uring E3, Bethesda gave us the opportunity to get our hands on Fallout 3, the company’s long-anticipated post-apocalyptic RPG. While we had a great time in our allotted 30 minutes, we were left craving more. Much more. Well, at Leipzig’s German Games Convention, we got another stab at it. Three of us (Game Informer Online’s Nick Ahrens and Jeff Cork, along with Game Informer Magazine’s Bryan Vore) got an hour with the game, starting with our character leaving the vault for the first time in his life.

As we sat at our Xbox 360 stations, we decided to make the most of our relatively limited time with the game and go in different directions. Afterward, we chatted about our experiences. Surprisingly, even in that short span of time we walked away with unique encounters, observations and more.

Nick Ahrens: I went left out of the vault. Left and backward. I should have looked at the compass, but I was too excited and just ran off. It was like being a kid

Jeff Cork: I kind of meandered straight and ended up running into the ruins of Washington D.C. Since we only had an hour, I wasn’t able to get to the Washington Monument; because of the way it’s laid out, there’s a lot of stuff that’s blocked off. You probably have to go through the ruins a specific way to get there, unless there’s some sneaky path I wasn’t able to find in the time I had. I really wanted to check it out, but I couldn’t do it.

Bryan Vore: I went straight south, and I ended up in Megaton, then I proceeded to some abandoned city that didn’t have any recognizable landmarks. There were a lot of scavengers in there.

Jeff: I looked over on your screen at one point, and I saw that you were making friends with the locals in Megaton…

Bryan: Yeah, the first time I spoke to the town sheriff we had a nice little chat. He’s really friendly, but I just kind of made fun of his hat. He was like, “All right, if that’s the way it’s going to be, then you’d better stay out of my way.” My exact response was, “There’s a new sheriff in town. It’s time to die, asshole,” and then I shot him four times in the head until his head came off and rolled down the hill for at least thirty seconds.

Jeff: Yeah, I saw that part, and it was probably one of the most impressive things I’d seen in a while.

Nick: When I went left, my first stop was Springvale High School. I went inside there, and there were some people who didn’t like me and instantly started shooting at me. I started shooting back. After that, I picked up a ton of gear and ended up finding a Mad Max-style spiked uniform, which went well with my Rivers Cuomo glasses. You can imagine how awesome I looked. I had a chance to upgrade some of my skills right off the bat. I put most of it into small arms, because I assumed I’d mostly be getting only small guns at first—and I was wrong—and I chose the gun nut perk, which made me even more effective at shooting.

Jeff: I picked up sneak, which gave me a greater chance to perform critical hits while crouching and undetected.

Nick: Oblivion style…

Jeff: I also put some points in small arms and lockpicking. For the purposes of this demo, lockpicking was completely useless, because I only ran into one locked item and it was so beyond my skill level that it was pretty much impossible to open. Small arms was handy. I grabbed a minigun from one of the super-mutant brutes and I also had a hunting rifle, but I still almost always stuck with my pistol.

Bryan: After I blew the sheriff’s head off, I went into town and stole some noodles from a vendor accidentally—I was trying to talk to someone—and I got a negative Karma indicator and everyone revolted at me.

Jeff: I ran into some negative Karma, too. After seeing tons of scavengers, each one of whom shot at me, I ran into a scavenger in an outdoor store-type area and I killed him. I searched his body and he had a ton of items on him. I highly recommend killing that guy, even with the karma hit. It’s much better than bartering.

Nick: My next stop was the Super-Duper Mart. It turns out, it was the base for some bad guys. Some younger guy asked me to help him find his dad, so I accepted and took a step into the supermarket and started shooting some raiders. One of the girls said, “To hell with this,” and ran off.

Jeff: I had a couple of guys in small groups run away after crippling their heads.