Holy hell … I just spent far more time than I care to admit on Take It Back (the final quest of the main Fallout 3 game), and the stress was such that I’m seriously considering drowning my frustration in booze and women. Now I’ve played the game before, but it’s been a year or so, and in that time I’d managed to soothe the memory from my mind of what a FUCKING PAIN IN THE ASS this mission is. Not because it’s difficult, no. But because Liberty Prime – the giant robot whose sole purpose it is to clear away electronic barriers and kill everything in sight in order to allow you to finish the storyline – is the glitchiest piece of fail in the entire game. Due to bugs related to quest triggers and clipping path issues, it’s very likely that you’ll find yourself hopelessly stuck on the bridge to the Jefferson Memorial, unable to advance because the lumbering douchebox won’t move his buns o’ steel. And unless you’re a chronic save-gamer, you may find yourself well and truly fucked.
Liberty Prime: One Bad-Ass Mutha-Stucka
Here are just a few of the happenstances that can cause problems:
- He’s stuck in/behind the landscape
- He got turned around
- You ran ahead on the bridge
- You shot at him and now you’re his main target
- You fast-traveled away from the Citadel when he was being “launched”
- And so on …
As I was struggling with figuring out a solution, I remembered that last time I finally gave up and turned off clipping via the console, which allowed me to pass all the barriers and reach the final destination. However, I wanted to do it the right way this time, as I wasn’t sure if Broken Steel (the add-on pack that activates right after the main game ends) would work correctly if the events didn’t unfold the way they were supposed to. So after searching through 23 pages of related threads on the Bethesda forum, my irritation turned to chagrin when I realized that this time my problem was that I had killed the dude whose presence actually triggers the robot to move. Fuckin’ A!
Barring the fact that someone that vital to the final quest should not be able to be killed, I had to admit that my murderous killing spree in the Citadel (brought on by a case of Adamantium Rage, no doubt!) was pretty damn fun, and because I tend to quick-save, I had been overwriting my save points for hours. *Facepalm* I was just about to give up and relog a ridiculously old save when I realized – amidst my stumbling around the Citadel grounds in grumbly abandon – that the fella in question (Paladin Vargas) was lying just outside the Citadel door. Utilizing the “grab” function (which I’d never used otherwise, as it always seemed completely pointless), I hauled his body over to Liberty Prime, and wouldn’t you know it … The metal gladiator of death FINALLY started moving.
[Cue the "Hallelujah" chorus here!]
So for any of you who may have found yourself in similarly dire straits – and of course, I’ve tested this only on the PC version – either be careful who you kill, or be prepared to go hunting for Vargas’ body in order to trigger Prime across the bridge (which may prove impossible if you turned him into an Ash Pile, at which time you’d have to utilize the Resurrect cheat). I know quite a few of my readers are Fallout 3 junkies as well, so I hope this is useful to someone! And for those who have asked, I finished 2 of the 5 DLCs – Operation: Anchorage and Point Lookout. The former was very combat-heavy and thus a lot of fun (and it also provides the strongest armor in the game upon completion), whereas the latter added about 6 – 8 hours of gameplay, provided that you wander around discovering all the locations and side quests. I mistakenly tripped the final main quest before I meant to, so now that Broken Steel has activated, I plan on going back and doing The Pitt and Mothership Zeta, as well as some of the side quests I know I missed. Now if only I could find something to spend my 20K stash of bottle caps on! I suppose there’s always that wench back in Megaton … 
