To reflect that it is a simulation despite the safeties being turned off, scattered devices providing healing and dispensing an endless number of bullets are found throughout the mission area. There's plenty of hot leaded action on the ice. Players are stripped of everything and given a simulated inventory to reflect their new career, but they retain their stats and their skills. Once in the simulation pod,they are dropped into the shoes of a soldier who had parachuted in with a Sergeant Benjamin Montgomery to take out a Chinese artillery position. Starting this mini-quest can be done at almost any time during the game once the player picks up the Outcasts’ radio signal and heads on over. What’s a player to do especially when there’s loot to be found? They’re desperate to get in there and promise you a share of what’s inside if you’ll help them first. It turns out that their newest find, an untouched, secured vault deep below DC supposedly filled with all sorts of pre-collapse tech, won’t open unless someone like the Pip Boy armed player completes a simulation sequence that the lock is tied to. The player picks up the signal and after a fight with several Super Mutants, earns their trust…especially when they notice that he or she has a shiny, if slightly used, Pip Boy attached. A distress call from the Outcasts, members of the Brotherhood of Steel that broke away from the main group in Washington DC over ideological differences, is what begins this virtual vacation from the Wasteland. Operation Anchorage covers the battle that led to the liberation of Alaska in 2077 from the Communist forces of China which had taken it over in 2066 but instead of traveling back in time, the player will be running through a simulation of it instead. The new expansion pack adds a few new toys to Fallout 3 so you, too, can look like Cobra Commander. It wasn’t the Annexation of Canada, but Operation Anchorage did play a part in starting WW3 so I was all excited to see this to the end, especially when there were more toys waiting for my arsenal. From what I had seen on the ‘net and the unofficial Fallout wiki in researching this, I’m not the only person that has had this problem, so I also added in my two cents here in case anyone needs a little help.īut now that the technical issues were out of the way, I was finally heading to Alaska. After fixing what GFW should have automated, I was off to Anchorage. GFW put it somewhere else and once I found it, I copied the needed files and activated them as I would a mod. It wasn’t there, nor was it in the Data folder where I had expected it to be. And that was after an hour of wandering around the wasteland looting raiders and killing radscorpions when it should have only been a minute or two.įallout 3 was built atop Oblivion’s framework so I looked for it as a Data File next to the main campaign module.
I could see that it was in the Download section as installed content once I had logged into Live through the main menu and it would say that the content was actually loading when the game began, but I never received the radio signal that would actually start my journey to Anchorage. Microsoft's GFW initiative still has a few rough edgesīut after downloading the content through the Live client and watching the installation message, the quest didn’t start up for me as it said it would after a few minutes spent in the game. You can also purchase points from Microsoft directly through GFW with a credit card.
If you don’t have any, you’ll need to purchase a point card with the necessary code to feed your online account with.
If you’re a PC fan of Fallout 3 and want Anchorage, you may need to convert some hard earned cash into points, or as a friend likes to call them, Microsoft Bucks, to be able to purchase and download the 800 point priced content through GFW Live.
The concept sounds great on paper, but its rough history on the PCs has rubbed more than a few players the wrong way.
Operation Anchorage would be the first in, but it would also be a further test of how much PC players were willing to put up with Microsoft’s Live service under their Games for Windows banner.Īs Fallout 3 players know, the game loads the Live client on the PC, the new standard by which Microsoft wants to deliver game content, updates, and other neat things in that space the same way that their Xbox 360 console audience is locked into.
Sure enough, Bethesda announced no less than three mini-expansions to keep players wandering the wastes in search of adventure. When Fallout 3 came out on the PC, extra content couldn’t be far behind.