Following the release of Bethesda and Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas debut trailer, new gameplay details have emerged which we've listed for you in point form below.

• Contrary to Fallout 3 veteran hope, you won't be carrying over your Vault 101 character, but will be instead filling the shoes of a courier who was buried in the desert and revived from an ex-Vault doctor who will give you a Pip-boy (meaning, presumably, your character is the one in the trailer).
• The game is set in the Mojave desert and will chronicle the struggle between three warring factions; The California Republic, Caesar's Legion and New Vegas residents.
• A 'Hardcore' gameplay mode will be introduced that will have you battling dehydration, ammo weight, slower healing (so no immediate use of Stimpaks while in the thick of it) and tougher enemies.
• Super Mutants are back and this time they're smarter, more varied and even have a few new mutated friends.
• VATS returns, but will allow for more melee stuff in line with the original series' humour, such as smashing an enemy in the groin with a gold club.
• On top of your Karma system you'll also find a Reputation system that works individually with each settlement you encounter.
• Failing an alternate conversation path if your conversation skill in any particular area is low won't be an immediate fail; instead it will reap some kind of witticism or verbal slap in the face, again more in line with the original games.
• Finally, you'll recruit followers once again (ala any one of the companions you had in Fallout 3), only now you'll be able to issue basic commands such as "follow", "attack" or "stay". Apparently an example was shown in the form of a Ghoul you rescue from a Super Mutant beatdown.

That's pretty much all we could gleam from scouring the interwebs, but it's all sounding pretty cool. It could be good starting from scratch, though I really would have preferred to bring my guy from Fallout 3 across and have heaps of cross-reference stuff to deal with based exclusively on hardcore decisions I made in F3, but that might be too ambitious a dream at the moment.

whens the release ? i need to finish mass effect 2 first.

much later this year - I'd say either October or November in Au

probably plenty of time yet. The time between the Fallout 3 trailer and release was around a year I think.

PUMPED. stevey you've done a good job getting my hopes up!

i fired up fallout3 last night to try out the broken steel dlc & i get this annoying bug where after the story continues '2weeks later' my character is in like a doctors room but i'm stuck to the table & can't move. let it run like that for over an hour... can't get unstuck from the table. boo!

i remember playing fallout 2, i walked over a puddle of green stuff on the ground whilst just traveling around and a message came up saying i stepped in radiation.

about 2 hours later *about 2 in game days* i get a message saying my foot is itchy, another 2 hours later, i get a message saying a wart has appeared on my foot.. about another 2 hours later, i get a message saying a 6th toe has grown.

I then remember finding some seedy doctor to remove said toe... i then carried it around in my inventory for the rest of the game.

it was little things like that, that made the 2 fallout games so f***ing awesome.

i also remember talking my way into getting a job as a fluffer at a porn studio, and becoming a boxer, finding a random encounter that was a ufo crash, a time machine, the monty python random encounter... oh the memories...

the crashed ufo was in fallout3 wasn't it? my memory of fallout2 is so vague n hazy now :/

There is a crashed UFO in Fallout 3, you find the Alien Blaster there.

this is good timing. i can give bc2 a good smash for 6 months then new vegas comes out. the gaming market is so considerate.