Fallout 3 is one of those games I can’t stay away from too long.. like Oblivion before it I seem to find myself wandering the DC Metro Wasteland listening to Three Dog’s howl whenever my game review plate thins out a bit.

So far Bethesda is keeping up its usual excellent job of supporting their games in the post release cycle with expansions and new content.


While the nightmare of Horse Armor may never be forgotten, the content for Fallout 3, including the Broken Steel add-on which removed the games original ending and raised the character level cap, is going a long way toward expanding the game in different ways while not really diluting the core experience of its scripted story.

The latest expansion, Point Lookout, concerns a rural Maryland area in the post apocalyptic world and invites the players to uncover a smaller scale story surrounding some swamp dwellers, cultists and even a steamboat. While the overview for the expansion sounds a bit “Call of Cthulhu” like, another licensed world Bethesda has played around with in the past, one of the most striking thing is the encroachment of more plants and trees into the Fallout 3 setting. Joel Burgess and Nathan Purkeypile, the add-on’s Lead Designer and Lead Artist respectively detailed the evolution of the Point Lookout concept in a recent blog post on the official Fallout website.

With Point Lookout, one of our primary goals was not to create just a quest, but a whole new region for players to explore. Straight away we knew that we wanted to focus on what we felt was one of the great strengths of Fallout 3 –a world too full of stories and surprises, ripe for exploration and adventure. For us, the world is a main character, and choosing our location was intrinsically tied to the tone of the content.

We knew what kind of geographical features we wanted to showcase, and began scouting real-world locations. We stumbled across the perfect place: Point Lookout, MD. This rural location is situated on the southern tip of Maryland where the Potomac River meets the Chesapeake Bay. The coastal lowland offered the setting that we wanted, and the area has a rich history that we were able to pull inspiration from. The founders of Maryland landed here, a Civil War camp held over 50,000 confederate prisoners, and the Point Lookout Lighthouse is purported to be one of the most haunted places in Maryland. All this just down the Potomac River, which runs through the Capital Wasteland.



I’ve included some of the recently released screenshots and frankly while Broken Steel might have been about expanding the ending of the game, Point Lookout seems to promise an interesting side trek with some content aside from generic feral ghouls and armored Enclave drones.



source : http://news.filefront.com