Column: Fallout 3's Broken Steel DLC and the Power of Prayer

While the vast majority of critics and fans heaped kudos upon Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic epic Fallout 3 when it was released, many players took to blogs and online message boards decrying its abrupt ending. When you completed the game’s central quest narrative, the onscreen action lapsed into a brief sepia-toned slideshow of images from the Capital Wasteland with some epilogue-ish voiceover remarks. Then bam, credits, game over, menu screen. It felt like going out on a romantic date that seemed to be going incredibly well, only to have it culminate in a brief peck on the forehead and a door being slammed unexpectedly in your face.

Broken Steel—the third pack of downloadable content for Fallout 3—carries an implicit mea culpa. Once you’ve installed the add-on, the abrupt ending vanishes. The Climactic Moment unfolds as it originally did, but instead of the game-ending slideshow, you awake from a coma roughly two weeks later in The Citadel clinic where Elder Lyons informs you that the battle between the Brotherhood of Steel and the remaining pockets of Enclave soldiers still rages. You will lead a team to wipe out their surviving base of operations, hopefully stamping out the vermin once and for all.

You can’t build a world as vast and captivating as Fallout 3’s Capital Wasteland and cut players’ wanderings short. There’s always another hill and factory and subway tunnel and abandoned farmhouse and power relay station and raider outpost to explore. Beyond the fact that it was smart of Bethesda to leave its game world open for exploration beyond completion of the central quest, this after-market tweak should remind people of what makes videogames so remarkable in the first place. There’s an incredible sense of interactivity not just within the games themselves but also between the developers and their audience.

In my original review of Fallout 3, I talked about the ways in which the game designer’s act of digital world creation has its own resonances to the Christian Bible’s account of the cosmos’ origin. But with Bethesda’s release of the Broken Steel DLC, that metaphor takes on additional weight. In essence, fans prayed for something to happen in the world of Fallout 3, and creator Todd Howard saw that it came to pass. There’s something marvelously communal in that transaction. How many other artforms can boast such a dynamic relationship between artist and audience?

Part of what makes life so engaging is the way it changes around us, the ways we’re forced to adapt to its thrilling inconstancy. We’re starting to see more and more of this experience reflected in the videogames we play. Broken Steel just so happens to be one of the more enjoyable recent examples.

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Watch the trailer for Broken Steel: