The merry folks at Bethesda have continued to expand the Fallout 3 universe with downloadable content, such as the Operation: Anchorage package, and now the upcoming addition, The Pitt. Set in the ruins of Pittsburgh, on the soil of the grand ol’ US of A, this expansion focuses on the struggle between the masters of this reborn city and those who live amongst its rusted shadows.

There will be industrial meatsaws.

Jeff Gardiner, the senior producer on the project, also took the time to post a dev diary on the experience of getting the Fallout DLC packs into the grasping and dirty hands of the Fallout community. Apparently, you can also blame him for the Oblivion horse armour disaster. The diary is over here, at Bethesda’s site.

While I’m all for developers releasing new content for their games to expand the worlds they create, the sad truth is the better parts of the Fallout community will just consider these DLC expansions to be fancy model packs for their modding efforts. Hopefully, the Fallout 3 mods will continue apace with the new content.

It all makes me wonder about a development theory where the game company creates a mod kit, sends it out into the wilds, then buys back the best and most interesting mods that come out of the gaming community. Slap some unified art and story direction on top, and suddenly you have a full-on game. I’m curious to think of what this would look like as a MMORPG.