I always felt fallout was about no-compromise roleplaying.

GTA is my favorite foil to Fallout; In GTA you can beat a hooker to death with a baseball bat, kill as many cops as you want, but If you can run away fast enough, There are no consequences.

In Fallout 2, if you kill a kid, people remember you. You do enough bad stuff, People from other towns (who have never seen you in person) will run away, start throwing rocks and shooting at you. The karma meter in Fallout really enforced that role you choose to play. (on a similar note, I did wonder why you could not win over a town by giving food/money directly to townsfolk and/or children)

Although I'm sure Fallout is still an awesome play, I think by removing children from the game Fallout loses a little bit of what has made the franchise great.

...wow.

If you don't let people kill kids in the game because the market and its laws don't allow it, okay- it can't be avoided.

If you make children in an M rated game invincible because you have the idea that its wrong to have destructible children in a video game filled with gore and murder... what the hell are you thinking?

Is it more wrong to murder children than it is to kill adults? Wait a minute.. it doesn't matter. Both are wrong and neither should be done. With that in mind, you've gotten used to killing adults in video games, so apparently thats not "wrong" in your eyes. But when your character kills a virtual child, suddenly you're shocked? Killing children in a video game isn't cruel. (You aren't 'killing' real children. Your killing an interactable picture of one.) Certainly not if killing adults isn't. Choose a side, or drop your irrational, hypocritical argument.

Also- It isn't the benefit of killing kids in the game that I personally care about, its the presence of indestructible weakling children that break the immersion that the game tries to create.

They try to create a game where you can do anything you want... except apparently kill the weakest type of humanoid in the game? They should have a better reason for that than imaginary morality .. the type of morality that gives old Grannies heart attacks when they hear curse words.

Anyway, the game wouldn't be forcing you to kill children. It would be making it possible. It makes sense that an evil character might kill children. It makes sense that a child would be harmed by bullets and explosions. It makes sense that a 'good' character should have to be careful about fighting near children, not throwing bombs next to one to take out a nearby bad guy. If anyone is in the 'wrong', its that evil character, and I (being the good person that I am) think that the authorities IN THE GAME should go after and capture that evil child-killing, monster! because IN THE GAME is the only place where its wrong.

Quote:
Fallout 3 is an M-rated game—made for adults

Being M-Rated is something else than targeting adults as the core demographic. As an adult, I do not need to have physically correct bloodstains to make a point about anything. I need a world and characters that behave in an adult way and do not show symptoms of child book black and white logic, or adolescent "Bruha" behavior.

The challenge is not to answer the question whether or not some children get shot as the result of the plot. The maturity of the content does not depend on that, the rating maybe, but the even at their most violent, the overwhelming majority of M-rated games is still inherently childish in nature. The challenge is to overcome that, not single acts of violence.