Pete started up a new game save, and though he wouldn’t say where or when this next encounter occurs, he did say it was close to the beginning. This next encounter is where Dog Meat is introduced: Dog Meat’s owner is killed by a group of monsters, which you have to fight off. Pete explains that you can “have him join you as your own little canine companion.” He demonstrated that by the press of a button, the dog can search the surrounding area for weapons. As the attackers did drop weapons, Dog Meat will pick it up and bring it back to you. The dog actually brings back a pipe that the attackers used to kill its owner. Pete explained that he can ask him to go find him food, tell him to stay put, or send him to the Vault 101 entrance and say, “Go wait for me there until I come and get you.” Basically, Bethesda has designed the dog to be your faithful companion, no matter how good or evil your character becomes.

One thing we were told by Pete about the Fallout world is that they don’t warn you when you’re going into an area where you will get your ass handed to you. You need to be careful and choose your options and areas carefully. Of course, you can always go back when you’re beefed up, but if you don’t want to get humiliated, you need to choose wisely. Another thing we were told was that there will be no vehicles in the game. The only means of transport is walking. Of course there will be a fast travel system similar to Oblivion, but in order to use that, you must have been to the location first. We did ask whether or not this was a good idea and Pete responded, “We can press the space so that you are not talking about walking for 30 minutes to get from one interesting place to another. We can press it so that there is always cool stuff to find and things to do.” That eased our thoughts.

As the game was playing, Pete showed us the junkyard so he could show us some explosions using the Fat Man. He demonstrated a chain reaction of explosions where the fire spread from car to car, each explosion different depending on the size of the car. He also told us that once the cars are blown up, they stay blown up. They don’t reset once you leave the area, and this principle goes for everything. We asked about destructible environments he responded, “We do decal damage on the environment in the way of bullet marks on concrete and asphalt and stuff like that, but we do not do any kind of terrain defamation. So vehicles are really the only thing that you can explode. Objects will blow around the world, so barrels and stuff will get knocked around and what not. But you cannot crumble buildings.”