I didn't have time to ask all your Fallout 3 questions in my recent interview. But Pete Hines at Fallout 3 developer Bethesda has come up trumps and now answered the ones I missed. So read on and found out - amongst other things - about Fallout pacifism and how melee combat works.
Will weapons require a minimum Strength? Or only a minimum in its governing attribute? (Perception = Energy, Endurance = Big, Agility = Small).
Weapons do not check for minimum stat values, you can use any weapon you want, the skill/stat just makes you better or worse with the weapon.
How will Attributes be weighted in regards to the Skills they govern? If you want to max out your Big Guns or Speech skills, but don't spend the SPECIAL pts bumping up Endurance and Charisma, how effective will those skills be? Would a 100% skill level in Speech be ineffective if you only had a Charisma of 4, etc?
They provide a boost or bonus to the skills they govern. I don't think we'll get more specific than that as far as exactly how they integrate with Skills. If you put extra points into a SPECIAL, it'll help those Skills beyond what level they're currently at. If you spend all your time leveling up a Skill to a very high level, it's safe to say you'll be very effective at using those skills outside of what the governing SPECIAL is.
Is the Intense Training Perk (permanently raise one SPECIAL) a one time use Perk for one attribute, or one time use PER attribute, meaning you could spend 7 Perks/Levels upping each of your SPECIALs?
You can use it more than once, so yes you could keep upping each of your SPECIALs, but that's going to come at the sacrifice of being able to do quite a bit of other stuff with available Perks, skill boosts, etc.
Is the steal skill really gone, or is it just merged with something else?
It's part of Sneak.
Though Oblivion looked gorgeous on the PS3, there was a noticable dip in framerate when things got busy. Has the work you did converting the PC original of Oblivion to the 360 and subsequently the PS3 assisted you in developing Fallout 3 for the same target platforms, and allowed further optimisations in performance?
Well, it didn't work that way. We didn't convert the PC to the consoles, but the gist of your point is whether working on all that has helped with Fallout 3, and it absolutely has. We have WAY more detail on the screen, loading is faster, and so on. I would imagine you'll see a noticeable difference.
In Fallout 1, there were only three key locations that you needed to visit to complete the game - The Cathedral, Military Base and Necropolis (the last one being optional, actually) . These places could be done in any order, creating Fallout's exceptional nonlinearity. Is Fallout 3's main quest structured in similar fashion?
Hmm, parts of it are, parts of it aren't. There are several large sections of the main quest that you can actually skip if you do things right.
Specific body parts cannot be targeted when fighting with melee weapons or in hand to hand combat. What is the reason behind this decision? Does melee/HtH fighting offer something else to compensate?
We tried many ways of doing melee with VATS, and having messed a lot with "missing" in melee, it just felt really bad. So once we changed VATS melee to "always hit", assuming you are in range, the body part selection became a bit unbalancing, so now it's a "whole body attack", but you still do end up hitting a specific body part when you swing, but it's based on what you actually contact with, as opposed to what you aim at. This avoids the "always punch in the head" problem, whereas with guns, we can balance out certain body parts with hit percentages, like the head.
Charisma influenced the speech skill, NPC's responses and how many followers you could have. Since Fallout 3 allows only two followers, has Charisma's role expanded to some other region?
Even though you have only one follower, having a higher Charisma definitely helps in Speech challenges and successfully using special dialog options you have when talking to folks. Also it's very helpful in bartering with people.
Can you tag Medicine, Repair and Barter, and focusing on those skills, still be able to complete the game?
Sure. We recently had someone play through the game and finish it while only killing one thing very early in the game...a Radroach. I'm not saying I recommend everyone run out and try to play the game as a pacifist, but if you want to give it a try, it has been done.
Will damage effects be area specific? Like if I shoot the arm, the arm gets bloody/blown to bits. So far the demos show *head gets shot, leg gets blown off*.
The demos look like that when the character in the demo has the Bloody Mess perk. Bloody Mess randomly makes parts fly off that aren't related to what gets hit. You should recognize that aiming at a part (eg, head) doesn't always mean that's the only part that either does or doesn't get hit. A shot at a head can hit an arm, or an arm shot can hit a leg. But yes, damage effects are area specific. Each body part has a status bar that lets you know how much damage that part has taken. Once that bar goes down to zero, that part is considered crippled and the enemy will suffer the effects. Incidentally, it works the same way for your character and you'll also suffer those effects as your body parts get crippled.
Can I gain reputation with Supermutants? Or ghouls? Or even Raiders? Can I work with them instead of against them?
We're not really talking about that yet.
Can we 'skin animals' to make/sell stuff?
"Mostly" no. There are a few instances of using animal parts to make and sell stuff.
