Mandatory game installs have become an expected burden for PlayStation 3 owners, a tax paid in time for the pleasure of playing games on Sony's latest console. And while the time spent watching the bar creep across the screen has ranged from modest to absurd, we're still not accustomed with having to wait at all. It's a sentiment echoed by the developers at Bethesda, as the company recently let slip that the PS3 version of its radioactive RPG Fallout 3 will not include any upfront installation at all.

"The answer to that is no, there isn't," Bethesda marketing guru Pete Hines recently told Joystiq concerning Fallout 3 on the PS3. "That doesn't mean we don't use the hard drive, just that it does it in the background as opposed to a large, upfront install." As far as how much hard drive space the game will require, the exec wouldn't say exactly. Hines did mention that the RPG will require "a similar amount" of HD space as Oblivion, making us expect to fill up the PS3's juicy interior with about 4-5 gigs of atom-splitting data when the game ships this fall.