5punk

Operation Anchorage

When you load Op. Anchorage up, you find a broadcast signal from some of the Brotherhood Outcasts requesting help. When you travel to their location you find some Outcasts fighting it out with Super Mutants. After those guys are taken care of, you talk with the Outcasts and they tell you about the Anchorage War Simulation that is protecting some advanced technology, but they need your Pip-Boy to access the simulation (Behind a locked door there is a dead body with their arm cut off; they tried to cut off the Pip-Boy from the guy's arm and it didn't go too well). The simulation is entirely just a shooter. There are lots of guns and every so often there are health and ammo dispensers as you have no other way of healing. As far as the missions go, they're your basic kill everyone on your way to point X. It's not quite what it should be, but it's not terrible. They could have done a better job with the story of the Chinese invasion of Anchorage though, and it would have been more interesting. The real reason to buy Op. Anchorage, though, is the gear that the simulation is protecting. There are some incredibly awesome pieces in there and for me it was enough to justify the cost to me, but if you're not apt to pay $10 for some guns and armor, then you can safely ignore Operation Anchorage.




The Pitt

The Pitt is the ruins of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. About 30 years before the game, the Brotherhood of Steel went through The Pitt, killing all of the mutated horrors they found. Now though it's turned into a slavery operation to mill steel again. The radiation is so bad that the people who were left in The Pitt soon mutated as well, into Trogs. When you load The Pitt, you get a radio signal of a man who need your help, claiming that there's a cure for the mutations but the slavers are holding it back. If you decide to help, you have to give up all your gear to become a slave and infiltrate the milling operation in order to find the cure. The Pitt is a pretty depressing wasteland, even more gloomy than the D.C. area. Trogs are initially rather quite dangerous as you really don't have much in the way of weaponry or armor, so you'll initially have some intense fights and tough decisions about health and your radiation levels. The story of The Pitt is pretty good, definitely worth checking out, with plenty of opportunity for good and evil. As with Op. Anchorage, there is some pretty sweet gear to be had (especially in combination with the gear from Anchorage) making The Pitt a great addition to Fallout 3.




Broken Steel

If you only buy one DLC pack for Fallout 3, it should be Broken Steel. It is easily the best one of the three. After the ending of Fallout 3, normally the game is over and that's it. Broken Steel adds in new gear, new, tougher enemies, a new quest about the same length as the other two packs, and raises the level cap to 30 along with some new perks. The raised level cap in particular is pretty sweet. At level 20, you're pretty awesome in the game, but at level 30 you'll be pretty insanely powerful. My lowest skill was at 70% and several skills were maxed out. The new enemies and gear are also pretty awesome. The new Enclave Hellfire Trooper has a really cool fire artillery weapon and neat armor. Albino Radscorpions and Feral Ghoul Reapers are tougher and more deadly than their normal counterparts, and the new Super Mutant Overlord is more plentiful and just as dangerous as the Behemoths with their Tri-Beam Laser Rifles. The new perks are hit or miss, I found myself only taking a few of the new ones as mostly they weren't that interesting, but there are a couple that are actually useful. I can't say much about the plot of Broken Steel without spoilers, so I'll just say that it continues from the end of the regular game. Broken Steel is definitely the best DLC pack and worth picking up unless you have an aversion to paying more money for DLC.

Well written Deject, thanks!

Nice. I started playing through the main game again from the start as I didn't like the way my character turned out - she was always too heroic, doing the right thing and ended up with little in return. So I'm being a nasty thiefy type man, which has been much more fun so far.

I made Butch save his Mom himself and hightailed it out of the Vault as soon as there was trouble without regard for anyone else. I still disabled the Megaton bomb both to get the house and leave all those other houses intact so that I could rob them later on.

If I continue to enjoy it, I'll definately check out the one that increases the level cap, but the two more fighty ones don't fit so well with my new character.

FatherJack wrote:I still disabled the Megaton bomb both to get the house and leave all those other houses intact so that I could rob them later on.

You get accommodation elsewhere if you blow up Megaton. But obviously you lose the other houses that you plan to rob.

Good reviews. I pretty much agree. Although I enjoyed The Pitt main mission slightly more than Broken Steel.

I redid that bit, robbed and killed everyone except Moira (lol) and Jericho then blew up Megaton.

Getting a *lot* of game freezes though, any tips on that would be great.

Stuttering pop up/loading textures type freezes or longer 'hmm, has it crashed, oh no there we go' type freezes? IIRC you're pc isn't exactly shabby, so the whole turn it down or buy faster bits doesn't really work.

Could be something like the light post-processing gubbins is saturating the gpu ram.

/random initial stab at an answer.

fake editz - have a look at this list of stuff, any of them seem likely?

I've tried most every fix there and on the official forums site and it's gone beyond annoying to unplayable now. I'm using several different revs of the game just to get down a corridor.

I have no idea. I get occasional hard crashes, but nothing that bad. I should say it's been a hell of a lot worse since moving to Fista than it was on XP.

Fallout is surprisingly well behaved for me (on Fista). It crashed every time I tried to use vats, but that turned out to be old grphx drivers. After updating them I've never had a real crash. A few cases where it's minimised itself, and one or two of those didn't let me unminimise it... but on the whole its better behaved than any other game I currently have installed

Also I thought operation anchorage was pretty good, even though I resorted to sweeping it because I refuse to use Gays For Windows Live or to buy speshul microsoft points for cash, and then buy DLC with the speshul points (but haha, oh wow look at that, you can only ever buy MORE speshul points than you need!!)

You need to update tihs now deject.

Ty aka Sir Die Aloty wrote:You need to update tihs now deject.

I haven't bought Point Lookout yet. I was going to wait for Mothership Zeta to be released as well before buying them.

deject wrote:
I haven't bought Point Lookout yet. I was going to wait for Mothership Zeta to be released as well before buying them.

Roger!

but DO IT NOW!

Ty aka Sir Die Aloty wrote:Roger!

but DO IT NOW!

Yes, DO IT NOW!

Point Lookout is probably my favourite so far. And I'm looking forward to Mothership Zeta now as I need so more ammo for my blaster. That came in very useful on the tougher enemies of the last two DLCs.

Yeah I will write up reviews for Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta in a bit now that I've finished both of them.

As my Xfire profile indicates, I've been playing this a lot this week. I finally fixed the crashing issue, although it does rarely still occur.

What used to happen was just a total game freeze, which while less catastrophic under Win7 was so frequent it became a real effort to play. Turns out it was a codec issue - I have the CCCP pack installed and it was specifically the FFDShow Audio Decoder Configuration that needed tweaking.

Under DirectShow control there's an option to not use ffdshow in certain exes, while fallout3.exe was already listed, I manually added it by browsing to my copy and rebooted. I may have done a reinstall of the pack, and the game, too.


Keen to explore the world, rather than rush through it as before, it's clear I missed out on a lot of game, despite having played about 75 hours before this week. I'm a higher level than I've been before (about 18 ) but still haven't gone to GNR - the main quest feels like a mere trifle I'll do at the end compared to my epic adventures in the wasteland.