1. It's offline game. I think it's harder than ElderScrolls but still far from annoying online pvp experience.
2. No. You could kill anything you see 99% of the time, but there are several NPC with essential status, some temporary some permanent. Usually it's because they're related to main quest or your current quest or they're children.
100% correct, but there's a few more things to add.
1) Children can't die.
2) Main story line NPCs can die sometimes, but only if there's a backup NPC (per New Vegas, in 3 the characters were all set to essential).
3) Followers can't die. They become unconscious, until all nearby enemies are put down.
4) Some NPCs are randomly bullet proof. I'm thinking of New Vegas here, where a sentient AI can just jump into another Protectron's body when his is felled. The only exception was if you critical hit with either a laser or plasma weapon. The vaporization/gooification didn't label them "dead," so he couldn't respawn.
I never played Fallout before, but this is from steam:
"Freedom and Liberty!
Do whatever you want in a massive open world with hundreds of locations, characters, and quests.
Join multiple factions vying for power or go it alone, the choices are all yours."
Now I like open world games, but can you easily get killed? And have to be on guard everytime?
I don't play online btw. Can you just walk around and kill everything you see?
I like to explore the world.
In every day conversation, anyone can die. In New Vegas, you can kill most people without even losing reputation if you're hidden. To that end I'd like to share a personal story. In New Vegas I was neutral with Caesar's Legion, and walked into their camp when the NCR troopers were being crucified. I took Ratslayer, and sneak attack critical hit every one of the Legion in the head, without ever getting a faction reputation loss. After wiping out everyone there, I freed the troopers, and moved on (the regular mission was to kill the troopers mercifully). Now later, I killed a legion trooper and my reputation suddenly dropped two ranks (apparently the game just didn't recognize it at the time), but I managed to short circuit some of the main plot line before I even entered New Vegas (something you should be doing very early on in the game).
What you get in return for being that open is a pile of bugs. Far too often something just nutty happens, or textures fail to load, or the game just suddenly decides to hang. Both Fallout 3 and New Vegas were based upon Gamebryo, as the bug fixing took months after their release, just to get mostly stable.
Skyrim is also a Bethesda released game (3 was Bethesda, New Vegas was Obsidian). It was built on the Creation engine, which is largely an evolved Gamebryo with better graphics. It was a gigantic pile of bugs, but didn't seem to be as unstable as 3 or New Vegas. Given that Bethesda has had four years to develop this game, I'm expecting at least the stability that Skyrim had. I'd love to say that it is going to be less buggy, but sometimes people do things that are insane (see above where AsRock shot his dad with the BB gun, except the developers made sure that the character was essential), which can't be accounted for. I don't expect a completely bug free game, I just expect something stable enough so that when I'm not trying to break the game it works without an issue.
I will say my favorite bug though is the death animations. In Fallout 3 the animations were somehow intermingled with the collision detection system. If you toggled collision off the NPC would remain locked in space upon death. More than once I toggled the collisions off, and got a bunch of NPCs together into a single room. After murdering about a dozen of them, you turn the collision back on and it's like being inside of a blender. Body parts exploding everywhere, and if you're particularly lucky you can see a bunch of eyeballs ricocheting around on the floor, like the most disturbing game of billiards ever.
