Pete loaded up another save, this time taking us just outside of a very large building. He equipped his 10mm submachine gun, which is one of the popular guns from the original game, and turned the light on. Before we saw any combat, we asked what the games position on stealth is. As he walked into this very dark building with his light on, Pete responded, “It effects the environment and the ability of folks to see you. If you have that on versus off, you are easier to detect for enemies.” Problem is you won’t be able to the see where you are going if you don’t have your light on. His perception allows him to see that little red dot on the map, which shows him where enemies are. How well you can see this is based on the character’s perception skill.

As he entered the room, we had our first encounter with one of the games enemies, Feral ghouls. There are three types of ghouls in the game: regular ghouls, who are basically people who were exposed to radiation (they are kind of grotesque looking, but you can walk up to them and talk to them), Feral ghouls, who are ghouls that had their brains melted because of too much of radiation and are now just mindless zombies, and glowing ghouls, which are Feral ghouls that were exposed to so much radiation that they actually absorbed it and began to emanate it, which gives them attacks that set off radiation within a certain area.

This is where Pete showed us more of the VAT system. Using VAT will allow you to target multiple creatures, even specific body parts, at the same time. Once the Vat system is up, we saw the percentage chance to hit each of the different body parts. In this case, there was 23% chance to hit his head, so he took a couple of shots at his head and then moved across the room and took a couple shots at another enemy’s torso. He indicated to us that he had now run out of points. Every time he cues up an action, it flashes how many action points that shot is going to use.

“Each gun has a different rate of fire," he explained, "so for a laser rifle, which is a single shot, you can get off more shots, where these are little controlled bursts on your submachine gun. You know the Fat Man, one shot would take out pretty much all of your action points. The idea is if you go in a VATS mode, and then you come back out and you just run around like shooting, then your action points will not come back as quickly, so you cannot jump right into VATS. We keep you from like running around and pulling the trigger constantly, and always being able to go right into VATS running around. You sort of have to balance it. How much do you want to do in real time, how much do you want to do in VATS?”