Today I downloaded the latest piece of downloadable content for Fallout 3, The Pitt. After a short delay it has hit Xbox Live just two months after the disappointing Operation: Anchorage; a short add-on that worked more like a linear shooter than anything else. The Pitt, on the other hand, contained more high hopes for me as it looked to incorporate many of the elements that made Fallout 3 such a fantastic game. Sadly, these high hopes may yet come to fruition, but it’s not like anyone is going to get to experience it for a little while longer.

You see, essentially, The Pitt is currently broken. Upon downloading and beginning my quest everything was going fine until I reached the downtown area; every time I tried to enter it, my 360 would crash. This happened on three attempts so I figured there was something wrong with my download. Being the detective type, I logged onto the net to do some research, making my way to as many forums as possible. What I found were many, many angry users, especially on Bethesda’s official forums. It appears this is a very wide spread problem, one that goes even further than the early crashes.

Those that manage to make their way into the downtown area have experienced glitch after glitch; from textures simply not appearing, to objects floating in mid air, weird red diamonds with exclamation points everywhere and myriad other graphical problems. Even if these people wanted to look past these problems and continue playing, they’re unable to as the game continues to crash when entering certain areas.

Many speculated that the wrong version of the game was uploaded, and this seemed like the most plausible option. Since these rumours surfaced Bethesda have come out and confirmed that the file was corrupted and they have since pulled the game from Xbox Live - preventing more purchases of a broken game, and plenty more angry gamers.

When you consider the amount of testing that should go into these products before release, it’s worrying that a corrupted file could go onto the network without anyone noticing until the forums built up with rage. Hopefully the proper file will go up in the next coming days, if not today. After the disappointing Operation: Anchorage this is just another chink in Bethesda’s DLC armour - or should that be “horse armour”?