Upon first setting foot in Megaton, the player meets Sheriff Leon Simms, who quips that this is his town and you had better not try anything. Pagliarulo chooses the dialogue option that goes along with the Sheriff's laying down of the law, while Howard remarks that another member of the dev team one day decided to pick the "That's a nice-looking hat" option. Which led to a fight that the player won. Then the player took the Sheriff's clothes, holed himself up in a tower, and started sniping the rest of town. While Pagliarulo decided not to go completely aggro on the Sheriff, he decided to play out his hatred of the town in another fashion.
Hitting up the local bar, Pagliarulo initiates a conversation with a shifty-looking fellow named Burke. It seems that Burke really hates Megaton, considers it a blight on the landscape, and observes that the player has no ties, family or otherwise, to Megaton. He then makes a proposal: a significant sum of money if the player decides to install a device that will prime the inert bomb and therefore detonate it. Not only does Pagliarulo accept, but he tries the dialogue option that will use his Speech skill in an attempt to get even more money (he fails the roll).
Howard interjects to comment that this quest is another good example of player choice. Not only is the player choosing to either let the town stay intact and partake in whatever quests its denizens can give or wipe it out and lose any potential quest/karma opportunities, but the player can also play Simms and Burke against each other. "Emil could have gone back to Simms and say 'hey, this Burke guy just gave me a job to take this town out', or furthermore, after telling Simms, he can still go back to Burke and either say that the Sheriff is onto him, the quest is over, or pretend to work for Burke, but work for Simms in reality." Whew. But for demo purposes, Pagliarulo takes Burke's initial offer and heads down to the bomb itself to initiate part one of the quest.
Dropping the Megaton
Afterwards, Pagliarulo then guides the player down to the DC Metro system, where he runs into Super Mutants for the first time. Howard comments that the DC Metro serves as a large dungeon/hub for getting anywhere within DC, and that the Metro and Downtown portions of DC are a significant chunk of the map. Any further questions about the size of the world, and whether there are even fast travel options are met with a "you'll see" type of response. Wandering around the Metro, Pagliarulo fights Super Mutants with a mixture of manual and V.A.T.S. aiming before showing off another feature.
Pagliarulo proceeds to hack a security/ticket-vending robot, and Howard describes one of the hacking minigames. The player needs to fill in a multiword-password, and is given a screenful of options. After the player picks one of the possibilities, the Pip-Boy reveals how many correct letters were in the incorrect option, and the player has a limited number of tries and time to figure out what the correct password is. After performing this hack, the robot simply walks up to each Super Mutant, asks for a ticket, and proceeds to open fire when the perplexed Super Mutant fails to present one.
As the player fights more and more Super Mutants within the Metro, he or she eventually runs into a Brotherhood of Steel platoon known as "Lyon's Pride," led by Commander Lyon. He proceeds to chastise you for being a newbie in a combat zone, and lets you tag along with her platoon in order to survive. Pagliarulo is able to scavenge better equipment, such as a Chinese Assault Rifle in better condition, and fights alongside the friendly BOS AI. All goes well until they encounter a Behemoth: a twenty-foot tall mutant wielding a signpost as a club.
