A Year Behind the Times

I just finished every quest in Fallout 3, after having bought the special Game of the Year Edition a month or so ago. This edition included every add-on that was released over the past year, which considering that buying these expansion separately would have set me back about $50 extra, it was rather fortunate that I waited.
With regards to the expansions, not every one was worth it. Each expansion has it’s own locations, equipment, characters and quests. Broken Steel expanded on the original story, which would otherwise have fallen flat. The original game ends with the reactivation of a water purifying plant. There is still the matter of an evil army of Enclave soldiers on the loose, which Broken Steel addresses with space lasers. Other expansions like Lookout Point prove more challenging with the enemies you face, but are somewhat anti-climactic. It didn’t have the same sort of good vs. evil moral conflicts like The Pitt, where one has to choose whether or not to abduct a baby. Operation Anchorage and Mothership Zeta are both valuable for their fun factors, but Mothership Zeta has the bonus of giving you a large supply of deadly alien weapons to use against your enemies.
I just wanted to talk about some of the weird glitches I encountered while playing. The original release was beleaguered by numerous bugs, some of which caused the game to crash. The Game of the Year edition doesn’t include and special programming to resolve these bugs, so it’s still glitchy at some points. I was forced at one point to resume an old save when my auto-save made my game freeze upon loading after exiting a door. The game would load, then freeze immediately. That wasn’t fun.
Other weird shit included Deathclaws, one of the most dangerous enemies in the game. I would chance encounter groups of Deathclaws attacking Raiders out in the Wastelands, and would wait for them to finish with their prey. Only: the Deathclaws would suddenly jump horizontally to the very height of the game’s invisible sky canopy, where they would vanish. Air Jordan couldn’t jump higher.
Once, while walking through an abandoned subway tunnel, I saw some scrap pieces which have previously been lying around assembled into a somewhat human form with a doll’s head on top. I don’t know if this was a random thing, or part of some poltergeist activity which the game sometimes displays, but it was messed up. Touching the display sent pieces scattering everywhere.
I lost my dog once. I made the mistake of sending him to look for a weapon near the quest start point for Mothership Zeta. He bounded off towards a crashed U.F.O., where he would wait for me. As I approached him, I was sucked aboard the Mothership, and the game informed me that my dog was waiting for me back at Vault 101. When I returned, he wasn’t there. I spent ages looking for him, to no avail. Then, while tying up some loose ends in the game, I happened to find him outside the Whitehouse, attacking mercenaries, as if I had mistakenly left him there to defend for himself. I told him to follow, but he didn’t obey, so I had to return and go through a few more lines of dialogue before he’d come with me.
Another time I sent Fawkes on his way to try another Follower, and I was informed he’d be waiting for me in the History Museum, only he wasn’t there. Ages passed, and eventually I found him stuck outside a door in the Citadel. Meanwhile, I was informed that I would not be allowed to take another Follower until I got rid of the one I had. Only, I didn’t have a follower.
I was unable to complete one Achievement for the game on Xbox despite finishing the quest, apparently because I hadn’t listened to the correct Holotape at the right time before talking to the right character. To unlock it now, I’d have to go back through half the game. Similarly, I can’t finish my Bobblehead collection because I blew up Raven Rock. I was three Bobbleheads away from finishing before I realized that goodie.
Just today, as I did a Necronomicon style quest in Point Lookout, I was unable to go with the Good Karma option for completing the quest because the one character vanished. From what I read online, it’s because I exited through a kitchen door.
This wasn’t necessarily a glitch, but at one point I had a quest in Broken Steel to go through an old underground railway under the White House. There was a part where ghouls and robots were attacking each other. Depending on how I went through that scenario, both or one of the factions was supposed to be hostile to me, and the portion would end with me looting a robot who was supposed to have died in the conflict. Only, because of certain items I had, no one bothered to even look at me. So I tried waiting and waiting for the ghouls to kill the one robot so I could nab a fuse off of him, but it never happened. So I had to cap him myself and steal it.
The Ghoul Mask in the game was originally supposed to make me immune to ghoul hostility by wearing it, but after a time it broke. Afterwards, I realized that ghouls still ignored me, even if I wasn’t wearing it.