It's not a confidence issue for Van Buren at this point. The simple fact is that it is VERY early in the development cycle to warrant an official announcement. We want to make an announcement once we have something to show. Right now all we have are Area Overview documents, tech and story docs, some engine conversion and interface stuff, and a handful of concept art. Hardly enough to show to our fans and press, at the moment. It's also a timing thing. We don't want to announce so soon into development and start building hype that by the time the game does ship, everyone's sick of hearing about it and lost interest (Jefferson was a whole different ball of wax that had to do with legal stuff. Van Buren doesn't suffer from that). Once Van Buren is officially announced, however, it will get its own forum, I'm sure of it. But until then...

"Hypothetically", a Fallout 3 game would stick mainly to the "universe" of Fallout 1, with some Fallout 2 for historical continuity. So, no hairy, intelligent deathclaws (Fallout 2's talking deathclaws were wiped out by the Enclave, so no more), no Humvees, etc.

Then worry no more; all of the things we're implementing here were planned for Jefferson. Jefferson was originally intended to have both RT and TB modes of play. The game system we were implementing in Jefferson is/was even more of a sequence-driven TB system than SPECIAL. We worked out all of these analogues for Jefferson over a year and a half ago. The vast majority of translation issues for converting TB SPECIAL into real-time were already addressed for Jefferson's system.

So, implementation and balancing are the two things you should worry about. The majority of design has already been handled.