, but if nobody sees you, your reputation will stay the same. There is an intangible quality that makes a game more engaging when you are notified your karma has been affected negatively whenever you do something that nobody has seen you do but would make your character feel guilty.
My major hangup with the game is that the environments look great, but the animations are still silly as hell. You can not play in third-person because the camera is stiff and your character's animation is horrible and ridiculous-looking. So far though it is definitely the best game I have played for a long time!
Hint: Aim for the legs to cripple them, then the eyes for damage... than again that holds true for all melee enemies.
Sadly you can not aim for the eyes or groin in this game - just the head. Big bummer. I hope there is a perk later that gives me this ability because shooting people in the genitals is way too awesome.
