Hines wasn't going to hold our hands right through the whole thing, however. He jumped forward to a spot of tunnel-bound play revolving around an energy weapon called the Tesla Cannon (yes, a la Return to Castle Wolfenstein). Some assembly required... “The Brotherhood of Steel has not yet been able to get here”, Hines said, playing through the dank, subterranean gloom. “So, you're given all the parts to build this Tesla Cannon and you figure out how to get to this base, and it turns out the only way to get there is through this old presidential metro tunnel that is underneath what used to be the White House. The White House got nuked in the war, but it turns out you can still get to the tunnels underneath, and this is the old presidential metro tunnel.

“But the problem is the metro isn't running, because the metro tunnel's been taken over by ghouls.” So, what's being done about it? Sentry robots have been sent in.

Hines moves through the tunnel, but one of those pesky door things is getting in the way. “So, you can either lock-pick it to get past it, or you can talk to Margot – she says you're not authorised – so again, there's a variety of ways you can do it. If you've got a really high speech skill you can talk your way through it...”

And... Hines jumped.

More overhead stone. Lots and lots of gunfire lighting things up.

Expect a number of new goodies to send pain flying around the place. You should also expect new enemies to hurt to go with them. “We've got a new super mutant called the Overlord”, Hines said. He pointed to Broken Steel's increased difficulty, saying, “Again, these are a higher level mutant you wouldn't have run into previously, and they have a new weapon called the Violator.”

Another new nasty shown off was the Feral Ghoul Reaver. It's like the ugly bastards you know and... (I won't speculate on your personal relationship with them). The difference is that they're more heavily armoured and have much higher hit points. They seem to love chucking grenades of varying sorts about.

“I regularly die playing through this, so I'm not going to play through the whole thing”, Hines told us. Once again, he jumped forwards.

As you've seen from the way Hines introduced the new enemies, he made a point of emphasising the lengths gone to to challenge higher level players. Key to that, of course, is the raising of the level cap from 20 to 30. Expanding on that, he said, “The advancement from 20 to 30 takes a tonne of experience points every time you level up one level.

“The number of experience points you need for the next one just keeps going up and up by a really large factor. We really want folks to be able to play this a tonne before they get to level 30.”

Hines noted, for those of us who haven't yet achieved Fallout 3 supremacy, that level 18 is where things really start to get tricky.