Fallout: New Vegas Preview

The folks at Shacknews are next in line to conjure up a hands-on preview of Fallout: New Vegas, courtesy of the build being showcased at this weekend's QuakeCon.
Crafting will play a much larger role in Fallout: New Vegas than in Fallout 3 with dozens of recipes available. Players will be crafting ammo, guns, and cook up items from those numerous body parts collected from slain wildlife. It's a nice change of pace from only being able to create the spectacularly unique weapons and should help in the game's optional "Hardcore" mode, which will certainly increase the player's reliance on getting everything they can out of the game's items.

In my brief hands-on time, there main quests I came into contact with seemed well designed and nuanced, while some of the side quests came off a little generic for my taste. In one bar, two NPC's standing next to each other both handed me functionally identical quests--go out into the surrounding area and find three specific NPCs--with different objectives and story content. Hopefully, this represents a rare occurrence as a game like this will live or die by its quest diversity. I only had about an hour and a half to play, so I'm not too worried at this point.