Goatmoose

To anyone who can hear me, my name is Wehrner. I come from a settlement to the north. I have information of great value to anyone willing to help me free my people. Please, help us. This message repeats…

Maybe having lived my entire life in Pittsburgh has given me a bias, but I’ve been super looking forward to March 24th since early February when Bethesda Softworks started announcing DLC packs for Fallout 3. It’s a super shame that so far, The Pitt is an ice cold poopsicle.

After booting up, everything was looking good. The radio signal (dictated above) came in to ignite my new mission pack and I traveled to said location. I met up with Wehrner and he told me I’d need to dress as a slaver and sneak into The Pitt. This DLC utilizes some of the already existing Fallout universe, which I thought was cool, as Operation Anchorage was basically a complete addition. Wehrner told me somewhere to the west there was a trade going on where I should be able to pick up a slaver suit before heading to the Pitt with him, so off I went, smile on my face and combat shotty in hand…

Welcome to The Pitt? Not quite yet, it seems.

Unfortunately, “somewhere to the west” is all the more detail I’m able to give about it, as I never made it there. As far as I’ve read on forums and blogs already irate by 9:30am today, few have. The game freezes the entire console with every attempt to head west, regardless of what route is taken. I tried four times over four routes – stuck at every attempt. Other reports include rocks you can walk through, trees and bodies floating in mid-air, graphics turning into black lines and Metal Gear Solid-esque exclamation points jagging all over the place. The few that did manage to get the suit and make it to The Pitt said the city itself is even more glitchy than the journey to it, with walls you can walk through and freezing even more rampant. All this makes the DLC unplayable for every single downloader so far. Epic failure.

It’s a good thing the route to The Pitt is way up on the north border of the Fallout universe, because with the patch in its current state messing up that portion of the map, even playing the regular game would trigger a freeze if you were wandering in that area. Fortunately there’s no real reason to be up there when you’re playing the regular game.

Now, Bethesda has a reputation for bugs with Fallout, but has patched them all eventually – and has made a stellar game overall with Fallout 3. I find it very unlikely that they missed all these bugs during testing. Clearly something with the process of bringing it to life for consumer use has caused an unbearable amount of crap. I have no doubt they’ll be working actively to figure out the problem, administer patches and fix the issues so we all can enjoy what we have waited long and paid 800 MS points for. But who knows how long it’ll take…

But dammit… today was supposed to be the end of a long, annoying wait. Apparently there’s more waiting to be done…