Had a huge session of this on Sunday. As soon as I finished playing I tried to work out how the hours had been filled and couldn’t.

Okay, so I obtained the Declaration of Independence. I went to Arlington Library and downloaded some information. And I… er… spent a long, long time wandering around Rivet City, talking to everybody. Oh, and I went back to home in Tenpenny Tower. And found a random cavern full of raiders, who I slaughtered.

That sort of thing.

I also broke the illusion of the game completely at one point. I wanted to open the medicine cabinet in the clinic in Rivet City. I tried to pickpocket the doctor, but he caught me, took his key back and then, um, acted as if nothing had happened. So I got out my shotgun and shot him in the back of the head. Blood everywhere. But he wasn’t dead, just unconscious, and I couldn’t search his body. Ten seconds later he got up, dusted himself down and acted as if nothing had happened, welcoming me to the clinic.

Oh. Oh well.

I thought maybe there’d be more consequences. And I’d love it if it used the Morrowind system for killing NPCs, rather than using Oblivion’s unkillable NPCs. (In Morrowind you could kill anyone – if you had the skills to do so. If you killed an NPC essential to the main quest a message would appear letting you know, so you could reload your last save game. Much better than immersion-breaking immortal characters, I reckon.)

Not that any of that hurts the game in any significant way, but I always thought Fallout was about choices and consequences – it does hurt a little to have some of those choices taken away.