Fallout 3 and Operation Anchorage are broken (Now with fix info)

[MinisterofDOOM]

EDIT:If you're having this issue, click here to jump to my post with details on how to fix it.

I bought Operation Anchorage this morning. I've been looking forward to it for a while. I had a hell of an "adventure" getting things to work. I'm much less enchanted with Fallout 3 than I was before my little "adventure."

Things that are WRONG with Fallout 3/Operation Anchorage:

1: Windows Live, while a great idea in theory, is HORRIBLY executed. I never bothered with it for Fallout 3 as it's a singleplayer game. I linked by gamertag for the auto-updates, and later it became necessary to download OA. The extremely stupid thing is that OA requires you to be signed into Live to play it unless you want to manually copy files around. Oblivion's content download system was already pretty crappy (third-party hosting) but the Windows Live crap is simply unnecessary.

2: Autopatching through Windows Live is BROKEN. I tried to apply both patches to Fallout through Live's auto-update. Neither worked. Both crashed partway through and hung. In fact, even the manual patches downloaded from Bethesda's website didn't go off without a hitch. I had to re-apply the 1.1 patch (so that makes it 3 tries for a simple patch) to get it to "take."

3: I didn't pay $10 to wander around the Capital Wasteland wondering when I'll get to play the new quests. Yes, I'm very familiar with Bethesda's expansions and their "it'll magically give you the quest after you've played for a bit" design. I have every Oblivion addon except the horse armor, all work great. I've played Fallout for more than a bit since I installed Operation Anchorage. No new quest. I kind of want to play the expansion I bought.

4: Why does this game crash so much? My rig is stable, runs many other recent games just fine. Fallout 3 crashes a LOT. Far too often to be acceptable. The 1.1 patch was supposed to fix much of the crashes. It certainly reduced the number. The fact that even AFTER being improved, the crashes are STILL too frequent to be acceptable is really irritating. I WOULD make up for it by just mashing F5 (quicksave) more often, but Fallout 3's quicksaves aren't "quick." They usually hang my PC for 30 seconds. I have more than adequate specs to run the game. It should not be running like ****.

5: Where is the content I paid $10 for? Hours (HOURS!) into the game AFTER installing Operation Anchorage and still no new quest. I'm getting really bored of fighting Super Mutants while I wait to see if the game will stop being broken eventually.

6: Why is the game save system so amazingly crappy? This is a PC GAME BETHESDA. Let me NAME my saves. Or, at the very least, have the autogenerated save name show more info, like level and currently active quest. But really, there's no excuse for not allowing us to name our saves. Even the Xbox and PS3 would benefit from it.

7: I'm pretty sure I paid $10 for some expansion content. Which makes it a little irritating that I can't recall having actually SEEN any expansion content in the game.

[Otto.]

Get an xbox.

Sorry for your troubles. Im sure you can find out somewhere in the web where anchorage starts.

[bmike818]

hope you resolve it soon. Let us know how the expansion is. I am borederline almost about to sell my copy of Fallout3 versus plunking $30 more bucks for these add ons. BUt if you say it is crazy good, I guess i am going to have to keep my copy.

[MinisterofDOOM]

If I were you, I'd just pass on the first addon. It's not really a major thing. Wait until the Broken Steel to plunk down your dollars. It'll be the real "expansion." Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt are just new regions with attached questlines.

Get an xbox.

No way I'd ever buy a Bethesda game for a console. Keyboard/Mouse > gamepad, and the PC version has unofficial addon support that the consoles miss out on.

[bmike818]

thanks, I just made my decision. Im going to sell my copy now and just buy a used GOTY edition a year from now. That is if Final Fantasy hasn't been released yet.

[s0m3th1ngAZ]

Yeh, the thing that made Oblivion finally stable for me were the Unofficial Patches that the community put out. Pretty much fixed everything.

I have pretty infrequent CTD for fallout since 1.1 and quicksaves take half a second...must have bad luck :P

Thanks for the headsup on Windows Live...always wondered what the hell that thing was for.

Oh and did you find the mod that extended the game after the ending?

[MinisterofDOOM]

I managed to fix Operation Anchorage.In case anyone else is having this problem, here are the details:

My problem is a result of having Fallout 3 installed on a separate drive from Windows. What seems to be a simple oversight has the game looking in the GAME install drive for the director that Operation Anchorage installs to. The path is completely correct, but the drive is wrong. The solution is to simply copy the exact directory path (all folders from the top of the drive down to the three expansion files) to the drive the GAME is installed onto. The path OA installs to by default is C:\Documents and Settings\Chris\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\XLive\DLC. Copy that exact folder structure to the drive your game resides on and you should have a functioning copy of Operation Anchorage.Also, if you don't care to use the Windows Live features, another option is to simply copy the 3 expansion files to your Data folder in your Fallout 3 directory. Then when you start the game, make sure to enable the data files through the launcher.

The game actually also seems to be running more smoothly now. Not sure if my machine is just having a better day or if it's really connected to fixing OA.

[pepegurr]

It crashes on the 360 as well, i downloaded it 2 days ago and in the first hour it crashed 3 times. There really gonna have to tighten up on the debugging instead of trying to rush , this is rediculous.