User:Kastera1000/Fallout 3 add-on reviews

Introduction
We all know that Fallout 3 was the first game in the series to have add-ons, but was this tentative experiment executed correctly? It may not count for much, but I'm going to tell you what I thought of this "pilot program" of sorts. The review will likely include mention of new equipment, quests, environment, anything else I think set the add-on apart from others and my favorite part of the add-on itself, so kick back, relax and have a nice read; this may take a while...

Point Lookout was, in my opinion, masterfully done by the Bethesda crew. The Pitt followed as my second favorite, which technically tied with Broken Steel, then Operation: Anchorage, and lastly Mothership Zeta.

Operation: Anchorage
For the first downloadable content for any Fallout game ever, Operation: Anchorage wasn't that bad (in fact, it was pretty good, considering the kind of technology involving downloadable add-ons), but when compared to the later add-on, it is often forgotten.

Operation: Anchorage, to me, felt like another Call of Duty game, which would be alright if I felt like playing a first person shooter, but not when I have an RPG in mind. I get that it's a simulation of the Anchorage Reclamation, so there's not a lot in way of diverse quests, but it would have been nice to have a little something else. There's no doubt in my mind that shooting Pinko Chinese commie bastards was fun and all, but the add-on only takes about 2½ hours to play through, so the experience is rather lacking.

Not much can be said about the quests. They were predictable and followed many of the WWII-era military first person shooter games cliche's of the early 2000's, like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. There was a level for infiltrating an enemy base and disabling the enemy's artillery barrage, fighting off a nearby enemy post, destroying a super weapon, taking over a forward command center, and finally a riveting battle complete with trench warfare. Now it may sound like I'm ragging on the quests, but most of them were actually pretty fun. That cliche level layout works; that's why there are so many games that follow the pattern. However, the fist quest was something I didn't expect; I thought you would just be thrown in with no explanation or background. The Outcasts would try to unlock the bunker, so it also gives some insight into the Brotherhood Outcasts and their motivations.

There was a vast variety of features that the add-on accomplished. For one, it helped explain what was happening prior to the Great War and why the Chinese were on the Alaskan Front. The Anchorage Invasion holotapes told the story of soldiers in the dispute and the emotional and psychological toll it took on them. It also explained the technological advances made by both parties in response to the War, like the development of T-51b power armor and psycho on the Americans' part and invisibility technology and Chimera tanks of the Chinese. Another feature that captivated players was the barren tundra that Anchorage sports in the winter. Howling winds pick up snow drifts, the sky turns a brilliant blue in contrast with the white snow, and sheer rock cliffs extend down into expansive crevices that seem to extend into eternity. The last feature was simple, but very entertaining. The intel suitcases put a fun spin to the add-on. Instead of just running through the game, you had to be on your toes and be on the lookout for these white suitcases. If you didn't pay attention, you'd miss out on some locations that gave background as well as the Anchorage Invasion holotapes, not to mention a useful perk.

The loot following the simulation that's sealed in the VSS Armory is a welcome addition to Fallout 3. There are just so many never-before-seen items, it gives me chills just thinking about it. There's the Chinese stealth armor, winterized T-51b power armor, scoped Gauss rifle, Jingwei's Shocksword and many more. Plus, if you can get it to work, the Gary 23 glitch can make the game much easier for you. You can essentially break the game because you don't have to worry about ammo or repairing your weapons you brought back from the simulation, like the assault rifle or trench knife.

My favorite part of the add-on was the Gary 23 glitch, even though I've only been able to get it to work once. This being said, it's among one of the most valuable exploits in Fallout 3. It may take a while to collect ammo, drop it, repeat, but after you get over 20,000 rounds for every weapon, the game is smooth sailing from there on out. On top of that, the exploit allows you to bring back essentially unbreakable items since the sim versions have such a high HP. I've been able to bring back an assault rifle and a combat shotgun, but never a Chinese assault rifle (my favorite weapon in the game); I need to get on that.

Though Operation: Anchorage was the first of its kind, it gracefully paved the way (no pun intended) for the rest of the downloadable content to come. It may be lacking in replay value, but it truly did help players understand more about the Fallout universe and the conflicts that shaped the world into what it is in 2277.

The Pitt
The developers of The Pitt expertly captured the grotesque, grungy feel that Pittsburgh would have after a nuclear apocalypse had taken place. Disease would run rampant, steel particulates would only add to the ill-effects and the radiation from three joining rivers only accentuated how bad it could truly get.

The new weapons in The Pitt were, to say the least, very cool. A chainsaw that rips through your enemies, reducing them to a pile of broken meat, a new assault rifle with a scope and a silencer, and a laser shotgun were among some of the best weapons in the game. I can't live without my Perforator, nor the Steel knuckles.

One of the best features in the add-on was the ammo press which curtails ammo cost when buying from merchants. 10mm and .32 caliber rounds, the most common (and cheapest) ammunition found in the game can easily be converted into .44 Magnum or .308 rounds (easily the rarest of all ammunition) without any hassle.

The Mill Worker quest was a nice touch because it forced you to explore the dilapidated ruins of a steel mill left behind by the Great War. The game basically told, "If you want this awesome loot, you're going to have to go exploring". Another thing related to the steel mill; trogs. I love trogs; not because they're cute or cuddly, but because they are a great source of bobby pins and chems that you can sell for mass profit. I enter The Pitt usually with 50 lock picks in my inventory, but when I leave, I have at least 120.

I wasn't much for quests in the add-on, but the story was thought-out well. Enslavement is a horror of the post-apocalyptic world, so it was a good idea to make an add-on devoted to explaining a small part of it.

The story threw me a curve ball and made me scratch my head a bit. I never thought that an escaped slave would ask me to make such a difficult choice. You can either kidnap an infant and subject her to all kinds of experiments or you could leave the baby in her crib and subsequently keep an entire town enslaved under a group of tyrants. There was no black and white, you had to choose the shade of grey and live with it. That's what a Fallout game should do; have you make difficult choices that ultimately decide the fate of the people.

My favorite part would have to have been how you have to start all over again and how the Pitt slavers make you feel helpless. They take away everything - your weapons, your armor, your stimpaks, - everything. You then have to work your way through and earn your equipment back by first collecting steel and them fighting in The Hole against some worthy opponents. After that, when you have your stuff back, it makes you feel accomplished and fulfilled.

Altogether, The Pitt brought visions of the direct impacts nuclear weapons can bring upon the world. Slavery. Disease. Savagery. Ruin. You can take a look at the Capital Wasteland and say "Nuclear apocalypse isn't that bad. Sure, may be dusty, it may be radioactive, it may have have a few crazy people. It's no better than New Mexico", but when you arrive in The Pitt, you're taken for a ride that shows the true horrors of Armageddon.

Broken Steel
Broken Steel was an add-on that was desperately needed for Fallout 3. Whenever I completed the quest The American Dream, I'm saddened that the next quest will end the game and I avoid doing the quest altogether so I can continue playing. However, with Broken Steel, you can continue the legacy of the Lone Wanderer and never have to worry about the game ending.

The basis of the add-on was excellent. After sacrificing your life for the good of man, you awake two weeks later to find that that your fathers dream of providing the Wasteland with clean drinking water was successful and his death was not in vain. On top of that, you are told the Enclave have yet another base to the northwest of the Capital Wasteland. From there, you embark on a campaign to eradicate the Enclave once and for all.

The add-on provided me with many more quests. The only problem I had with them were the side quests. The main quests were fun, but the side quests all revolved around the same subject: people stealing water. People stealing the water for profit, people stealing the water to make it "holy", people stealing the water for profit (again). Granted, clean water was a huge part of the add-on, but it would have been nice to have a little variety. Protecting the Water Way and The Amazing Aqua Cura! were basically the same quest; you have to find out where the water went, confront the thieves about it, strike a deal with them and then you can get paid every week for your silence. It was the exact same!

But, the add-on redeems its main quests. The quests got back to the basics; if someone is going to bring harm to you, don't act passively and try to talk them out of it - retaliate and kill them before they can kill you. All the main quests were simple, just point and shoot. Also, when you're fighting nothing but Enclave, you get some seeerious loot. With the quests Death From Above and Who Dares Wins alone, you can get up to 1500 lbs. of loot on an average run-through which would net just shy of 108,000 caps. The only problem is a) storing the equipment in a safe place and b) finding a merchant with enough caps (which is why I keep every merchant alive in my game). Most of the time I can't find the merchant(s) with enough caps, so I trade the poor condition power armor and plasma/laser rifles to the Brotherhood Outcasts.

No add-on is complete without its new weapons and Broken Steels were just unthinkable. The Tesla cannon: a shoulder mounted cannon that discharges a beam of electricity with devastating range and area-of-effect radius. The heavy incinerator: essentially a mortar that shoots fireballs. A second alien blaster: enough said.

Broken Steel also gave me the opportunity to explore new areas of the Capital Wasteland and meet new creatures along the way that would otherwise be gone. I'm taking about of course, the feared feral ghoul reaver, the superfluous super mutant overlord, and the angst-causing albino radscorpion. However, this can be a downside, as I have encountered all of them below level 7, which caused me to swiftly run for my life, but to no avail, resulting in my head being smashed to bits and quickly devoured by other Wasteland critters.

If I were to hazard a guess, my favorite part of the add-on would be infiltrating Adams AFB at the end. I always have the Chinese stealth suit by the time I do Broken Steel, so it's always fun to role play Solid Snake within another role playing game. I gauge the success of the infiltration on how many times I was seen and if I was seen, how long I was detected. Another great thing about this part is the massive haul of loot you can get. I make at least seven trips back to the supply box at the entrance. However, I'm not a huge fan of the half-hour it takes me to transport the 1000 lbs. of loot back to my Megaton house.

In all seriousness though, nobody wants a half-baked character that specializes in only a couple areas; they want the power house that kicks everyone's ass! Really, the whole point of Broken Steel was to create that desired super-character; a character with a 10 in all S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes, 100 in all 13 skills, devastating weapons, top-of-the-line armor, enough bottle caps to rule the Capital Wasteland, a fully decorated house, and enough ammo to keep your guns running for years to come. Besides, after all you've been through, you deserve to be thrown a bone.

Point Lookout
Point Lookout was simply phenomenal all around! As the fourth add-on I downloaded, I was pleasantly surprised. The all-new weapons, the thought-out quests, the overall scenery, were all just amazing in my eyes.

The scenery was above all else, absolutely one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. When roaming around Point Lookout, I had the opportunity to explore an area roughly a quarter the size of the Capital Wasteland that was covered in dense, murky swamplands that are cut by winding rivers and punched with turbid ponds throughout. Lifeless trees bowed down and laid in the muck, creating a putrid smell that could rival even the swampfolk. The overcast skies give the mood that you do not belong here and you will die here, it's only a matter of when. Even during the day, the light is as bright as the Capital Wasteland's dusk.

Related to the ambiance of the location, there was a small detail that intensified the mood so much more. Usually, you can tune out surrounding noise with a radio station whether it be GNR, Agatha's station, or what-have-you, but not here. Without the radio, you were forced into listening to the listless bogs surrounding you; between the ambiance music in the background, you would hear the scuffle and chatter of swampfolk, the bubbling of the muck, skittering of mirelurks and wind blowing through the trees. All of this added up to a fully satisfactory auditory experience.

The add-on incorporated all-new weapons such as the lever-action rifle, axe, double-barrel shotgun, and many, many more. There a lot of things that could have gone wrong with the addition of these weapons. They could have been too overpowered which happens all too often with add-on weapons. They could have also made it impossible for ammunition to be found, but all the weapons operate on very common ammo that you can find right out of the vault.

Point Lookout also provided me with ten additional quests (which is what I really enjoy in a Fallout game), which is more than any other add-on (the next being Broken Steel, which only provided six). I have to admit, I never thought there would be so many different paths for quests. There was a heated rivalry between two pre-War entities for a main questline, and for side quests there was helping a local woman make moonshine (a totally new consumable for Fallout 3), a geological expedition left abandoned, a ghoul who runs a safari killing his own kind, an old man wishing to reclaim a holy book from the "locals" and a Chinese spy whose operation went awry. You don't get more variety than that.

There was also the scare factor that put it high on my list. There aren't many games that will creep me out, but Point Lookout really did a number on me. When I first went into Room 1K of the Homestead Motel and saw the Pint-Sized Slasher's mask, I jumped and nearly pissed my pants. I never thought I would see that little bastard again, and what's even worse is that he wasn't an urban myth; this shines some insight that the Pint-Sized Slasher may have, in fact, truly existed. Then when walking around the swamplands, it's common to see relics of bone, dolls and mannequin heads. This reminded me of The Blair Witch Project, so that put me on edge as well. Finally, the Point Lookout warehouse that's filled with mannequin heads and exploding baby carriages; enough said.

If I were to say what my favorite part of the add-on was, it would be when you're gassed by the Mother Punga plant and you run around trippin' balls the Sacred Bog. It was like the Lone Wanderer was just alone with his mind, facing his inner demons and self-doubt. All the Schmault-Tec Bubbleheads conveyed a weakness that held the Lone Wanderer back, like how they could have fallen into another trap, how everyone that's close to them ends up leaving and how their mother abandoned them. Plus, the hallucinations themselves were riveting. The saw cutting through the ground and the needle sewing though it represent Tobars' actions to you, how Mr. Break is really Tobar talking to you while you're unconscious and major characters, like Elder Lyons, Amata, the Overseer, and your father floating dead in the bog. I also liked how the developers put Nuka-Cola Quantums in the bog. Every player instinctly goes for these glowing bottles, only to have them blow up in a nuclear explosion.

The only two things I would change is the fluidity of the game and the local enemies. By "fluidity", I don't mean the storyline, I mean the actual game; it would become choppy and run slowly in a lot of different places, making it difficult to play. About the enemies, I wouldn't change the enemies themselves; I would simply get rid of the swampfolks' and tribals' automatic 35 HP damage infliction bonus. That's my main problem with enemies in Point Lookout; if I'm not careful, I very well could end up dead.

All in all, the Point Lookout add-on has raised the bar on all future add-on that I will play. It was a magnificent experience; whenever I go there in a new play through, I always shed a tear of joy when I walk down that pier for the first time and take my first breath of sea air.

Mothership Zeta
Mothership Zeta was a nice throwback to the alien skeletons you see in both Fallout and Fallout 2. Instead of finding the remains of these strange beings, you actually got the opportunity to witness them, first hand. Little did I know this concept would be less than I had expected.

Although, I have to admit, Mothership Zeta had an interesting approach; take a person who's used to the dilapidated, grubby feel of the Capital Wasteland and throw them into a pristine and overall clean vessel orbiting the Earth in the thermosphere. It was a nice concept, but when I play a Fallout game, I expect a dirty, gritty setting. Every Fallout game before it made use of tints and shades of browns, yellows, greys and greens, but the Mothership was shiny, bright and new. It may only a change in coloration, but this chromatic shift threw me off and made think I was playing something other than Fallout 3.

Another thing that threw me off; the thing about futuristic areas is everything looks the same, so you can never tell where you've been or where you have yet to be. I had to check my map about every 3 minutes to avoid confusion. This is a major problem because there are so many locations within the Mothership, so the add-on forces you to explore all of them before completing it, because the rest of the ship cut off after the last quest. So if you were hoping on exploring the bowels of the ship later, you're outta luck. The add-on purposefully wastes your time! In most instances, you explore the place, on your own time, after you've done what you've needed to do, but with Mothership Zeta, it blackmails you into exploring the entire ship before the add-on is over. It's basically making your choices for you, saying, "If you want some unique equipment, you'll have to explore now, or else lose everything in the future". I, for one, do not enjoy an RPG game telling me how to play the game; that's the exact opposite of what an RPG should do.

Another thing that lead to my overall annoyance was the final battle with the other mothership. To be frank, it was a joke. It was just "Shoot cannon with max energy, turn on the shields with max energy, wait for cannon to reload, repeat". The final mothership battle should have been difficult or, at the very least, challenging, but it was much too easy.

My last piece of criticism is the overall lagging that happens in the add-on. The developers put too many world objects in the Mothership (especially in the Engineering Core and the Cargo Hold) which caused my game to run much slower because it was trying to account for all of the unneeded objects. All the winky-dinks and thing-a-ma-bobs that you couldn't pick up needed to be accounted for, but the games' engine couldn't handle it all at once, leading to some slow down and eventual crash.

Now that I'm done ragging on the add-on, I can get to the good stuff about it. Like Operation: Anchorage, the best part was the loot that you got (of course, only if you took the games "advice" and went exploring). Aside from the alien tech, you could finally get a magnum without a scope, a samurai sword, a unique plasma pistol, and an overcoat that was to be delivered to the great General Constantine Chase. Going back to the alien tech, I didn't like it that much, partly because I'm not a huge fan of energy weapons and partly because they were just too stereotypical. I realize that's when the developers were aiming for, but the alien weapons just look silly.

There was also the factor of Elliot Tercorien. Mothership Zeta tied back to Operation: Anchorage, symbolically wrapping the Fallout 3 add-ons up and went full-circle, letting you know that this was the end. You could go on to further understand the Sino-American conflict first hand from someone who had been there and seen the worst of the worst.

Unlike the other add-ons, I didn't really have a favorite moment - the add-on just melded together with only small notable features. I guess the thing I enjoyed the most where how stereotypical the aliens were. They were the classic 1950's spacemen with eerie green skin, bulging heads, tentacle-like fingers, and big, black, intrusive eyes. They're like the extraterrestrials described by Betty and Barney Hill. It's also interesting to note that the mothership may be named after the Betty and Barney Hill abduction as the abduction is occasionally called the "Zeta Reticuli Incident".

It's ironic that the last add-on (which should have been the best thus far) turned out to be the worst one in my eyes. It had its moments, but they were few and far between, and the add-on itself was just too predictable. It didn't have any plot twists that made your head cock off to the side and scratch the top of your head. It was a bland experience that was fun at times, but overall ends with me taking a sigh of relief when I'm transported back to Earth.

Conclusion
To close, I'd like to say that I really did, in fact, enjoy all the add-ons Fallout 3 had to offer, even if I ragged on some of them. They all have their ups and downs - some had more downs that ups, but I digress. Ultimately, the add-ons gave extra background about both the Fallout universe's past, present and future which made for a better Fallout universe, one that had fluid continuity, historical moments and a full timeline that can be used to compare the past and present. The success of the add-ons set in motion a new tradition for Fallout games that I don't think is going to end anytime soon. Now, if you've stayed long enough to read my full rant on the add-ons, you deserve a reward, so get offline and play your favorite Fallout 3 add-on! I would recommend Point Lookout, but you already knew that, didn't you?