Earlier tonight, I finished the second DLC for Fallout 3--The Pitt. The premise of The Pitt is that you're going to the remains of Pittsburg to do something with the slaver colony there. I say "do something" because, like much of Fallout 3, there are always choices.

Much like in Anchorage, the game introduces some false difficulty by taking away all of your equipment near the beginning of the quest tree. They do not (and presumably cannot) take away my ridiculous 20th level skills, so I began my new life in the slave colony by pickpocketing a tire iron from one of the slavers and beating him to death with it. This provided me with a firearm which substantially increased the speed with which better equipment was provided. What disapointed me, however, was that my "kill them all" strategy was not actually viable. The Pitt includes a large number of doors which, in Neverwinter Nights parlance, were "warded against simple spells and too complex to pick". This meant that, even though I routinely slaughtered the slaver overlords, I could not actually advance the plot without finding and doing whatever chores were required. It also lead to odd conversations wherein I would be pointing a gun at a slaver's head and they would mock me. This would, of course, result in bullets going into their head and eventually (due to Bloody Mess) their bodies exploding. The whole experience was a bit surreal due to my unorthodox method of approaching the situation.

Aside from the fact that the Pitt is rather brief (maybe 3 hours, tops), I was a bit irritated by one of the Achievements added. Generally, most of the achievements for Fallout 3 were for doing quests. There were only a handful that were for doing collections (custom weapons and bobble heads being the only in the original). One of the new Achievements was to find 100 steel ingots in a large sprawling area. This achievement alone was probably an hour or two on top of the 3 hour play time simply because of the logistics of it and the tedium of searching such a huge area. Also, aside from the Achievement, there isn't much of a reward for completing it. It gives a few unique weapons (only one of which I bothered to keep) and for doing the whole set it gives a unique power armor. Unfortunately, this armor isn't as good at the armor that comes out of the Anchorage DLC, so it ended up sitting on the floor in some room once I got all of my equipment back.

Taken together, I don't think the sense of danger that the Pitt is supposed to represent came across well. At least it introduced a silenced assault rifle.

Published by XPost