About moral choices (and I think Jacob made a comment along these lines some months ago on your blog), The Witcher has a great approach to these. They are never apparent (no moral slider) and never easy. Motivations are everything and they are not simple. I wrote a review on the game today. Maybe you will want to have a look at it or ask your brother if I am totally off before you try it: http://marelles.blogspot.com/2009/07/witcher-review.html

“rob the rich (and give to myself)”

:D Rofl’ed on that.

as Zel allready said.. karma-system was allready in both previous Fallout-Games, but i still think it was done a lot better. Its not that the choices for each and every action became better. The only thing that is more anoying than you are marked “evil” because you did steal massive ammounts of property (while noone ever saw you) and saving the whole planet, is that the people give you choices based on your carma.

“You are not evil enough that i would join you, go pick up some of my stuff, then i might!”

I find it pretty amusing that there is a lot of Farms and similar stuff in F1&2 while F3 just ignores this. There is even a Slaughterhouse, a brewery for Booze in F2 and someone keeps Deathclaws to eat the eggs of them. (a pretty secured chicken^^)
Whole Parts about Fallout 2 care about Geckos and Trappers, you should think there would be someone hunting different/easier things then mirelurks.

What i really liked about F3 whas the idea to build you own weapons. Its just what seams apropreate in a post-nuclear world.
(at least i liked it until i got the second schematics for something… we all know that if i got 2 cooking-books, i automaticly produce twice as many food.)

Fast travel is a nice feature, but it takes away what partially makes the game interesting : the actual traveling. I really enjoyed taking my time through the trips around the wasteland, stopping to look at the scenery, ponder how I’ll cross a heavily guarded area, investigate a nearby suspicious looking building or follow a weird radio signal back to an alien ship! I tried to use it as little as possible but it’s hard to resist the temptation of laziness, which is why I’d rather not have been able to, just to prevent that nagging “You’re wasting your time, just fast-travel” feeling.

Karma was in the original Fallout games, at least in the second, but it was much less important. It was sitting in a tab in the already quite loaded character sheet. You never had any in-game prompt telling you you had gained or lost karma. You can do whatever you want, and as long as you don’t check it explicitly never be aware of your karma level/evolution. Beside, it doesn’t have much use (or any?).

I think F3 went wrong in that it informs the player every time he/she earns karma, proclaiming the morality of the action just as it’s been done. It’s like the game is constantly nagging you with moral judgments. This is not fun, especially when you disagree with the designer’s point of view (it happened often to me).