51hrs and 30 minutes to complete it for me.

Level 20

70-80% of side-quests completed (as per achievements)

4/20 Bobbleheads found

90-92 locations/areas discovered (just short of the achievement)

Still have a few achievements to get, as I scored 650/1000 on my first playthrough:

• Agitha's Song
• Nuka Cola Challenge (20/30 bottles collected...Not bad for getting 0 bottles in the shipments)
• All 3 neutral alignment achievements (Level 8/14/20)
• All 3 evil alignment achievements (Level 8/14/20)
• You've Got to Shoot Them In The Head
• Weaponsmith (have 1 more blueprint to get)
• Data Miner
• One Man Scouting Party
• The Bigger They Are
• Yes, I collect Dolls
• Vault-Tec CEO

Overall Impressions:

It's my GOTY candidate. Bethsada upped the ante in every imaginable way with Fallout 3 compared to Oblivion (and I've spent somewhere around 250+ hours on Oblivion). VATS is revolutionary in design, and I hope more games and developers take the idea behind VATS (turn based strategy in a real-time setting) and flesh it out. It's not perfect, but absolutely revolutionary. After 51hrs, I was still giddy each time I fired up VATS to kill someone.

Weapon balance was suprisingly good. Even at level 20, and completing some of the last side-quests before beating the game, I was still switching and using the 10mm Submachine Gun, and Chinese AK once in awhile - which speaks volumes about how well balanced weapons are, and still needed late in the game.

NPCs are pretty smart compared to Oblivion, but still have the weaknesses - I was able to trap quite a few and butcher them before they got to me. Not to mention, sidekick NPCs are pretty smart, at times.

Pros & Cons:

Pros:

• VATS is amazing, and a must-see for any person doubting how you can hybridize turn based RPGs and real-time games
• Story and dialogue options are near Mass Effect (ie, awesome) levels
• Weapons are fun, balanced, and strategic - I only used the Fat Man during the very last 2 hours of the game
• Dungeon/Area design is a huge step up from Oblivion - far more variation
• As per Oblivion, game is huge and very open ended. Even if you cheated to get the Karma achievements, I'd expect no less than 60hrs to 1000/1000 the game - If not 80hrs. Of course, Karma achievements typically require 3 playthroughs.
• Fawkes, post-Raven Rock is the best sidekick in the history of gaming. He's litterally a gamebreaker, in a good way.

Cons:

• Overworld is, at times, bland and depressing. I mean, it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but the color pallete is horribly bland.
  
• Caps can be, at times, hard to come by.
• Some quests (such as Big Trouble in Big Town) have borked options - Such as, you cannot fix robots to defend the town, as you can't find them in the junkyard.
  
• General Oblivion-esque glitches are prevalent. NPCs act atrocious at times, and some get stuck in odd areas.
• Game froze 3-4 times on me throughout my 50hrs of playing (X360, game not installed. 20GB and pre-Falcon)

I took my 18 hours to beat the game and I became lvl 13. I dont know if I will do more side quests now after I have finished it.

Sucks that if you beat it in 18hrs, you never got to enjoy 70%+ of the game. The main quest is only half (or less) of the fun :)

How many sidequests are there?

15?

I really hated one thing about it. I got to lv 20, more or less maxed progression, and still had at least 70% of the game world to explore. This game needed a MUCH higher level cap ala Oblivion or Mass Effect. To max level in Oblivion took some doing since, depending on your main skills, the cap could be as high as 40 or 50 effectively; ditto with Mass Effect, you had to do a TON of side quests to hit max level as you went through.

I agree that caps were hard to come by initially, but after lv 10 they more or less flowed like water. The only limit on caps was how many NPCs had caps to trade. I basically had to go to 5 or 6 NPCs to trade away all the trash I found by the end, but I was walking around with 10000+ caps consistently by the time I hit lv 15. The amount of crap you find to sell is just ridiculous.

Overall though it was a great game, though I'll say not as good as Mass Effect. In some ways the combat was really exciting with the VATS system and all, but being limited to gun shots just felt so limiting after playing Mass Effect, Bioshock and Oblivion where there were SO many skills, spells and what have you to use. I just ran from scorpion to scorpion shooting with my plasma rifle for the last 50% of the game (since the Plasma Rifle was almost double the power of any other weapon) and it felt pretty limited. I understand that magic or powers wouldn't really fit in to this world, but more mechanics then just gun fire would have been appreciated.

I also would have appreciated more direct control over your dog and your companions again ala Mass Effect. I guess that control was less important since they can't do anything but fire their gun and/or melee attack (vs the many powers available in Mass Effect to each character) but even still, it would cut down on dumb AI mistakes.

I guess I concentrated on the bad, but you did mention all the good anyway.

Oh and the console ports of the game were vastly inferior to the PC version, so much so that it wasn't even like playing the same game when I got the PC version. The PC version looks flat out amazing, the mouse/keyboard control is infinitely better then playing with either the 360 or PS3 controller and overall its just a beautiful game on the PC. This game really shows why PC gaming will probably always be superior to console gaming, its just glorious on the PC, and once you've seen both the console versions look really half baked. If you haven't played it and have a decent PC don't waste your time with the console versions.

Oh and I did appreciate the multiple approaches to any problem. In a lot of cases you could talk your way through something with the speech skill, sneak and lockpick your way to success, hack your way through the problem or of course just go in shooting. It really did a good job of creating multiple ways to solve problems and that added a lot to the non linear nature of the game.

The glitches aren't NEARLY as bad on the PC. I did have 1 or 2 crashes, but the AI problems were nowhere near as bad, probably in part due to the much higher processor power the PC has to deal with the complex algorithms that make NPCs work.

I'm in 74 hours.
100% side quests
I'm gonna follow the main story now.(I;m somewhere in the middle I hope)
20 Bobbleheads found
20 level (Hard difficulty now back to normal since I don't gather XP points anymore)
5/5 Behemoths slayed
All weapons done (the dart gun is my favorite) but NOT all the blueprints (they just advance the number or the durability of the weapon)
Almost 80 books-mags read...
...ahhhh, I don't recall something else right now.
Oh, and yes, all the areas outside of the main quest revealed (got the explorer perk earlier in the game so I knew where to go...)

Yep, GOTY for me.

Oh, and the game installed (you know how :) ) runs really smooth.

There are 17 achievement-related sidequests in the game.
There are also 19-20 other side-quests that give you various rewards. Some of which are revolving quests that ask you to obtain specific items, that will give you massive amounts of caps or items in return.

Now, having said that, the achievement related sidequests can be short, or massive. The Wasteland Survival Guide, if done properly, takes around 6-8 hours.

Not even close. I've got probably 20 hours invested, and have only done a few quests. I can't help scrounging around and looking for Raiders to headshot instead of progressing with the story. What an awesome game.

mrstickball: I did some side quests and I had much points in Speach So I did not need to do extra stuff do get what I want. :D

I'll agree that the level 20 cap was far too low. If I didn't stop gaining XP, I'd be around level 23 or higher, as I stopped gaining XP quite some time ago.

But the advantage is that it does force your character to become role-specific. You can't just max stats and become a god at everything. Even if extra levels just gained you AP and HP, I'd of been happy. Maybe have an achievement for getting Level 30 regardless of karma.

And one massive thing, that may spoil some things:

Once you beat the game, the Downloads button lights up. I thought that was VERY interesting, and telling of what the DLC may be :)