Bethesda has explained that it's not its fault that Broken Steel is unplayable at the moment. Those who got the DLC pack and attempted to run it have been hit with a message reading “cryptographic message is not formatted correctly.” Apparently, this is related to Games for Windows Live and not to Broken Steel itself.

Peter Hines, who is a vice president at Bethesda, told Kotaku that “We're seeing the same error folks have reported, which is a Games for Windows Live DRM install error. Microsoft is working on fixing it, and we'll let everyone know once we've verified it.”

The big problem here is that Bethesda cannot do much by itself because of the way Fallout 3 was integrated with Games for Windows Live, which is controlled by Microsoft. Judging by how long the software company is taking in approving patches for the Xbox 360 games that also use Live, it could be some time until the problem is sorted out and until Broken Steel is back up and, hopefully, playable.

Xbox 360 gamers who owned Fallout 3 and installed their version of Broken Steel might have been spared the bug that prevents play, but they are having other issues with the DLC. There is a bug in the game not allowing them to active Project Purity. This is not affecting all players and apparently Bethesda and Microsoft are also working on fixing it as quickly as possible.

It would be nice if Bethesda scrapped plans of putting the first two pieces of DLC, Operation: Achorage and The Pitt, on a disk and selling them and concentrated on making sure that all those who have Fallout 3 can run the third and most important piece of DLC, Broken Steel. Then maybe a Collector's Edition of Fallout 3 incorporating all content could be put together and released.