Broken Steel: Fixing the Frontier

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Written by BuckGB on May 28th, 2009

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With Broken Steel installed, the new real star of Fallout 3 is water.

Here I was, recently doubting the viability of the Western as a game form, and then came Broken Steel, subtly pushing forward water as a dynamic and important part of the Wasteland. There's an action story to distract you from that fact, but look beyond the nominal drive of this new chapter -- an encounter with the Enclave -- and you'll see that the landscape around D.C. is now a more detailed, lifelike frontier. I wonder if Bethesda views this evolution in the same way.

Originally, the primary story of a Lone Wanderer from Vault 101 had a hard endpoint. You had to find and activate a water filtration system, and radiation ended the story. No matter how you approached the story's final beats, done was done. Water was a MacGuffin of sorts; you pursued a dream of clean water for the Wasteland, and the story ended as the dream came to fruition.

The new content removes that hard ending. In the process, it doesn't push water to the foreground. It sets the Lone Wanderer off on the trail of the Enclave, the group that tried to take control of the water purification system.

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