When you hit ten, you get a little Red Ryder BB Gun for your birthday. Here, you learn the basic elements of combat, which is basically real-time with a bit of turn-based-pause thrown in. That is, you normally aim and shoot in first-person like a shooter, but you can activate the "Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System" (V.A.T.S.) to momentarily pause time. During pause, you can then target specific body parts, queue up shots to said body parts, and then resume time to have V.A.T.S. automatically fire at your designated target spots.
Ah, but to prevent you from just abusing the heck out of V.A.T.S., and in a throwback to the turn-based combat of the previous games, each shot in V.A.T.S. costs Action Points. In the demo we saw, each shot took about three APs and the player had nine total, meaning he could try for three aimed shots at any moment. Howard said they're still futzing with the exact system, but at the moment, AP automatically recharges over time when playing in real-time (with the recharge speed dictated by the player's Agility stat), but that recharge rate is slowed down a bit when you're just shooting stuff. Additionally, all the combat we saw is gun-based, but Howard did comment that melee combat (and we saw the "unarmed" skill listed in the character screen) is still a possibility.
On your sixteenth birthday, you're expected to take the G.O.A.T. (Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test). This helps determine what skills you're proficient at, and the general levels of said skills. Howard commented that the G.O.A.T. will be "more skill-based" as opposed to the traditional Q&A-style of character generation found in previous Elder Scroll RPGs. We also noted that in-game, characters comment about the injury rate of G.O.A.T. takers, implying that it's a mock scenario or battle of some sort (not unlike how Oblivion tried to determine your character class by how you acted during the beginning dungeon tutorial). We didn't get an explicit rundown, but we were told that there are fourteen skills in the game, with familiar ones like Small/Big/Energy Guns, Speech, and Gambling listed among the few quick glimpses of the character screen.
Your nineteenth birthday is the one that sets the main quest off. You simply wake up and notice that your father is gone. No explanation, no nothing. Just up and disappeared. The Vault Overseer sure seems cheesed off about your father leaving, and forbids you to go after him (a recurring theme comes up during the Vault portion, when the Overseer comments that "you are born in the Vault, you will die in the Vault"). So, naturally, the main quest objective of your nineteenth birthday is to leave the Vault; how you do so is up to you. While Pagliarulo simply had a keycard that opened the Vault, Howard commented that you could hack the door open, or pilfer the keycard (like Pagliarulo did) or even find a different way to get out.
While describing these early-game landmarks up until the opening of the Vault door, Howard commented that there are a multitude of quests inside the Vault itself, and actions you take when you're a ten-year-old do have some effect on how people treat you when you're older. He also pointed out that the PIP-Boy is your main interface tool ("we spent way too much time finalizing the design of the PIP-Boy"), and serves as your quest log, your character sheet, your inventory, the menu to heal yourself, your map, and your radio tuner (more on that shortly).
