Fallout 3: Sun and Steel

Self-defence and Slavery

The Pitt may be the best Fallout 3 add-on released by Bethesda, and certainly it’s my favourite one. The Lone Wanderer meets a stranger posing as a leader of slave resistance in the ruined Pittsburgh, which has been turned into a colossal industrial combine by a certain raider leader.  On the moment he crosses the main gate, our character is immediately knocked down by the guards and eventually wakes up at the literal bottom of the social ladder — as a slave wearing tattered rags who is forced to labour in a steelyard, facing savage mutants, radiation and, let’s not underestimate it, horrible food, the Slop. Thanks to the player’s skill (and sometimes the liberal use of quickloading), he may slowly rise from an indentured worker to an arena fighter, and eventually has the chance to become one of the Evil Overlord’s henchmen. Of course, the resistance among the enslaved population is still active and requires his help in preparing a rebellion, but the line between good and bad, the downtrodden and the oppressors, is becoming blurry…

There are two main reasons to like this mod: the first one will be obvious to everone who looks at a few screenshots or finds a gameplay video on YouTube. To put it in a nutshell, the entire location looks and feels like a part of the Mad Max universe combined with a futuristic version of the Soviet Gulag. Personally, I think that the overall tone matches the postapocalyptic tone of the Fallout series better than any other location or quest in its third installment.

The other reason is that The Pitt forces even the advanced players to start from scratch again. When he was about to enter the compound, my Hagen was a proud owner of an Enclave Power Armour, armed with a blaster literally from the outer space, and boasting 30 levels of experience. At this point, it was very refreshing to have to survive with minimum equipment, searching the gloomy steelyard for metal ingots and repelling mutant attacks again and again. The first major quest may be the most interesting and satysfying in the entire DLC, but I will write more about it another day.