Hot on the heels of the Broken Steel DLC review, here's my review of The Pitt DLC.
Unlike Broken Steel, The Pitt is an isolated mission that has to be completed in its entirety on a separate "island" off The Wasteland, before you are allowed back into the Wastelands. It sucks too cause I couldn't take Fawkes, my faithful super mutant friend with me.
But anyway, The Pitt starts off with you picking up a random radio transmission calling for help. And if you choose to follow the signal, you stumble upon an escaped slave who says he needs your help in liberating the rest of the slaves, stuck in a horrible-sounding place called The Pitt (originally Pittsburgh).
Of course you'd choose to help him otherwise there would be no point to the DLC. You disguise as a slave and get yourself caught by the raiders at their base in order to get in. The Pitt is an interesting idea because before the DLC, the raiders were just these random encounters out in the Wastelands that were a little annoying, easy kills, and pretty disgusting with all the bags of dismembered corpses they seem to keep around their camps. They were developing the characters behind a significant faction in the Fallout universe.
I enjoyed the atmosphere and setting of The Pitt greatly. It is so unique and well-realized in comparison to the milder Broken Steel. First, there's a massive bridge that needs to be crossed to get to The Pitt, and this is an introduction to the devastation that a prominent city like Pittsburgh had faced during the nuclear apocalypse. The bridge is jammed up with destroyed and abandoned cars, there are mines laid in between, and you see some slaves running in the opposite direction to you, only to be shot down or blown to bits. Not a pleasant place.
In The Pitt, there is no perception of day or night, it seems the sun is constantly blotted out by dark, black clouds. It is depressing inside, slaves working away at an industrial plant, and most of the buildings are boarded up and abandoned. The raiders are snide and rude to you if you try to approach them, but it is interesting to hear them speaking as opposed to their grunts back when they just wanted to kill you. Back to the slaves, upon closer inspection, you see their skin seems to be afflicted with some gruesome disease - a half-way between ghoul and not.
Inside the factory, it is a sight to behold, the steam presses chugging away, the furnace blasts exploding with heat. You could almost feel the sweat and intense warmth on your skin. But the story is what is most exciting about this DLC.
It seems simple enough, infiltrating the encampment but to get what the slaves need, which is a "cure" to the disease I mentioned earlier, I have to get close to the big honcho of the raiders. Not a lot is said about the big boss Ashur, although he is treated as some kind of messiah, and he wears Brotherhood of Steel armor. It leaves the players to make their own interpretation of who he is - he speaks more refinely than his raider-lackeys, and is probably in place of power because of his greater intelligence compared to the barbarians.
You'd think all Brotherhood of Steel members are righteous do-gooders, but apparently, back when The Pitt had just been hit by the nukes, the Bros of Steel had swept through to scavenge what they could find for themselves instead of helping the residents (which surprised me).
Most likely, Ashur stayed behind and set up his own "business", recruiting raiders and getting them to enslave the residents into working at his factory. Either that, or Ashur killed a Bro of Steel and took his armor. But I like my first interpretation better, because it speaks volumes of the dog eat dog world out in the Wastelands. True to the theme of number-one first in Fallout.
The rest of the characters aren't so memorable, but they are interesting in their own way. Like there would be a group of slaves conspiring in whispers, huddled in a corner. If you approach them, a slave lookout would whistle and the group would disperse. Such detail adds to the immersive story of The Pitt. Anyway, back to the story, to get close to Ashur, you need to get an audience with him. But only after completing several gladiator-style rounds in The Hole - a small cage that is filled with radioactive barrels which forces you to kill all the other competitors faster before you die of radioactive poisoning.
For those who played Oblivion, it is certainly reminiscent of The Arena, down to the NPC commentator who starts each round with some pumping speech. After that, you meet with Ashur and the slaves initiate a riot in order to distract him, and for you to steal the cure. Here's where it gets interesting. There are two options which the player can take, both significant choices that can change the outcome in The Pitt; help the slaves, or side with Ashur and take down the insurgents.
I had already made my mind up to help the slaves because I had killed a tonne of raiders back in the Wastelands, and that wasn't going to change any time soon. So upon helping the slaves steal the cure there's a little interesting moral twist (which I won't spoil here), when you learn the cure isn't all that you thought it was in the first place. It makes the slaves seem less peachy, and in their own way, quite capable of bad things. All that I can say, is that helping the slaves didn't make me feel like the paragon of good that I feel when killing all the Enclaves in Broken Steel.
Once again, the moral grayness of The Pitt is a plus point for Bethesda in making an impact with audiences. Fallout has always been a series where the choices you make can't be totally black or white. Utilitarianism is emphasized here. When you learn that it was Ashur who envisioned the cure for all the residents, you don't think him too badly and yet here he was making them work against their will. So, do you let him continue working on the cure but keep all the residents as slaves, or liberate them and stop the cure from possibly coming to fruition sooner?
Combat is heavy in this DLC, but at least there is almost as much NPC non-violent interactions, which is better than the brainless shooting in Broken Steel. Trogs are the new monster, although their introduction to Fallout 3 is only confined to The Pitt, and you won't find them elsewhere in the Wastelands. They are positively ugly, and when you are creeping through the abandoned steelyard, trainyard and an underground power station, they have the tendency of jumping at you from behind. It is slightly scary, but they aren't hard to deal with. A well-placed mine or grenade can take a group of them out fast.
In fact, I found the DLC to be too easy combat-wise, probably because I had approached it after having gotten uber post-Broken Steel. I was just killing things too easily and not dying at all. That said, killing humans (the raiders) are a lot more fun than robots and armored Enclaves. But the heavy combat is the shortcoming for this DLC; the final climatic sequence when The Pitt is over-run with Trogs and rioting slaves, there are so many raiders to shoot your way through, that it gets tiresome after a bit. Perhaps Bethesda needs to work a little better on their pacing with the combat for future DLCs.
When the mission ends, no matter who you choose to help, The Pitt remains as a city on the outskirt that you can revisit if you want more ammo made at the factory, or earn random gear by collecting steel ingots strewn out in the dangerous Trog-infested steelyard. But if you ask me, it is not enough of an incentive to go back to an isolated region at the far fringe of the Wastelands.
Also, what was weird was that after I killed Ashur and let the slaves take back control of the city, I was attacked on my way out by the slave leader! Well, there were a few raiders left that I had not yet killed, so perhaps in my fighting, he got caught in the crossfire and turned against me. I killed the leader, the very person who approached me at the start of the quest, pleading that he needed my help - someone who I initially thought was very cool with his eyepatch and was morally upright himself.
But when you learn of his intention with the cure, and his actual ruthlessness in overthrowing Ashur and the raiders, you learn to stop making positive presumptions of people. It meant I didn't feel too bad in killing him. It was just a waste that I had gone through a few hours to save the slaves, only to take out their leader. I didn't dare return to the encampment to see the reactions from the other slaves.
I was grateful to get out of there; to leave The Pitt and return to the Wastelands. I was sickened by the place devoid of morality on both sides. The slaves and raiders could just kill each other off for all I cared. It was the greatest lesson I learnt from the entire time I spent with Fallout 3, including the vanilla - that no one is truly to be trusted, that humans can be as flawed as they wanted to be, and even a champion of good like me could do nothing to change that.
The best DLC for Fallout 3 yet.
