A Meaningless Title

- Children are extremely rare. Most towns don’t have any.

- You need a campfire and a steak to make salad.

- Wearing Caesar’s armour will make his guards think you’re part of the Legion, regardless of your age, race, gender, or the bloody remains of Caesar right behind you.

- People will willingly bet money on a card game in which a player can discard cards from their hand and draw new ones as often as they like before play begins.

- Paper money backed by a large and powerful nation are less trusted as currency than bottlecaps.

- Being intelligent means one automatically knows Latin.

- Empty syringes weigh more than full ones.

- Lunch boxes are not reusable.

- People do more damage to the gender they’re attracted to.

- Magazines can only be read once.

- A flamethrower is basically the same sort of weapon as a laser pistol.

- Water can only be bottled in unbranded soda bottles. No other bottle will do.

Been too busy with Fallout: New Vegas to post for the last week. Wonderful game, few flaws, but still, excelent addition to the series.

One major issue, though: Considering this game is, if anything, bigger than Fallout 3... who's brilliant idea was it to have the radio play even fewer songs? After a few hours, one starts to long for F3's endless choruses of "Butcher Pete"...

And so Fallout DLC ends as they began – with a completely linear shoot-em up completely detached from the setting of the original game. I wasn’t expecting anything as good as Point Lookout, but Mothership Zeta is, if anything, worse even than Operation Anchorage!

 

( The plot, such as it is: )

Wait, wait, wait. Let me get this straight – Bethesda’s released a patch for Fallout that actually fixes the problems created by the last patch and doesn’t introduce any new bugs? And then they follow it up with a new DLC that works fine right from the start and is also really really good as well? I… I don’t understand…?

No, seriously, Point Lookout is wonderful. It’s head and shoulders above the other three DLC packages – I’m rather surprised at how much stuff is here, and how much I enjoyed exploring the new areas. If you’re only going to get one DLC, get this one… even Broken Steel looks a bit dull compared to Lookout.

So, what’s it about? Well, there’s not much of an overarching plot here – You get a message informing you there’s a ferry in the Potomac that’ll take you to Point Lookout for a small fee. Once you get there, you’re pretty much on your own. Well, hell, you’re an RPG protagonist – do you really need a reason to head out into the wilderness and kill things?

Point Lookout itself is a large swamp on the coast. It’s nowhere near as big as the Capital Wasteland, of course, but it’s still a decent sized area – maybe a bit more than one fifth the size of the base game world. Big enough to get lost in, certainly – big enough for there to be plenty of interesting little areas to explore. That’s the real strength of this expansion – it’s got the same sort of gameplay that made Fallout 3 such a wonderful game. The other DLCs were very linear and had little remaining content when finished, whereas Point Lookout is the complete opposite; complete the Lookout ‘main’ quest, and there’s still plenty to do in the swamps.

The swamps offer a completely different feel to the Capital Wasteland’s desert – Washington is filled with burned out ruins and broken concrete structures, the legacy of the bombs falling. Point Lookout seems not so much destroyed as abandoned. The swamp is slowly reclaiming the last remnants of civilization here. It’s a creepy environment, with bubbling swamp gas, strange native ritual dolls hanging from trees, and inbred moonshiners with shotguns behind every tree… Swamps are, I think, a vastly underrated game setting, and it’s nice to get a chance to explore an area with such a different feel to the base game.

I don’t want to spoil the main quest, but suffice to say that it’s got a lot of great moments and ends up… weirder than I was expecting. There’s a fair number of sidequests, and a few unmarked little things to do. I found it oddly satisfying to find a replacement lightbulb for the long-abandoned lighthouse, making it operational again.

Interestingly, Point Lookout doesn’t bother throwing new weapons or perks at you like the other DLC did – there’s a few new weapons; notably double-barrelled shotguns and lever-action rifles, and a couple of perks that can be acquired through completing certain quests, but they’re nothing special. That’s not a complaint, really – a game add-on shouldn’t have to reward you with awesome new weapons just to get you to play the damn thing; Point Lookout worth getting for the experience, not just because you get a stealth suit or whatever at the end.

A few negative points, just for balance. Point Lookout’s designed with high level characters in mind. Fair enough. Unfortunately, Bethesda’s idea of a tough enemy for high level characters is just a regular enemy with far too many hit points. Adding to the problem, most of the new enemies are scripted to do extra damage to the player with every hit, regardless of what they’re armed with. It gets very silly when half-naked hillbillies with axes are a bigger threat than Enclave troops were. Stealth-based characters will be at a particular disadvantage, as even a sneak-attack headshot isn’t going to kill any of the new enemies in one go. Hand-to-hand and melee specialists will also have difficultly… Fortunately, my character minors in Big Guns and has several thousand excess units of Flamer fuel.

I also feel the hillbilly swampfolk would have been better implemented as regular human npcs with some sort of odd skin texture, not as the rather cartoonish creatures they are here. They look like characters out of Redneck Rampage, and that’s never a good thing!

And why can’t your companion follow you to Point Lookout? In The Pitt, sure, you were trying to sneak in, keep a low profile. Here, though – you’re going on vacation! Why can’t Fawkes and Dogmeat come along? There weren’t any areas that would have caused problems with companions, and there was never any real justification for not having them…

Despite those minor issues, though, this is a wonderful expansion. Is it too much to hope that Bethesda will make a few more like this? I’d love a Commonwealth-based DLC of this size…

Minor notes:

- There’s at least two pint-sized slasher masks in the swamps, if you were disappointed at not getting a real one after Tranquillity Lane.

- Point Lookout’s sparsely populated, and lacks most of the services you’ll find in the Capital Wasteland. In particular, you’ll start to curse the lack of doctors after a while. Take plenty of Rad-Away before you leave – wandering through the swampwater takes its toll after a while.

- Oddly, judging by the pip-boy display, travelling to Point Lookout takes an entire month!

- Confederate hats are everywhere; they’re presumably the low-karma equivalent of the base game’s Lincoln’s hat. No Confederate uniforms, unfortunately…

For a game set in the anarchistic decaying ruins of civilization, Fallout’s a pretty funny game. Giant mutant mole rats are hard to take seriously. Two headed cattle being a common sight is hard to take seriously. The Church of Atom, worshipers of the Bomb are hard to take seriously.

And the “Fat Man” is hard to take seriously. For those who haven’t played the game, the Fat Man’s the most powerful gun in the game. It’s a mini-nuke launcher, and can take out any but the most powerful enemies in the game in a single shot. It’s overkill against most foes – though a friend of mine swears by it – and I assumed it was included as a joke, like how every car in the game explodes in a mushroom cloud when shot at. It’s a humorous take on the ubiquitous nature of the Bomb in 1950s popular culture, right? I mean, come on – a hand held nuclear weapon? That’s a little too silly…

Right?



Nope.

“The Davy Crockett was the smallest and lightest nuclear weapon ever deployed by the US military… the W54 warhead weighted just 51 pounds, with an explosive yield of 0.01 kilotons.”

Granted, this weapon isn’t quite as miniaturised as the Fallout Fat Man - still, a portable nuclear weapon launcher that small is a hell of a lot closer to the Fallout weapon than I ever expected to see exit.

Well, that was underwhelming.

Operation Anchorage is the first of a planned three downloadable add-on quests for Fallout 3. This one focuses on a virtual reality simulation of the ‘Battle of Anchorage’ – part of the war between the United States and China that escalated into the nuclear exchange that forms the backdrop for the Fallout series.

And… well, it does what it says on the box – and little else. Plus points – it fits into the established game world well. There’s a new Outcast base on the main map, and I couldn’t tell you how much of the base was there before the addon. When you show up, there’s a full scale battle going on between Outcasts and mutants. You help them out, and they explain they’ve uncovered a pre-war weapons cache. Problem? The only way in is to convince the computer you’ve completed your ‘training’ – ie, the VR simulation. Not a problem, except the Outcasts can’t access the VR program. Only you can, because you’ve got a Pipboy computer that’s compatible with the VR system.

So, you agree to do the VR, and in exchange, you get a share of the goodies in the base. You plug in, and away you go with the meat of the quest.

That’s where things fall apart. The actual Battle of Anchorage is pretty linear. You shoot a bunch of simulated Chinese soldiers, run through some bases, and blow the things up you’re meant to blow up. The problem is, the simulation doesn’t have the depth or freedom of the ‘real’ wastelands, but doesn’t really do anything with the concept of a simulation either. Hell, it doesn't even really do much with the concept of Anchorage! Simulated Alaska looks and plays a lot like the regular Capital Wastelands, only with snow. Effectively, you go from a computer game to an inferior version of the same game.

It’s a real shame, because the Tranquillity Lane simulation in regular Fallout was one of the highlights of the game. Off the top of my head, I can think of two ways they could have massively improved Anchorage. They could have played the simulation as being a US Army training exercise, not a pure historical recreation – make it a full on propaganda piece, with your character taking down thousands of enemy soldiers unscathed at the head of an army of clean-cut, newly liberated Alaskans ready to give their lives for the American way. Throw in a guest appearance by the Liberty Prime robot and a diabolical Red Chinese villain to thwart, you’d have a simulation the Enclave could be proud of!

Alternatively, they could have gone with the idea that the simulation is malfunctioning. You defeat the Chinese, only to have it reset itself, over and over, with increasingly bizarre variations of the scenario. You’d have to work out what was wrong and find a way to shut down the scenario – with bonus options for characters with high Science, Repair, or Speech. Ideally, you’d only get out when you completely break the scenario by siding with the Chinese forces…

But instead, we get neither. The scenario is played completely straight, and feels like a rejected level from a rather dull FPS. There’s some fun details here and there – you can pick your own squad of simulated soldiers to take with you, with five or six different types of soldiers and robots to choose from – but there’s nothing very memorable.

In general, Operation Anchorage just plain lacks polish. It feels like a moderately well-done user mod, not a commercial product. The voice acting is below average, and there’s more than a few bugs. Oh, and Bethesda? Your official mods don’t need to bellow their existence the moment they’re installed. I already know I’m using it, there don’t need to be pop-up boxes the moment the game starts.

It’s funny, because I just found a whole bunch of free user mods for Fallout 3 that add so much more to the game as a whole – for example, ‘Explosive Entry’, which lets you use grenades and mines to open locked doors and crates, making land mines more useful while rendering lockpick less of a must-have skill. That strikes me as a hell of a lot more exciting than a half-assed linear quest mod.

To be fair, the other two downloadable missions sound a hell of a lot more interesting than this one ever did, and Bethesda can do decent downloadable addons - the Knights of the Nine questline in Oblivion was one of the best in the game. Here's hoping the next two are a hell of a lot better than this one.

Finished up Fallout 3 last night; haven’t found all the Bobbleheads yet, and I suspect there’s still a few areas of the map I never really explored – I never found the crashed UFO, for example. Still, that gives me some stuff to look out for next time – I’m thinking of trying a melee specialist who uses lots of grenades… Grab the Animal Friend perk next time around too – those mutant bears are nasty!

The ending seems rather abrupt – there could easily have been another couple of quests in between retrieving the GECK and the final showdown. Scouting out the Enclave’s positions or tracking down parts needed for Liberty Prime, for example…

And the ending itself – storyline hint here, guys: If the resolution of your story revolves around the hero having to deal with a massive amount of radiation, you should probably first make sure your hero doesn’t have access to at least three possible allies who are immune to radiation…. Well, the robot might not be immune, but I imagine RL-3 would still last longer than a human. If nothing else, don’t draw attention to the problem by having a previous quest be dependant on you getting the assistance of a radiation immune ally!

I kinda wonder if the followers were added at the last minute – in addition to the end-game plot problems, there’s two other areas in the main quest where you get captured, and both times no mention is made of your followers – they just wander back to where you originally recruited them. Well, if they’re not going to help rescue me from the Enclave, screw ‘em! I’m happier as a lone wanderer anyway!

Still, I enjoy the game immensely. I like that they kept the Fallout tradition of letting you talk your way out of the boss fights – President Eden struck me as a fairly reasonable man, all things considered… though the fact that I’d maxed out my speech skill probably played a role in things. I also liked that your skills and perks seemed to play a role in a lot of dialogue – I got a lot of extra options because of my “Robotics expert” trait, which I’d only picked to get a damage bonus against ‘bots. Of course, this does render somewhat useless perks like “Lady Killer” or “Child at Heart” where the main or only benefit of the perk is to give you extra dialogue options…

Well, there’s always room for improvement and I hope a proper editing tool will be released soon – I’d love to see more radio stations added, and maybe a bit more diversity to the raiders – different gangs with different styles of combat, maybe sometimes you run into two gangs fighting each other or something.

Also, there needs to be a way to get the cool sheriff’s outfit and cowboy hat without having to kill the Sherriff in Megaton!