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Fallout. That name may not mean much to console gamers, but fans of PC role-playing games revere it. Published a decade ago by Interplay, Fallout became an instant classic by blending excellent role playing with a memorable setting and an ironic sense of humor. Fallout was followed by the equally popular and critically adored Fallout 2, but the series almost died along with Interplay's fortunes. That's when Bethesda Softworks, maker of the highly successful The Elder Scrolls series, swooped in to purchase the Fallout name and property. The result of that is Fallout 3, an incredibly promising and beautiful RPG that's set to arrive on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 next year. Bethesda has actually been working quietly on Fallout 3 for years, but the company finally opened its doors to show off the game, and we were there for a very first look.

Welcome to the world of the 24th century! Unfortunately, it got nuked some time back.

The combination of Bethesda and Fallout may seem a bit strange. After all, Bethesda is known for first-person fantasy RPGs, such as the blockbuster hit Oblivion, which let you roam around pastoral lands armed with swords and sorcery. The Fallout games were top-down RPGs where you go around a nuclear wasteland armed with shotguns and assault rifles. However, Bethesda does have a history with postnuclear war games featuring guns (1995's Terminator: Future Shock was one of the very first first-person shooters with mouse-look), and executive producer Todd Howard explained that the folks at Bethesda have always been huge fans of Fallout. "It's the kind of game that we really love, in terms of [how] you make the kind of character that you want and then you do whatever the hell you want," he said. In fact, Howard said that the company had toyed with the idea of offering to make a new Fallout game when the sequels stalled at Interplay. When the opportunity to purchase the rights for Fallout came, Bethesda leapt at it.

First, here are some key basics about Fallout 3. Yes, it's a first-person game, but it also has a third-person camera if you like to play that way, and the camera can be moved so that it almost mimics the perspective of the original Fallout games. No, it's not a pure action shooter, though it can be played like a shooter in some ways, if you want. However, the game does rely on role-playing statistics to determine whether you hit or miss. More intriguingly, you can pause the combat at any time and target specific parts of an enemy's body, just like you could in the original Fallout games. And, yes, it's very much a role-playing game with hundreds of quests. While it only has a few hundred characters as opposed to the 1,500 in Oblivion, each of the characters in Fallout 3 will have his or her or its own distinct identity and dialogue. But we'll cover all of this in a bit.

Fallout 3 is set approximately 30 years after the events in Fallout 2, though knowledge of the first two games is not required. The world of Fallout isn't based on our own. Instead, it's the world of 2050 as envisioned by those in the 1950s and then blown up in a nuclear war with China. Your character's ancestors sought shelter in Vault 101, one of the many high-tech bomb shelters built by the Vault-Tec Corporation, which has the grinning Vault Boy mascot that doubles as the mascot for the game. Over the course of the next 200 years, the huge blast door to Vault 101 never opened. And it is into this underground city that your character is literally born. That's because character creation is cleverly tied into various childhood scenes, such as your birth, your 10th birthday party when you are given your Pip Boy (a computer that you wear on your wrist), and your 16th year, when you have to take the vault aptitude test to find out where your talents lie. When you determine the look for your character (you can play as either gender), you determine the look for your in-game father, voiced by Liam Neeson himself. He's the main scientist of Vault 101, and his mysterious disappearance will lead you to escape to the outside world in search of him.

This is your father, voiced by Liam Neeson. His appearance will actually change depending on what your character looks like.

When you reach the outside world, you'll find yourself in the blasted wasteland in and around Washington D.C., a departure from the American West seen in the first two games. This is an area teeming with wild creatures and rival factions, such as the Brotherhood of Steel, which defends the remnants the capital; the Slavers who occupy Paradise Falls, a converted strip mall; and the super mutants, tough-as-nails humanoids looking to take over. This world will be slightly smaller than the one in Oblivion, but that's still big. Where you go and who you ally with will be up to you because the game will have multiple endings. And yes, there will be a definitive end to the game, at which point you can start over to explore the many other choices. And Bethesda really wants to make choices count in this game, much more than it did in Oblivion. After all, in Oblivion you could pursue every quest in the game and be all things to all people. In Fallout 3, the choices will be much more binary, and they will have far-reaching consequences.

The example that Bethesda gave of this involves Megaton, a shantytown built around the worship of an unexploded nuclear bomb. When you arrive at Megaton, you'll eventually have two choices. A stranger will reward you if you rearm the bomb, as he represents a developer that would like to wipe Megaton from the map to make room for a nice postnuclear suburb. Or you can inform the town sheriff of the plot and save the town. If you choose to go along with the stranger, Megaton will be wiped out of existence in a glorious nuclear blast; thus, all the quests and adventures associated with it are gone. However, by blowing up Megaton, you'll open up a new area in the game that you would not otherwise have access to, Tenpenny Towers. But if you decide to save Megaton, you won't experience the quests and adventures associated with Tenpenny Towers. Talk about a tough call.