So – after a nightmarish time trying to get Operation: Anchorage to work, it turned out to be wholly disappointing – only bribing its way into my favour by showering me with pretty loot at its early conclusion. My experience attempting to install this newest downloadable content for Fallout 3, the Pitt, was several orders of magnitude less painful, but we’re still talking fraught, unsuccessful visits to the Games for Windows Live forums here. Eventually, after installing various Windows updates that may or may not have had anything to do with GFWL, I was able to boot up the game, sign in to Microsoft’s increasingly offensive service, and, y’know, play the content that I’d bought several hours earlier. And now I have four hundred superfluous Microsoft fun points.
Happily, the Pitt manages to redeem itself. Unlike Operation: Anchorage’s brief foray into pure FPS territory, the Pitt is consistent with what makes Fallout 3 great – namely, wandering around a lovingly constructed post-apocalyptic environment, rummaging for loot, and leaving a trail of destruction, or at least change, in your wake. You’re summoned by an emergency radio signal to a point at the extreme north of the Capital Wasteland’s map, and, after stumbling around on cliffs and in radiation pools for a while, you find the radio tower and an eyepatch-wearing, chain-smoking escaped slave named Werhner, who whisks you away to post-war Pittsburgh post-haste, aboard a railway handcar. Unlike Washington DC, which in Fallout’s vision of the future was pretty much levelled when the bombs fell, Pittsburgh escaped largely unscathed, only to become a breeding ground for disease and decay in the years that followed. It’s home to a colony of raiders and their slaves, ravaged by a disease that transforms its victims into inhuman Trogs. When you casually stroll on to the scene, a cure is close to being developed.
In other words, the Pitt is a meaty and satisfying slice of true RPG goodness – it’s got factions, it’s got conflict, it’s got choice, it’s got proper characters, and it’s got the opportunity to have a dramatic effect on the world around you. Lovely – that’s the way to do it. The main quest is still a little on the short side for your £8.50, but the open levels leave a lot of opportunity for wandering, and there are couple of side distractions chucked in there too. My level twenty character – a charming, silver-tongued psychopath that moves silently, kills indiscriminately and fetishises assault rifle mechanisms - breezed through Pittsburgh without difficulty, defeated only by a suddenly immaterial handrail on one of the higher gantries. Arguably it is a little too easy, given that most of the people interested in the DLC will probably have higher level characters, but honestly I just enjoyed choosing all the threatening and hubristic dialogue options, knowing that, when the time came, I could make good on my word and visit death upon the decaying colony. Which I did.
None of the new loot is as lovely and shiny as the Chinese Stealth Armour or Gauss Rifle from Operation: Anchorage, but there’s a lot more of it, and it’s all pretty cool in a grimy, rough’n'ready sort of way. Commanding centre stage, of course, is the Auto Axe, a giant spinning whirly death arrangement that fits in so snugly with the Pitt’s aesthetic that it’s hard to imagine playing through the add-on without lugging around half a tonne of bladed metal and using it to chop up mutants, raiders and uppity slaves. Better still for a compulsive loot-whore such as myself, however, is the host of new armours, a new unique weapon, and a handful of other bits and bobs to spend hours meticulously stacking onto the shelves of my apartment. People that are even more obsessive than me can perform a fetch quest for steel ingots to get even more new stuff, the extent of which makes my excitement at Operation: Anchorage’s paltry-if-awesome offering look a tiny bit stupid.
The Pitt is one of the best environments I’ve seen in Fallout 3 so far, possibly the best – a ramshackle raider settlement clinging around and atop the empty, rotten buildings, all cloaked in thick orange pollution from Pittsburgh’s one working steel mill. It’s not merely an extension of the base game’s barren, green-grey nuclear wasteland, but a separate and internally consistent place, with its own tone and its own feel. This was one of Operation: Anchorage’s greatest strengths too, but where that storyline took place in pretty-but-narrow snow corridors, the levels in the Pitt are wonderfully open, complicated and sprawling – particularly the breathtaking steelyard. It even has new music, some of which is brilliant – and if Operation: Anchorage had any new music then it can’t have been very memorable.
The best part of the Pitt is this: it’s very Fallout-y. My experience with the first two games is still limited, but it fits in perfectly with Fallout 3’s vision of the future; the Pitt is masterfully crafted, very obviously a departure from the Wasteland while still feeling like part of the same world – a place where the same events have had a radically different impact. There’s even a pretty good story spun within it, and one that was intensely gratifying – I waltzed in, did my thing, and waltzed out, leaving the settlement reeling from my actions and my presence. Where Operation: Anchorage was a largely unsuccessful attempt at the FPS, the Pitt is a triumphant return to the RPG.
(Credit where it’s due: my character’s hair in the pictures is from this mod)
