Fallout 3 has been on store shelves for some time now and its various DLC packs have followed. However, if you still haven’t had a chance to pick up the DLC packs, now’s the time. It was just announced that all Fallout 3 DLC will be half off on Xbox Live.

This means, “Operation: Anchorage,” “The Pitt,” “Broken Steel,” “Point Lookout,” and “Mothership Zeta” will all be available for 400 Microsoft Points from now until March 29th. Of course, you’re going to have to have an Xbox Live Gold account but you probably already have that.

via destructoid

Sure, there have been some major issues with two out of the three downloadable content packs Bethesda has released for Fallout 3, but in spite of that they’ve been selling well. Soon they’ll be selling even better since Microsoft’s exclusivity is coming to an end and more content packs are on the way. All three of the existing DLC packs are going to be available for the PS3 this year. Operation Anchorage releases in June with The Pitt and Broken Steel following after with a four to six week interval between each.

The two new content packs will be released for PS3 eventually, but they’re going to be released for the Xbox 360 first. Point Lookout will bring the player to a new swampy area with new quests based around the real Point Lookout State Park of Maryland. Although the Fallout universe is set in an America where events eventually diverged from our reality, some of the events will draw on the collective past, including the Civil War.

Mothership Zeta continues with the running reference in the Fallout universe to the existence of aliens. In previous games you could get your hands on a powerful albeit short ranged alien blaster if you stumbled upon their crashed ship. In Fallout 3 the same thing happens, but in the DLC pack you’ll find yourself abducted by the alien ship responding to the distress call you can pick up on your Pip Boy.

As with the previous packs there’ll be new quests, characters, items to collect and even some new perks, but at this early stage no details are being discussed about what they might be, though they did say that we can expect a ton of new art for Mothership Zeta. Lookout Point is set for a June release and Mothership Zeta for July.

I know hyperbole like that is bound to get me in trouble.  Any kind of hyperbole requires a whole lot of backup, otherwise its utterer comes off looking like a rabble-rouser, pointless fanboy, or, worst of all, a politician.

As someone who becomes more convinced with every passing title that Bethesda cannot turn out a BAD game (let’s not bring horse armor into this), Fallout 3 for me rapidly proved to be a whole lot more than “Oblivion with Guns”, as the skeptics protest.

Fallout 3, in case you don’t know, puts you several decades into the future–somewhere around the 2200s–and smack in the middle of a heavily nuked Washington DC and environs, now referred to as the Capital Wasteland.  Filled with mutants, Super Mutants, random thugs known as Raiders, and a whole slew of other baddies, you roam the land, doing good or ill as you see fit, helping the survivors to reclaim forgotten civilization or trashing it all for your own personal profit.  Either way.

With features like the oft-maligned VATS system allowing you to target specific body parts of your attackers and the multi-function Pip Boy on your wrist, Fallout 3 gives you an extraordinarily immersive game with a vast array of downloadables on the way.  In fact, one such downloadable, Operation: Anchorage, has already been covered here.

Oh, sure…it’s not perfect.  The game has the nerve to actually cut you off after beating the main quest instead of allowing you to continue, and you’d think that Bethesda learned enough from Oblivion to just let Fallout 3 work similarly.  And indeed, overuse of the VATS system can make the game a lot duller than it could be.  But I remind those reading that the VATS system is totally optional, and not necessary for gameplay.  Indeed, there’s a lot to be said for the fun of plinking Raiders with a sniper rifle from up on a cliff, and you can’t do that in VATS mode.

But these fairly small troubles aside, Fallout 3 remains a highly immersive experience with lots of great plot and plenty of fun things to do and see.  Try the Lincoln Memorial sometime–it’s still there.  Just watch out for the fifty pounds of irony waiting inside; a bunch of slavers live there now.