Cathode Tan - Games, Media and Geek Stuff
logo design by man bytes blog

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Fallout 3 DLC ... Bethesda, WTF?

In the beginning, there was Fallout. And it was good.

Then there was Fallout 2, and heralded it was as awesome.

Then a bunch of stuff happened, some of it pretty great and some of it Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel.

Then we got Fallout 3. And we could forget that whole F:BOS nonsense.

And then we got downloadable content. And it was a buggy demon from hell.

Look, I really love the fact that the PlayStation 3 finally got the DLC. What I don't get is that after months of waiting and even more months of delay - the DLC still just doesn't work right.

Your mileage might vary - but my mileage is stuck on the side of the road waiting for VATS to get unstuck. Or that load screen to, well, stop loading. Which, by the way, many times it simply won't and I need to reboot the PS3. I haven't had an experience this buggy since I ditched playing games on the PC.

Which - for the record? Is why I ditched playing games on the PC. I can understand the graphical glitch here or there, or oddities with quest objects, or the occasional slowdown in framerate ... but there are multiple times while playing that the game simply stops running.

How does that pass quality control? Did someone forget to document "game should keep running" as a requirement? Are all the test scenarios less than ten minutes? Did they test a completely different game? Any explanation?

So far I've played through the main quests of Broken Steel, Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt and Point Lookout. All of the DLC has been plagued with slowdowns and lockups to varying degrees - with seemingly little predictability. Mothership Zeta remains, and honestly my excitement for it has waned considerably in anticipation for multiple reboots.

Sure, Fallout 3 is a great game - but this level of quality is just shameful. Hopefully New Vegas aims a little higher.

2 comments:

sterno said...

Yeah I had similar issues with mine. Nothing I liked better than playing this game while I was at home sick than having to lug my ass up off the couch to go across the room to restart the console.

Overall having the DLC has been nice, but I'm debating the value of them. I mean if I buy all of the DLC for it that's set to be coming out, I end up spending as much as I paid for the game in the first place. However, I'm not getting an entire new game worth of content.

So far I've played Broken Steel, Operation Anchorage, and the Pitt. I really liked Broken Steel, largely because I got some very cool weapons out of it (Alien pistol and Tesla Canon). Operation Anchorage didn't get me a whole lot, just some armor that will now proceed to degrade and become worthless. I like having access to the ammo press in the Pitt, though I really wish I could get an ammo press that would crank out ammo for my plasma rifle.

Josh said...

So last night I finished Zeta. Much of the add-on was far more stable than the previous, though there was one annoying lockup after a particularly lengthy fight scene.

However, at the very end, when I return to the Wasteland, there was a candidate for worst bug ever. I pop in and get greeted with the message:

Dogmeat has died.


Oh yay. I defeat the alien menace only to have my dog die. Who I intentionally left safely iin Megaton since none of these add-ons seem to allow companions.

Loading a previous save fixed it ... but really? Killing puppies? That's pretty low.