Review: Broken Steel (Fallout 3 DLC)
May. 12th, 2009 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenSo, who’d have thought Operation Anchorage would turn out to be the DLC with the fewest problems on release? I guess in hindsight, calling this one “Broken Steel” was a bit of a warning sign…
Anyway, I managed to get it working well enough to play through the main quests – though I had to deactivate most of my mods to get it to work, and it still wasn’t particularly stable even then. I’d wait a few weeks before getting this one – hopefully Bethesda will come out with a new patch that corrects all the problems introduced by the last one…
Alright, the expansion itself. New enemies, new levels, new weapons, new post-game quests. A lot bigger than The Pitt or Anchorage. For starters, and most appreciated, you no longer die in the activation of Project Purity - if you activate it yourself, you wake up two weeks later in the Citadel. If you’ve got Fawkes as a companion, he’s no longer a jerk, and will activate the purifier for you – and, as a mutant, comes out just fine. Haven’t checked yet to see if Charon or RL-3 can also activate it for you. Annoyingly, the end game sequence will still criticise you for not sacrificing yourself – personally, I don’t see self-sacrifice as a virtue if it’s completely unnecessary!
Anyway, regardless of who activates Purity, you wake up in the Citadel. A lot’s been going on, and Elder Lyons wants your help to finish off the last remnants of the Enclave. There’s three main quests against the Enclave, and three side quests revolving around delivering water from Project Purity to the various settlements.
Now, let’s be fair, the quests are fun; I especially liked the side-quest in Underworld revolving around a Ghoul con artist trying to sell purified water as a miracle cure, and the sections of the main quest in the ruins of the Presidential Metro. The downside is – well, it’s a mop-up operation, not a grand finale, and it feels a lot less epic than the battle for Project Purity at the end of the vanilla game. Granted, it’d be hard to top that, but it still doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything that important. The Enclave is broken, you’re just clearing out the last of them.
I think the main problem is the new quests lack a clear antagonist. Vanilla Fallout 3 does a great job of building up President Eden – you only meet him once, near the end of the game – but probably the first thing you encounter coming out of the vault is an Eyebot broadcasting his propaganda. He’s a constant presence throughout the game. Broken Steel really needs a figure like that. Instead, you just fight faceless, nameless Enclave soldiers. There should have been a final confrontation with the new leader of the Enclave – either Autumn if you spared him, or someone entirely new who’s reorganising their shattered armies. You actually get the option at the end of the last quest to turn against the Brotherhood and destroy the Citadel with an orbital strike – but you don’t really have much motivation, since all you’re doing is making the Brotherhood hostile to you, and there’s no Enclave leader to take refuge with…
Still, they’re fun quests, if perhaps a little anticlimactic. There’s a few changes to the wasteland to reflect the activation of Project Purity – water caravans travel between the Jefferson Memorial and Rivet City, there’s Brotherhood-branded barrels of water in most of the major settlements, and I ran into a couple of new random encounters that reflect the new water situation. It’s a shame there aren’t new side quests for all the towns, though – there’s ones for Megaton and Underworld, and one involving caravans headed for Canterbury Commons – but it’d be nice if evil characters had the option to help ensure Paradise Falls and Tenpenny got a share of the water too…
As for the level cap – well, it’s nice to still gain experience; my character had maxed out at level twenty long before the end of the main quest. It does get a little silly once you’re at level thirty and have more skill points than you know what to do with, and most of the new perks are either worthless or just not as good as existing perks. I was rather expecting level 20+ perks to give you really powerful abilities, not junk like “reset karma to neutral” or “immune to alcohol addiction”…
The new weapons are nice – the heavy incinerator is a sort of flaming grenade launcher, useful for taking out large groups – and another weapon to benefit from Pyromaniac. I haven’t run into any mutants with the new triple-laser rifles, but I like the idea. The new Enclave Hellfire armour looks pretty neat too – though oddly I keep seeing generic Enclave soldiers wearing it, not just the specialised Hellfire Troopers.
All in all, it’s a nice expansion; certainly a cut above the last two. I just hope they fix the problems with the recent patch so I can run it with all my mods installed…
Trivia
- There’s an extra alien blaster in a locked crate in the Enclave mobile base, bringing the total number of alien blasters in the game to… two.
- Cute discovery: In the new area of Old Olney, there’s a room with a teddy bear and a garden gnome set up on opposite sides of a chessboard. Shrunken beer and milk bottles are being used for the pieces.
Anyway, I managed to get it working well enough to play through the main quests – though I had to deactivate most of my mods to get it to work, and it still wasn’t particularly stable even then. I’d wait a few weeks before getting this one – hopefully Bethesda will come out with a new patch that corrects all the problems introduced by the last one…
Alright, the expansion itself. New enemies, new levels, new weapons, new post-game quests. A lot bigger than The Pitt or Anchorage. For starters, and most appreciated, you no longer die in the activation of Project Purity - if you activate it yourself, you wake up two weeks later in the Citadel. If you’ve got Fawkes as a companion, he’s no longer a jerk, and will activate the purifier for you – and, as a mutant, comes out just fine. Haven’t checked yet to see if Charon or RL-3 can also activate it for you. Annoyingly, the end game sequence will still criticise you for not sacrificing yourself – personally, I don’t see self-sacrifice as a virtue if it’s completely unnecessary!
Anyway, regardless of who activates Purity, you wake up in the Citadel. A lot’s been going on, and Elder Lyons wants your help to finish off the last remnants of the Enclave. There’s three main quests against the Enclave, and three side quests revolving around delivering water from Project Purity to the various settlements.
Now, let’s be fair, the quests are fun; I especially liked the side-quest in Underworld revolving around a Ghoul con artist trying to sell purified water as a miracle cure, and the sections of the main quest in the ruins of the Presidential Metro. The downside is – well, it’s a mop-up operation, not a grand finale, and it feels a lot less epic than the battle for Project Purity at the end of the vanilla game. Granted, it’d be hard to top that, but it still doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything that important. The Enclave is broken, you’re just clearing out the last of them.
I think the main problem is the new quests lack a clear antagonist. Vanilla Fallout 3 does a great job of building up President Eden – you only meet him once, near the end of the game – but probably the first thing you encounter coming out of the vault is an Eyebot broadcasting his propaganda. He’s a constant presence throughout the game. Broken Steel really needs a figure like that. Instead, you just fight faceless, nameless Enclave soldiers. There should have been a final confrontation with the new leader of the Enclave – either Autumn if you spared him, or someone entirely new who’s reorganising their shattered armies. You actually get the option at the end of the last quest to turn against the Brotherhood and destroy the Citadel with an orbital strike – but you don’t really have much motivation, since all you’re doing is making the Brotherhood hostile to you, and there’s no Enclave leader to take refuge with…
Still, they’re fun quests, if perhaps a little anticlimactic. There’s a few changes to the wasteland to reflect the activation of Project Purity – water caravans travel between the Jefferson Memorial and Rivet City, there’s Brotherhood-branded barrels of water in most of the major settlements, and I ran into a couple of new random encounters that reflect the new water situation. It’s a shame there aren’t new side quests for all the towns, though – there’s ones for Megaton and Underworld, and one involving caravans headed for Canterbury Commons – but it’d be nice if evil characters had the option to help ensure Paradise Falls and Tenpenny got a share of the water too…
As for the level cap – well, it’s nice to still gain experience; my character had maxed out at level twenty long before the end of the main quest. It does get a little silly once you’re at level thirty and have more skill points than you know what to do with, and most of the new perks are either worthless or just not as good as existing perks. I was rather expecting level 20+ perks to give you really powerful abilities, not junk like “reset karma to neutral” or “immune to alcohol addiction”…
The new weapons are nice – the heavy incinerator is a sort of flaming grenade launcher, useful for taking out large groups – and another weapon to benefit from Pyromaniac. I haven’t run into any mutants with the new triple-laser rifles, but I like the idea. The new Enclave Hellfire armour looks pretty neat too – though oddly I keep seeing generic Enclave soldiers wearing it, not just the specialised Hellfire Troopers.
All in all, it’s a nice expansion; certainly a cut above the last two. I just hope they fix the problems with the recent patch so I can run it with all my mods installed…
Trivia
- There’s an extra alien blaster in a locked crate in the Enclave mobile base, bringing the total number of alien blasters in the game to… two.
- Cute discovery: In the new area of Old Olney, there’s a room with a teddy bear and a garden gnome set up on opposite sides of a chessboard. Shrunken beer and milk bottles are being used for the pieces.