Reviewed by Rebecca Wigandt
I should probably provide a very brief summary of my feelings on Anchorage so it won’t look like I’m trying to take up lots of space making vague allusions to things, if I’m going to go ahead and make comparisons to the original Fallout 3 game.
Anchorage was a lukewarm offering – it introduced the beginning of what appears to be an unpleasant trend in introducing official expansions; that is, the ‘mysterious radio signal from total stranger asking for vague help’ which leads you to the entrance to the expansion’s zone. The process smacks of shoehorning, in The Pitt as in Anchorage, and it feels a little silly. Yes, I know, Anchorage was all just a big VR simulation and they had to put it somewhere, like with Vault 112. It’s become the equivalent of TES: Oblivion’s ‘mysterious letter informing you that you’ve inherited a wizard’s fortress/rogue’s dungeon/1985 Chevy Monte Carlo with pee-stained upholstery from an anonymous dead relative.’ It’s a good thing the FCC went down after the Big One, because all these radio transmissions baiting people across the desert to run errands sounds like some sort of scam to me.
My point is, why did Bethesda develop such a great modular game engine and then force everything to be processed through a main .ESP/ESM file? Why do you have to connect all this new content to the main quest, when maybe it would (look, feel, play) better if it could stand alone? Food for thought.
My other complaint about Anchorage relevant to discussing The Pitt is – aside from its shoehorn introduction – the fact that it did little to expand the background of the Fallout timeline as it claimed it would. Anchorage was basically a shoot-em-up using the Fallout engine that threw you some nice ‘real life’ reward loot for your character when you popped out the other side – but it felt sparse and sloppy. They didn’t even correct for PC gender in the very, very limited dialogue that took place. Sure, if you’re really interested in the Fallout timeline you know the events it’s referencing (the Chinese invasion of Anchorage Alaska at the height of the Third World War, the purpose for building Liberty Prime, the ‘gee whiz’ god’s hand at the main quest’s conclusion), but it does very little to reveal things you didn’t already know or place the game’s history in any greater context. That and playing a video game while playing a video game felt fantastically silly. The Pitt is not only a more ambitious offering in general, it also references background events discussed in the main game – and gives you a detailed look at what’s going on.
Now that I’m done griping about Anchorage, let’s talk about the title I am actually reviewing. The Pitt rolled out a day late due to a spectacularly catastrophic bug in the Xbox version that caused Bethesda to yank it from the Marketplace and run screaming. For such a hotly anticipated expansion (I wasn’t the only one who found Anchorage mediocre, but who was nonetheless eager for something promising), this was a PR disaster: I hadn’t even found my way to the actual download source for The Pitt (which, incidentally, I found maddeningly confusing the first time when procuring Anchorage) when I was awash in links to every forum under the sun announcing how the Pitt release was a big steaming “whoopsie”. Fortunately, they scrambled like no one’s business to have it up and running again in less than 24 hours.
In any case, now that it’s here, The Pitt takes you to post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh, where everyone still talks with an accent from Grease and everything is a dirty, rubble-strewn mess, just like real life. The ‘mysterious radio transmission’ leads you to the northernmost edge of the main game’s map to meet Wernher, an escaped slave from the raider-ruled town, who is seeking help stealing the cure to the inhabitants’ unique mutation-inducing plague. This is the disease referenced by Brother Kodiak in the main game’s Brotherhood of Steel, and The Pitt is the city the Brotherhood swept through in “The Scourge.” Wernher wants you to infiltrate The Pitt disguised as one of the town’s many slaves and connect to the resistance movement there to steal the cure.
You get there by taking an improbably direct and uneventful handcar trip (see my earlier gripe about shoehorning new real estate into the main plot) the 200+ miles from the Capital Wasteland (shoe goes on, shoe goes off…) to the fortified gates of the Pitt outside of what looks like Liberty Bridge. There, you surrender all your gear and enter the slave-labour capital of the post-apocalyptic east coast to begin your mission.
There’s a lot of new character material in The Pitt: more than a half-dozen raider-themed outfits offering a great deal more diversity in appearance (and- get this- function! You’ll actually use them!) from the vanilla game’s library, two fiendishly wonderful new weapons, and a few new Perks. Anchorage did introduce new landscape and terrain (which is to say you were perpetually in snow-covered mountains), but The Pitt takes it even further- though small in comparison to the Capital Wasteland map, The Pitt showed off a lot of new textures, background and level layout possibilities that will probably have the modders up all night with Kleenex.
Let’s talk about those visuals for a minute. Playing through The Pitt is like running around on the inside of a Tool video trying to resolve labour disputes – everything is rusty metal, big pipes spewing gouts of liquid-propelled flames for no apparent reason, big dirty guys in leather slave harnesses, power tools, gas masks, and oppression and pestilence symbolism everywhere. It’s the same over-the-top ‘bleak horror’ atmosphere that the main game captured so well, this time done industrial-style (and, again, something that makes The Pitt feel so much more themely than Anchorage did).
Also unlike its DLC predecessor, The Pitt is a well-balanced offering of action, exploration, and interaction. There’s a large, open ‘dungeon’ level spanning above-ground steelyards and indoor factory rubble with stuff hidden just plain everywhere, and much of the exploration of said area is entirely up to you. For its size, The Pitt has a good number of named and unique NPCs, many of which do have some complex and interesting interaction possibilities with the PC. Even at the climax of The Pitt’s quest plot when everything goes to hell, there’s as much interaction as run-and-gun.
There’s also an arena where they drop toxic waste through the ceiling and sneering girls in leather costumes call you mean names. I mean, really, isn’t that worth $10 right there? There are a lot of people out there, mostly rich white guys, who pay twenty times that paltry sum for that sort of thing.
It isn’t all fetishistic oppression and new toys, though. The Pitt has some drawbacks. There’s a ton of loot to be collected, if you’re so inclined, and no way to ‘process’ it until you’ve gotten well into the expansion’s overall quest. The player doesn’t have any kind of a base in the zone to stash or process the literally dozens of craftable objects tossed your way, and there’s only one shop that you have very brief access to until you’ve finished the quest. This is all very apparently by design, though- you’re meant to move through The Pitt with a sense of urgency, not set down roots, kick up your heels and accumulate enough caps and uber weapons to bore The Punisher.
It’s also worth mentioning as a positive note that you can leave The Pitt and return freely after completing the quest, which sets up another modest trading center for you at the north edge of the map. Try to ignore the fact that you’re allegedly riding a handcar 200 miles down a train track to get there, and just enjoy the fact that you can go back to D.C. and wow the natives with your leather harness and gas mask dominatrix ensemble.
Also, I was being polite not mentioning it first given the embarassment already endured on the Marketplace, but good Goddess this game is buggy. It isn’t the catastrophic ‘holy crap I just remembered this checksum thing – back in a minute guys *pyow*’ bug that yanked The Pitt from the virtual shelves, but rather a small jillion or so bugs that, sadly, ambitiously ‘busy’ Bethesda content seems to be known for. Already, the message boards are flooded with crash bugs, sound bugs and character behavior bugs, a handful of which I’ve experienced myself, albeit not consistently. There’s also some plain old design problems- characters don’t know how to navigate the very complex rubble- and catwalk-strewn industrial landscape and frequently do silly things. There are lots of oversights that are more indicative of sloppy work than bugginess- stock NPCs with missing dialogue, poor scripting (people overlooking plot-advancing events and spewing now-irrelevant dialogue, etc.), chaotic scripted events (an admittedly dramatic mass riot that kills off lots of named characters seemingly randomly beyond your ability to intervene) and greatly excessive overcluttering in some zones (did you guys really need to scatter 200+ Jet inhalers all over the ground to hammer home the fact that everyone’s a junkie?) that leads to laggy, misbehaving gameplay even on a high-end machine. I shudder to think what the poor Xbox players must have gotten with the first release.
Thirdly, be warned that the expansion is clearly for relatively higher-level characters, which is the big reason that they (very wisely, in my opinion) confiscate your loot at entry so you have a fair challenge. Just getting to the northern edges of the main game map to reach the entry point will eat lower-level characters alive (at least, with the difficulty slider all the way up like I do because I’m such a tough chick), so if you’ve just started playing Fallout 3, don’t expect to be able to enjoy The Pitt right away.
Anyone who hasn’t completely converted their Fallout experience to user-generated material is still chomping at the bit for Broken Steel, the third and final official expansion pack which reopens the main plotline’s ending- the general consensus of said ending being that it was an annoying and limiting disappointment- because it returns to the prior Fallout convention of allowing you to continue play in the game world after the main quest was complete and allows you a wide number of ways to accomplish the same goal. The Pitt isn’t going to change your experience of Fallout in general- you’re going to have to wait for Broken Steel- but it is definitely a positive indicator that the expansion dev teams are getting their act together, expanding the potential of these packs, and introducing enough new and relevant material to make it feel worthwhile.