Fallout/YMMV

"Endgame Narrator (Ron Perlman): Myron died less than a year after the defeat of the Enclave, stabbed by a Jet addict while drinking in the Den. His discovery of Jet was quickly forgotten, and now there is no one who remembers his name."
 * And the Fandom Rejoiced: Fans are allowing a tiny, tiny glimmer of hope to bleed through upon announcement that some of the original Fallout team would be working on New Vegas. This doesn't sound like a very positive reaction until you consider that the Fallout fanbase has traditionally been one of the most cynical in existence, and has generally been worried that every new Fallout game is going to suck until it comes out (as far back as Fallout 2!).
 * The announcement that traits would be returning in New Vegas certainly inspires hope.
 * Michael.Friggin'.Dorn. is back as Marcus.
 * It's now been released, and is generally considered to be exactly as good as expected so far.
 * Broken Base: There is not generally much overlap between fans of the first two game and fans of the third one (though exceptions exist), and the disagreements between the two groups can get rather...vehement. It even spills over to TV Tropes - much of this page's edit history can be summed up as a permanent low-intensity Edit War between Fallout 1 and 2 fans and Fallout 3 fans.
 * There is even a splinter group of Fallout 1 fans that dislikes Fallout 2 because they felt it introduced "too many silly elements."
 * Complaining About People Not Liking the Show: Saying anything negative about any game in the series with the exception of Brotherhood of Steel will usually get you yelled at, and called either a 'stupid Bethesda fanboy' if you complained about the first two games or Tactics, or a 'stupid NMA troll' if you complained about the third one.
 * Notably, the biggest mistake you can make is complain about the graphics in the first two games. Que a lecture on the character models being actual clay models.
 * Complete Monster:
 * Fallout 2 had Frank Horrigan, who was considered a psychotic maniac before he became an even more aggressive
 * Fallout 2 also had Myron, a slimey, perverted, immoral drug baron who killed hundreds of slaves while testing his drug "Jet". Not only does he not care how many lives his drug ruins, he actually brags about it. Fortunately, in the epilogue, he gets one of the most awesomely appropriate Karmic Deaths in the history of fiction:


 * A pretty good case can be made for the people behind the vaults; pretty much each one of which was not designed for the purpose of saving people from the nuclear holocaust, but to trap a lot of people together in one place for the purpose of cruel, sadistic and bizarre experiments which, in most cases, seem to have been designed expressly to drive their occupants murderously insane.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Fallout: New Vegas, Frank Sinatra, NO EXCEPTIONS (And that's just the teaser!)
 * Demonic Spiders: Jesus Christ it's a Deathclaw - get in the car!
 * Deathclaws in 3 have a massive Achilles Heel: the Dart Gun. One dart will slow it down to a crawl, and you can easily keep your distance and Cherry Tap it to death. You do have to find the schematics and build one first, though.
 * So much so, that Obsidian decided to go above and beyond in New Vegas. Not only is there no dart gun, but deathclaws now come in packs and have titanic damage thresholds, meaning most (as in, everything smaller than the anti-materiel rifle) will only do Scratch Damage. Thankfully, they now can't spawn randomly. You'll know where they are.
 * Yao Guai are the not-quite-Demonic cousin of Deathclaws. They're easier to kill and do less damage, but unless you're high level they are still dangerous, especially in packs.
 * Broken Steel adds in Super Mutant Overlords. You won't encounter them until you're a pretty high level, but they're equipped with powerful weapons and are ridiculously tough. To make matters worse, they have an unblockable damage bonus of around 20-40 HP per shot depending on the weapon. Even wearing power armor and toting a rocket launcher, your ass may well be handed to you.
 * Overlords are nothing compared to the Albino Radscorpions, which have almost as much HP as a Super Mutant Behemoth! Their only saving grace is their lack of a long-range attack, so you can get out of dodge by climbing on top of something they can't reach you from. That said, considering their durability and damage potential, running the hell away is a good idea too.
 * And rounding out the Broken Steel trio are the Feral Ghoul Reavers. Oh hey, they look just like Feral Ghoul Roamers, piece of ca- WAIT WHAT.
 * Having the ghoul mask is a very good way to avoid that.
 * Obsidian nerfed these guys, too. Now they're just a little better than Roamers.
 * Damn those swampfolk/tribals and that magical unresistable damage bonus!
 * Any player trying to do "Those!" at any level below ten or so will find the fire-breathing ants a hell of a challenge. Sometimes it's an easier and smarter idea to just kill one ant on the street and just do the quest later in the game, so that their levels stay somewhat low while you have a wider arsenal to gun them down with. Or just stand on the ledge outside of town and snipe them.
 * Easy way to deal with Fire Ants; get a small group of them to chase you, and drop a Frag Mine behind you. It should blow the antennae off the lead ant, causing it to go berserk and start torching its buddies. Nothing for you to do but sit back and watch the barbeque, perhaps picking off the remaining ant, which is likely to be almost dead by that point anyway.
 * The Enclave Soldiers in Fallout 2 were the bane of players everywhere. They are pretty much immune to electric damage and heavily resistant to nearly every other kind of damage due to their power armor, not to mention they have extremely high health and can effortlessly kill you in one turn even without a critical hit. Because of them, going anywhere near the coast until you've reached near endgame levels was instant death. Unlike most Demonic Spiders however, it's pretty easy to tell where they are and which places to avoid (anywhere near the coast pretty much).
 * Those stealth suited aliens. Hell, you feel pretty stupid by shooting a mini nuke to a 3 foot tall guy and watching he shoot back at you with his alien rifle just after.
 * Ear Worm: Galaxy News Radio in Fallout 3 plays only the most catching (and appropriate) songs of the first half of the 20th Century--including "Maybe," from Fallout 1.
 * He keeps hackin’ and wackin’ and smackin’, He keeps hackin’ and wackin’ and smackin’, He keeps hackin’ and wackin’ and smackin’
 * I've got spurs that jingle jangle jangle (jingle jangle) as I go riding merrily along (jingle jangle)
 * "You had plenty of money in 1922 You let other women make a fool of you. Why don't you do right? Like some other men do..."
 * Biiiiiiiiiiiiig irrrrrrrronnnn, big iron!
 * And the Badass trailer for New Vegas. I love those Deeeeeeaaar hearts, and geeeentle people, who live in myyyy hometown... Too bad it didn't make it into the soundtrack.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: LIBERTY PRIME
 * Also Charon. He is a ghoul with missing skin and hair but somehow still got tons of fangirls. It may be related to the whole "total obedience to whomever holds his contract" thing.
 * Freaking Fawkes from the same game. A Badass Super Mutant who is actually one of the few nice guys in his species, wields a Gatling Laser in ranged combat, is a Genius Bruiser with the strength of a Physical God and frequently saves your ass? Yeah, the fandom are really going to hate him.
 * In Fallout 1, Dogmeat. So much so that he he reappeared in a special encounter in the sequel and had an Identical Grandson in Fallout 3.
 * Don't forget Marcus form Fallout, he's pretty much the reason why Fawkes is so well liked.
 * Fanon Discontinuity: Hardcore fans generally refuse to acknowledge the existence of the ("good for what it is") Tactical RPG Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel or the console hack-and-slash Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. Bethesda have adopted a similar policy, declaring Tactics Broad Strokes canon and Brotherhood of Steel Canon Dis Continuity.
 * Fridge Horror: Vault 68: a vault with 999 men and one woman, and Vault 69: a vault with 999 women and one man. Once you picture how things would play out there... urgh...
 * Fridge Logic: You can't kill children in Fallout 3, but enslaving them is A-OK. Taking a strong moral stand, there.
 * Also, in the Pitt, an expansion to Fallout 3, you are assigned to kidnap Ashur's baby girl, who has immunity to the radiation disease affecting the rest of the Pitt dwellers. Wernher and his allies hope that by doing so, they can both get the treatment, then ransom off the child. But since you have to pretty much ice every raider there to kidnap the kid, who's going to pay a ransom? Wernher should win automatically, since everyone under Ashur's command is dead.
 * For that matter, if there is pre-War money laying around, and people trade in it, why the hell is everyone using bottlecaps for money?
 * There probably wasn't enough of it. Pre-War Money is pretty darned lucrative.
 * Also, and here's a big one. They all have seem to have forgotten how to filter water. You run the water through alternating layers of sand and charcoal then boil it. This removes all toxins, bacteria, and harmful particles such as radioactive fallout. This may make Project Purity a moot point. Guess they don't have any copies of the Scout Handbook on the East Coast.
 * They may not. The Scout Handbook in Fallout 1 doesn't exist in Fallout 3, and the skill books may or may not be Story and Gameplay Segregation anyway. Other intact "pre-War books" are insanely valuable, if you sell them to some of the few people who seem to realize their importance, and pretty darned hard to find.
 * Well, at least in New Vegas, that is addressed, with a good survival skill, your character understands how to make instant potable water using a couple pitchers and some surgical tubing.
 * Although, considering that there are actually quite a few bottles of Purified Water laying around the Capital Wasteland, it's likely that there are some people around who do know how to do it. Not to mention, the purpose of Project Purity is to purify the entire Potomac River and bring clean water to everybody, and you need big machines to do that.
 * Fridge Brilliance: The Lockpick Bobblehead in 3 is the only bobblehead that doesn't bobble. Possibly because someone used the spring to pick a lock.
 * Isn't the world of Fallout set in the 50s vision of the future? Then what's with all the stuff that's different!? Society, language, culture in general.. It keeps getting less and less like the future of the 50s! Wait a second.. Does this mean the only thing that could pull Fallout America out of the 50s mindset was all out nuclear war?!
 * Watch the intro and listen to the charming Ink Spots tune "Maybe". Then play the game. Now listen again.
 * I Am Not Shazam: The Vault Boy is NOT called PipBoy. Even the developers of Fallout Tactics fell into that. Vault Boy is the blond, wavy haired man in the blue jumpsuit, and PipBoy is the redhead pixie in the yellow and orange spacesuit, in case you were wondering.
 * Game Breaker: The Gifted trait.
 * Algernon, the semi-hidden weaponsmith in Fallout 2 who will arbitrarily make many weapons better and more valuable for free would count, if it weren't so ridiculously easy to get stinking rich anyway.
 * To a lesser extent, the Sniper perk in the first two games. With high luck, almost every hit will be a critical hit. Combine with shots to the eye and a decently powerful weapon and only the strongest enemies will survive more than one round of combat.
 * Jinxed with Luck 10. Your obscene luck (usually) counteracts the negative effects of the perk, but your enemies will constantly be hitting themselves, each other and breaking their guns and limbs on a regular basis. Although this means that the rest of your party become a lot less helpful and much more dangerous to you.
 * Some of the special encounters that you come across in the Wasteland in 1 and 2. The crashed Nuka-Cola truck which gives you over 10,000 caps at a high enough Luck level, the Alien Blaster, the Solar Scorcher, the Red Ryder LE BB Gun, the Holy Hand Grenade, the Monument Head and the Star Trek Hypos.
 * Mothership Zeta DLC. After finishing, you end up with a huge amount of super healing stuff, overpowered weapons and ammo for those weapons. Good bye scavenging and weapon maintenance, hello Alien Desintegrator!
 * Finishing Operation: Anchorage will unlock a chamber filled to the brim with awesome weaponry, plus two game breaking suits of armor. The Chinese Stealth Suit always gives you 100% stealth (and allows you through a glitch to wear all the clothing you have in your inventory at once, giving multiple armor and stat boosts at once), and the Winterized Power Armor, which never degrades and allows you to circumvent the usual restrictions to wearing Power Armor before completing the required story mission.
 * Technically it does degrade. It's just that it has so many Armor Hit Points that it makes the degradation a moot point.
 * The perk Jury Rigged in New Vegas. Your kickass-but-hyper-rare 12,7mm SMG is about to break? Just grab an NCR assault rifle and you're good! It's hard to obtain, though (a skill repair of 90).
 * This is debatable due to the large number of NPCs capable of repairing weapons and armor to 100% and the sheer quantity of caps you can earn at the casinos.
 * Goddamned Bats: Geckos in Fallout 2, especially around Trapper Town/Klamath. * Head Desk*
 * Bloatflies and pretty much every other insect in Fallout 3, unless you have the Entomologist perk.
 * Oh god, the Albino Radscorpions in Broken Steel. You can't turn a corner or walk a yard in the landscape without one of these fellows popping up.
 * Good Bad Bugs: With Broken Steel installed, Three Dog will talk about even if you haven't gotten that far in-story.
 * In the Mac port of Fallout 1, the aftermath of  will sometimes leave the dead bodies standing upright, as if they're mindless flesh statues, frozen at the point of their death. Which is very creepy when you're wandering around looting them.
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: A character in combat armor outside the Boneyard (Fallout 1) wears a pin reading "I'm Chris and you're not". Chris Avellone joined production for Fallout 2, and has become the name most associated with the franchise.
 * Nightmare Fuel: Enough to fill a folder on the Video Games page for it.
 * Sailor Earth: Want to make an original character who also grew up in a vault? Easy, just make up a number between 001 and 999 and add the word "Vault" infront of it.
 * Uncanny Valley: The characters from all of the games, to some degree.
 * The Master from the first game is most definitely an intentional version, and a damn creepy on as well.
 * The Woobie: Harold in the three main games. He has lost just about everything he had by the time you see him in the first game, and suffers a Fate Worse Than Death in the third. At least you can actually do something about his situation in that case (or don't, if ).
 * Also somewhat of a subversion because in the first game, one of the Multiple Endings had Harold ruling The Hub making peace among the rich merchants and the street vagrants... unfortunately, the ending couldn't be accessed because of a bug, but fan patches restore it.
 * Additionally, if you choose not to mercy-kill him, you can convince him that he's an important part of the Treeminders' lives, and therefore he should give them a chance. The REAL cruel option is.
 * Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The Master from the first game. Once you learn about everything he's gone through and witnessed, it's not hard to see why he became so insane.
 * Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The Master from the first game. Once you learn about everything he's gone through and witnessed, it's not hard to see why he became so insane.