Broken Steel up and after all the bugs, it was worth it

Broken Steel went up yesterday and I’ve been plugging away at it…and you know what? It’s really good.

But first, the things I learned while waiting for the DLC and in getting it to work:
1) GFWL still seems to be a work in progress for PCs
2) I still had to copy the mod files into my game directory
3) If the expansion still doesn’t start up after the ending rolls (you should get “Two Weeks Later”), turn off all of your other mods other than the official ones from Bethesda (Operation Anchorage and the Pitt). I had to turn off my custom repair mod which seems to have gotten Broken Steel to work for me. Mod boards are also filled with quite a few posts about community add-ons no longer working after updating the game to 1.5 with the pre-patch for Broken Steel.

After figuring all that out and getting it to work, I am happy to report from the wastes that it was worth the trouble.

I like it a lot more than I did the Pitt…it just felt more complete and the side-quests were pretty creative ranging from having to deal with a snake oil salesman to slumming with a gang and going so far as to challenge the leader for control. And the ending? Wow…you can really be an evil schmuck if you want to.

The way that it shows off the results of your actions after activating Project Purity added even more lore to the game in the way that clean water has changed the landscape. Just listening to the Scribes bicker at the Project, or listen to the comments that the Brotherhood makes concerning the current operations against the Enclave were also part of the fun.

Now that the three DLC are created, there’s only the rumor about the fourth one…codenamed “Point Look”. But I also can’t wait to hear more news as to what the crew over at Obsidian have planned with their own spin on Fallout when they take players back to Vegas!

They also do little plastic bottles, too, but without charging people. If only that were like the real world...

Broken Steel pulled for PCs

Somehow I’m not surprised?

I was all ready to download Broken Steel, the DLC add-on for Fallout 3, when I couldn’t find it on Games for Windows Live. Digging a little deeper, I hit the forums on Bethesda’s site and discovered that it was pulled because of issues. Although not everyone has run into these, quite a few vocal users are more than happy to share their stories.

What issues? How about the GFWL DRM breaking the DLC as VG247 reports? Achievements not working? The DLC simply not activating? The official forum is filled with these stories and more. One poster has even gone so far as to say that Broken Steel is a “Broken Steal”. Aside from the linked reply on VG247, Bethesda’s official site has been quiet about the user complaints piling up in their forums.

At this point, I’m just waiting for the download like everyone else, but after the Pitt, you’d think that Bethesda and Microsoft would realize that something simply isn’t working right, or that Q&A has to take a harder look at what is going on. The only download that I didn’t have these kinds of issues with was Operation: Anchorage and the solution to my problem with that was an easy copy-paste to another directory.

Dropping GFWL might not be so easy, either, given the integration with Fallout 3, so calls to have Bethesda simply go another route may not be as simple as picking a new content provider from the short list.

I guess we’ll wait and see what happens next, but I’m not holding my breath. Time to burn a little time with more Thunder Force VI.

PC users revolt against GFWL, demanding that Bethesda drop the service and choose something else. Like Steam, Stardock, or back to the old way of doing things like they did with Morrowind.