Fallout: New Vegas PC Gamer Details

The latest issue of PC Gamer magazine hit our mailboxes this weekend, and Ausir over at The Vault has already put together a bullet point list of the new Fallout: New Vegas content contained within.
'¢ The box on the first page of the preview names Bethesda as both the publisher and the developer, while the article text itself gives due credit to Obsidian and discusses the devs' work on Fallout, Fallout 2 and Van Buren.
'¢ New California Rangers wear modified LAPD riot armor. The trenchcoat guy from the teaser is identified as one in the article.
'¢ Gun modifications will increase damage, ammo capacity, accuracy, rate of fire and more
'¢ The player will be able to have two or three companions in their party
'¢ With Raul the ghoul in your party, you'll start to pick up clues that he's more than just a simple mechanic
'¢ Unsurprisingly, deathclaws and radscorpions are mentioned
'¢ From the screenshot, Fore! indeed looks like an attack on the head, not groin, as mentioned in an earlier preview
'¢ The dinosaur casino is identified as Dinky the Dinosaur
'¢ NCR is described as large and powerful but bureaucratic.
'¢ Chris Avellone: "It's a very amusing location design-wise. Vegas is like a whole city-wide amusement park. We can play on different themes, different styles. It's fun for the artists, it's fun for the designers... I don't know how much fun it's going to be for the programmers"
'¢ J.E. Sawyer: "The Karma system is mostly the same as in Fallout 3, but checked less often. Mostly we rely on reputation, because that's what people know. Karma is just a general indicator of how much of a sonofabitch you are. If you murder people in secret, your reputation doesn't go down because no on knows you did anything, so you can maintain a good reputation but your karma has tanked really heavily. Karma does influence some things, but reputation is usually what most people in the world base their opinions of you on."
'¢ Avellone: "We recognized that one of the strengths of Fallout 3 was that so much of the game revolved everything around Washington, D.C. That's your signature city. And to be honest, adventuring in post-apocalyptic D.C. is interesting. You're like, OK, I get it. I know what D.C. is like in the real world, I'd like to see what it's like in the real world when mutants are running around in the streets. So, if we have a western version of Fallout 3, what's a key signature city that people will immediately get when they hear the title? And also, what's interesting to us? So individually, Vegas came up for a number of people without a community discussion about it. That kept coming up. So we said, OK, if within this small sample group that city keeps coming up, and we understand why, that's the city to use."