I'm not going to humor this post with a crack about Bethesda's buggy release history and how "X" Never Changes

Anyway. Bethesda released their final (announced) DLC pack for Fallout 3 yesterday, Broken Steel. This is the pack that I was the most excited about, because it adds some expanded gameplay upgrades to Fallout 3, as well as another new area to quest in, etc. What was particularly enticing to me was the fact that the game now does not end after you finish the main questline and the level cap has been bumped up to level 30 (from 20). It was great to take my first character out of retirement and tour the Capital Wasteland again and actually be rewarded with Experience points. I'm somewhat disappointed with the descriptions of some of the new perks that I read. As opposed to being fun, interesting character tweaks that you can't get anywhere else, the new perks are somewhat uninspiring. Examples include: three seperate perks to set your karma to best possible/neutral/worst possible, one perk to automatically know how to create every custom weapon in the game, one perk to convert Nuka-Cola into Nuka-Cola Quantum, one of the two final perks at level 30 increases all of your characters stats to 9 (out of 10), etc. It seems like almost all of these are "grind-reducing perks" which misses the point of what was so fun about character perks in my opinion. Mysterious Stranger, Hired Assassin/Lawbringer perks... stuff like that is more what I had in mind. Thinking off the top of my head, I guess a lot of perks in Fallout 3 were grind-reducers, but they were cleverly described in context which led to your character feeling more S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (sorry).

However, the other final level perk (while not feasible in gameplay) sounds far more amusing: when your health drops below 20 HP, you spontaneously combust into a nuclear explosion that (I assume) kills everything around you.

Again, in the little bit I played, it was fun to be exploring the Capital Wasteland with my main Fallout 3 character again. Even yesterday, I still found new locations in the game that I had never seen before (including a computer that had a "beta" text-based adventure game on it, hahaha). There's still even new quest content and items that I have to explore on top of all the additions to the main game! I will definitely have to set some time aside for my re-entry into Post Apocolyptia.