New details about Fallout: New Vegas hit the jackpot

You can bet your noodle that I’ve already seen some of the leaked magazine scans containing pertinent details about Fallout: New Vegas. I’m not interested in linking to places hosting these scans, but I’m sure your Google-fu is good enough to get you going if you are that curious. I suspect over the next few weeks we’ll get official screenshots and stuff to publicly drool over. Just gotta be patient.

Anyways, here’s some tidbits that raised my eyebrows:

There’s an optional hardcore diffuclty mode, wherein the character will need to drink water to survive the Mojave desert, ammo has weight, and healing with stimpacks isn’t instant.
There are now special moves for melee weapons in VATS. For example, the golf club has a move called “Fore!” which is more or less a groin shot.
Mutant geckos!
Skills will have a bigger effect on conversation choices. Someone with a high Explosives skill may be able to have a coversation about explosives where using them would be 100% appropriate. This makes sense, and I’m amazed it wasn’t implemented before.
There is a Reputation system in addition to Karma.
All dialogue options will beshown to players regardless of whether you have the stats to succeed or not, and there’s no punishment for failure.
Followers can be managed through a context-sensitive menu, with orders like “follow,” “stay,” or “attack.”

Yeah, it’s gonna be good, and from what I’ve gathered…funny. Now, Fallout 3 had it’s moment or two of dark, dark humor, but this time around it seems like there might even be a glimmer of silly or, dare I say, slapstick. Evidently there’s a female Super Mutant rocking some wicked shades and a stripper wig. Can’t beat that for guffaws.

But what I’m most pleased to see is that Fallout: New Vegas is using the same engine as Fallout 3. Some folks might take this as a disappointment, that the series isn’t going forward but rather standing still, but the Capital Wasteland was huge and open and completely explorable without having to drop into numerous (and/or obvious) loading zones. If the same can be done for the Mojave Desert then we’re in for a treat: another ginormous game with tons of locations and quests to suck away more hours of our lives. Ultimately, we should consider ourselves lucky.