No, I believe what GStaff said was that Steam unlocks at midnight Pacific time. Since all PC versions use Steam, all versions will be unplayable until then. In other words, the PC version you buy at midnight on the east coast won't work until 3AM.

There's some extreme apologizing and head in sand syndrome about how buggy and incompatible Fallout 3 and Oblivion IV are on the PC. All you have to do is head over to any of the Fallout 3 support forums on this board and you'll be overwhelmed by unsolved issues. In my experience if you're competent and you've done everything right and it's still not running, it's probably just a driver or hardware issue that Bethesda has no intention of providing compatibility for. I had to dual boot to XP to run Fallout 3 and Oblivion IV, as neither of them would run properly on Win Vista or 7 despite being the exact same system. New Vegas runs on the same antiquated Gamebryo engine that practically guarantees it will have similar bugs and crashes, the most insidious being the fact that the further you progress in the game, the more likely it is that your save file will become corrupted and start crashing all over the place, at random, stepping into certain zones, etc.

Journalist impressions of New Vegas are coming in. Even the console versions are crashing frequently. It's apparently buggier/crasher than Fallout 3. Oh boy.

Re FO3 not running: You -did- try disabling SLI and/or limiting your threads to 2 in the INI?

Re LilBudyWizer: I had tons of crashing in FO3 until I put 'iNumHWThreads=2' into FALLOUT.INI under [General] (I have a quad core)

After that point, only mod-related bugs seemed to get me. (and with FWE and all optional additions, unofficial patch etc... it was modded quite heavily)