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More Rumored Fallout 3 Graphics, Details
Although not officially announced, both the No Mutants Allowed and Duck And Cover fan-sites for the Fallout series of PC RPGs have much new info on Fallout 3, including some new alleged Fallout 3 concept art, as well as pictures of it on the wall in Black Isle HQ. NMA has a good unofficial FAQ, missing the newest info such as there "..being just one playable race in Fallout 3, humans" , but including many more details from the game codenamed 'Van Buren', as being widely discussed in online forums by lead designer J.E.Sawyer.
Assuming everyone is playing fairly, this setup gets most of the benefits of both client server and peer to peer. Taken to the extreme, it could allow for massively multiplayer games to be run cheaply (perhaps with no monthly fee) with lots of the processing being done on the clients.
Unfortunately, giving clients such control over the state of the game opens up serious issues with cheating. For example, in the article it appears that the client would have control over AI ground units it is flying above. What's to stop the client from disabling the ground unit so that it doesn't attack? When two clients are attacking each other, assuming peer-to-peer interaction, which client controls who hits who? A cheater could setup their client to make all their shots "hit" and their enemies shots "miss".
(Note that I may be making some wrong assumptions about how this particular game works. I'm just going by the article and what I know about networking and games in general.)
I would be very interested to see this type of network setup in a manner where it could prevent or stop cheating altogether. Perhaps for any entity in a game require multiple controlling clients (clients acting as servers for that entity), and see if there is any clients that is constantly comes up with a different opinion on the state of the game and kick them out. I believe similar techniques are used for non-game P2P networks, such as SETI (correct me if I'm wrong about this).
Another possible option might be using something like Palladium to ensure clients are running the exact same code, though I'd have to know more about it to know how feasible that would be.