Fallout 3/YMMV

"Three Dog: Now, the Lone Wanderer, aka that kid from Vault 101, has done some pretty interesting things, but this one takes the cake. My contacts report that he/she recently went on a highly dangerous excursion to recover -drum roll please- a violin. Oh, but not just any ol' violin, children... We're talking Stradivarius here. That's one top o' the line fiddle, you dig? Here's the best part. The violin was for an old woman named Agatha, who has taken to the airwaves herself to share some truly beautiful music. Agatha, we love ya. Keep playin', sister. And Vault kid? You've helped make the Capital Wasteland a better place. Hats off, my friend."
 * Accidental Aesop: By using the GECK to reactivate Project Purity instead of using it to terraform the region as in Fallout 2, "It's better to work hard to change things over time than to change them entirely at once."
 * Alternative Character Interpretation: The appearance of Mr.Burke in the Lone Wanderer's drug induced hallucination can be taken to mean a variety of things depending the on the player's actions, specifically whether.
 * And the Fandom Rejoiced: For some fans, the fact that this game even exists. Considering the last attempt at a Fallout 3, this is understandable.
 * Anticlimax Boss:
 * , despite being the Final Boss, can be killed with one clean critical to the head, and the two bodyguards nearby are just the same Enclave troopers you've been gunning down all game.
 * Eulogy Jones and the other slaver bosses have the same health as any other mook.
 * Ashur has excellent armor, but isn't that much tougher than a normal Mook. Ironically he can't survive as much damage as his unarmored rival Wernher, due to the later having Companion-level health.
 * At the end of Point Lookout's main quest, neither Desmond nor Calvert put up that big of a fight. Calvert is pathetically easy as he's ultimately with no means of defending himself aside from a small group of piss-easy Protectrons that deactivate when he dies. If you chose to betray him, Desmond can at least put up a fight since he wields a gun, but he ultimately dies quickly since his clothing is simply a suit and glasses, with nothing more.
 * Author's Saving Throw: The new ending for Fallout 3, provided by DLC for the widely unpopular ending.
 * Awesome McCoolname: Herbert 'Daring' Dashwood.
 * Base Breaker: Moira Brown. People either love her and view her as a hilarious adorably quirky woman with a good heart, or an annoying idiot who seems to want to get you killed on your various excursions in the name of her survival guide. It's hard to find people who are at the middle ground.
 * Broken Aesop: The Pitt DLC was touted for its Gray and Gray Morality. The resolution involves . Both Wernher and Ashur have Misaimed Fandom, at times.
 * In the main game, we have Ronald Laren, who at worst is a Chivalrous Pervert who is at least trying to woo the clueless Sierra Petrovita into... erm... "opening up" instead of just making like a savage raider and raping her. He even will readily gun down raiders who threaten the little shanties in which they live. Helping him along with his quest to get in Sierra's pants is somehow karmically evil. On the other side, we have Angela Staley and Diego. Angela wants to woo the religiously chaste Diego who otherwise still has a liking to her. Finding some ant queen pheromones for Sierra to cause Diego's sexual instinct to overwhelm his inhibitions in an act that borders on Double Standard Rape (Female on Male) is somehow karmically good.
 * Character Tiers: Hirable followers definitely come in tiers.
 * With Broken Steel, Dogmeat, Fawkes, and RL-3 are subject to a glitch that turns them into bullet sponges. Charon and Cross are fairly tough compared to other followers. Butch, Clover, and Jericho are fairly frail but remain usable as pack mules.
 * Without Broken Steel, Dogmeat is the weakest follower, Fawkes remains high-tier(albeit with MUCH less health), and RL-3 is mediocre.
 * Cliché Storm: The Aliens. They are little green men who ride around in a death ray using flying saucer and abduct humans for anal probing and other such things. Note that this is entirely intentional.
 * Clueless Aesop: The Tenpenny Towers quest take on racism. Sure, those Tenpenny Tower inhabitants are scum for refusing entry to Roy, a murderous madman who threatens to kill them. On the other hand, this might just be a slightly heavy-handed message to players who prefer a non-violent solution to quests that are probably better served by violence.
 * Complete Monster: This game has quite a few of them. They include:
 * Dr. Stanislaus Braun who is arguably the worst of the bunch. He's a Mad Scientist who locks away a bunch of people in a virtual simulation, where he tortures them for years and years. He specifically states that torturing real people who can feel pain rather than computer simulations is more fun. You get positive karma for
 * Mr. Burke is another one. His back story isn't explained much, all we know about him is that he is Mr.Tenpenny's right hand man, and Mr.Tenpenny wants Megaton (a peaceful town) nuked, because it ruins the view from his tower. He assigns Mr.Burke to detonate the atomic bomb in the middle if Megaton, under the condition that he evacuate the town first. Burke, however, completely ignores this, and goes out of his way to make sure that when the town is nuked, as many people as possible are caught in the blast. If you get Lucas Simms to arrest him, he shoots Simms dead (unless you are very quick on the draw) and assigns mercenaries to track you down. You get positive karma for killing him. However, if you don't kill him and help Roy Phillips (see below) break into Tenpenny tower, Roy (who is scared to death of Burke), will make Burke his right hand man. Not only that, Burke will go ahead and nuke Megaton, even though Tenpenny is dead and there is absolutely no reason to nuke the town. It's worth noting though that he CAN be redeemed if you're playing as a female Lone Wanderer with the Black Widower perk. Burke is more of an example of a Complete Monster whose status is a result of the actions that the player takes.
 * Roy Phillips. He leads a ghoul gang who live in the horrible slums outside of the luxurious Tenpenny tower. He has tried repeatedly to get in, and when you meet him you can help get into the tower either peacefully or violently (by unleashing a horde of feral ghouls into the tower). Either way, even if he gets in and is allowed to live there peacefully, he and his gang still slaughter everyone there. But for some reason, you get bad karma if you kill him (although you can kill him without karma loss if he attacks first).
 * Eulogy Jones, a brutal slaver boss who heads the Capitol Wasteland's largest slaver group and trafficks innocent adults and children en masse.
 * You can be this if you choose to go that way. The pure Video Game Cruelty Potential is outstanding. You can brutally murder scores of people, sell children into slavery, nuke a town full of people for cash, burn a pyrophobic man to death,, annihilate the Brotherhood of Steel's headquarters via orbital bombardment, and so, so much more.
 * even has shades of this, towards the end of The Pitt's quests you learn that  The number of surgical tools in his hideout seems to confirm what he has in mind for her.
 * There's an unnamed female Ghoul scientist you can run into near a large satellite dish who doesn't seem that out of the ordinary: she can't be talked to because she's running around like a headless chicken while you pick off nearby Talon Company Mercenaries. But a look in a nearby terminal she's been using show that she just so happens to be a crazed scientist who gained access to an old pre-war satellite that she was going to use to blow the continent to bits, for no reason other than for the hell of it. She doesn't even have any feelings of loyalty to the Talon Company Mercs she hired, and seems to want to betray them once she begins her orbital bombardments. While a very, very minor example of this trope, she's definitely worth a mention.
 * Contested Sequel: Points of debate include the shift in gameplay from turn-based to real-time (among numerous other changes), the quality of writing, both in the main quest and in secondary quests and locations, and the change of location resulting in almost nothing carrying over from the first two games aside from the Enclave and Brotherhood of Steel.
 * Crazy Awesome:
 * Liberty Prime. He has a backpack full of nukes he throws like footballs.
 * General Jingwei's main weapon, an electrified Jian sword.
 * Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Merely one example of many: Randomly encountering three slaves being escorted by a slaver, rescuing them, and successfully defusing all three slaves' explosive slave collars.
 * The "Agatha's Violin" question. From Three Dog:
 * Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Merely one example of many: Randomly encountering three slaves being escorted by a slaver, rescuing them, and successfully defusing all three slaves' explosive slave collars.
 * The "Agatha's Violin" question. From Three Dog:


 * Fallout: New Vegas gives us one retroactively. You can find the Wasteland Survival Guide as a skill book. Moira dared to dream, and it came true. It is possible to come across a woman who tells you that thanks to your book her family is no longer starving.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: The music playing in the main menu and while it loads. It practically booms POST-APOCALYPTIC. Works even better when doubled with The Ink Spots' I Don't Wanna Set The World On Fire in the opening sequence.
 * So cool that the London Philharmonic Orchestra included it in their album of The Greatest Video Game Music.
 * Demonic Spiders: As per Fallout tradition, Deathclaws are easily among the most dangerous enemies you can run into. They deal a ton of damage with their enormous claws, can do a running leap that covers an ungodly amount of ground if you're far from them, and they can sponge a lot of hits before falling. Thankfully, they don't start appearing in the wild until you're really high-leveled, but they always spawn over in Old Olney, and the place is stuffed to the gills with them. If you don't have a Dart Gun on hand, get ready to hurt.
 * While they stop being a threat once you're higher leveled, Yao Guai can be incredibly dangerous to lower-leveled players since they're pretty much Diet Deathclaws. They move incredibly fast and eat through your health in the blink of an eye, and will likely see you long before you see them and are surprisingly good at sneaking up on you undetected. Even worse? They often hunt in packs. Thankfully, the Animal Friend perk turns them completely harmless.
 * Mirelurks are annoying enough, but their more powerful Hunter variation is far worse. To get the idea of how painful dealing with Mirelurk Hunters is, take a Mirelurk, make it bigger, make it sturdier, make it hit far harder, and let it keep the annoyingly hard to hit weakpoint that the weaker Mirelurks have. They lunge at you fast too, which makes dealing with them in close quarters a real chore.
 * Giant Radscorpions in general due to their lack of a weak point. At least the Mirelurks have a head to snipe for a potential One Hit KO.
 * Giant Radscorpions also seem to follow the Cliff Racer school of being able to see and attack you before you see them, they must have a perception of eleven! And it doesn't help at all that they're fast as hell and prone to quietly sneaking up on the player as well as traveling in pairs.
 * Sentry Bots. They're incredibly fast, very sturdy, and have two different methods of attack that are equally annoying: they can bombard you with missiles that easily cripple limbs and have a huge area of effect, or shred your health with a gatling laser.
 * To make up for the fact that players can now level up higher than they could in the base game, Broken Steel adds three new enemy types that you give you hell: Super Mutant Overlords, Albino Radscorpions, and Feral Ghoul Reavers. They're far sturdier than their weaker counterparts, and deal far more damage as well.
 * Super Mutant Overlords now usurp the most powerful Super Mutant position from the Masters, and boy do they earn their stripes. They come packing Tribeam Laser Rifles or Super Sledges, and both weapons hurt. The guns especially, since they have a high damage output and hit you with three seperate beams with every shot. But there's one nasty caveat that comes with it" Overlords deal an additional forty points of unblockable damage. It's quite telling how bad an enemy is when you basically have to disarm it first since you sure as hell won't eat through its health fast enough to kill it in one go with V.A.T.S. Thankfully though, they aren't too dangerous if they've been disarmed.
 * Albino Radscorpions aren't too different from their weaker brethren: they're still really fast, and lack any real weakpoints meaning that you can't take shortcuts when eating through their health. Unfortunately, that's exactly what makes them so dangerous, especially when their bulk and speed are combined with their higher power and the fact that they still like hunting in pairs.
 * The scariest of the new enemies however is the Feral Ghoul Reavers, who are leaps and bounds stronger than other Feral Ghouls, who unlike Radscorpions and Super Mutants stop being threats really quick. The Reavers are (as expected at this point) speedy, powerful, and have health for days. But along with their ridiculous amount of power, they're fond of tossing lumps of gore that serve as grenades. And unlike Overlords and Albinos who can be cheesed (By either disarming the former or jumping on rocks safely out of reach of the latter), you have to go toe-to-toe with the Reavers since they lack weapons you can break but can still hurt you from a distance. They're also near-impossible to sneak up on, and during battle can randomly spaz out and turn invincible thanks to a glitch.
 * If you're a Fallout 2 veteran unimpressed by the weaksauce Enclave troops fought in the base game, complain no more! Bethesda fixed by adding Hellfire Troopers to the Enclave's ranks! They're quite durable and don't go down easy, and they come packing Heavy Incinerators, which are essentially fireball-lobbing grenade launchers that will burn you to a crisp in seconds. And they're great shots too, and can pick you off from pretty far away.
 * The Tribals. They are ridiculously powerful and hard to kill for no reason at all. Getting beaten by a bunch of tribals with hunting rifles and axes that barley wear clothes after curb-stomping the Power Armor wearing, Gatling Laser wielding Elite Mooks of the Enclave is rather jarring.
 * The Swampfolk are even worse. You don't really have to deal with the Tribals all that much, but the Swampfolk infest Point Lookout, and you almost never run into any alone (in fact, it's not uncommon to run into groups of five at once. Like the Tribals, they take a surprising amount of punishment and can kick your ass five ways to Sunday. The fact that they're a bunch of ugly, inbred hicks only serves to make it all the more insulting when they slap you around harder than the Enclave's troops ever did. Among the different variations however, the Creepers are easily the most dangerous since not only do they deal an unblockable extra 35 damage like the other Swampfolk, but they often tote Double-Barrled Shotguns which are among the most powerful weapons in the game. If you run into two or more, you'll be torn to pieces in seconds.
 * Pretty much any enemy wielding a missile launcher or flamethrower. The former sends out fast moving projectiles that tend to do a ton of damage over a large area of effect as well as cripple limbs easily, and the latter does huge amounts of damage while obstructing the screen.
 * Mothership Zeta's Aliens are surprisingly flimsy and buckle under the force of your shots (In fact, just one headshot kills them more often than not)... unless they're packing a barrier. Then all of a sudden, your shots barely phase them, and they can mow you down unopposed since they hit really, REALLY hard thanks to the alien's weapons being among the most powerful in the game.
 * Designated Villain: Aside from the shoot-on-sight policy of their Mooks, the game never really gives any reason for why you have to fight the Enclave, Dr. Li just saying "it's not right" when telling the Brotherhood the Enclave can't be allowed to control the purifier. The obvious pride issues aside, when you examine the situation from a pragmatic point of view, it actually makes far more sense to ally with them and let them take over the region, as they have the resources, manpower and technology to help a lot of people and bring order to the wasteland, and they're (mostly) interested in doing so..
 * That being said, they're still rather horrible as you can find Enclave outposts all around the Capitol Wasteland where they've been experimenting on humans and killing any civilians who don't comply with their orders (Hell, Colonel Autumn shot a scientist during his introduction just because James refused to turn over Project Purity to him.) While Autumn isn't as bad as Eden, he's still not the kind of guy who really needs complete control over
 * Draco in Leather Pants: Many people who played the game thought  was a super nice guy, even though   Some even wanted him as a companion.
 * The Player Character can play himself this way: a bloodthirsty killer with no morals what-so-ever, but who has maxed out their charisma and intelligence to the point where no one would dare argue. Except Three Dog, of course.
 * Alistair Tenpenny seems to have a bit of this treatment going on as well; while he's perhaps not quite the Complete Monster his minion Mr. Burke is, he still shoots people from the top of a skyscraper for fun, he's still a complete bigot, and the fact that killing him nets the player a karma boost (one of the few occasions where this happens) suggests that even if he's now just a slightly senile old man (which is how he's generally viewed in this treatment), he's been responsible for some pretty nasty stuff in his life.
 * Ear Worm: The Enclave Radio, and Galaxy News Radio station. Most memorable ones:
 * I don't want to set the world on fiiireee....
 * So, Bongo Bongo Bongo, I don't wanna leave the Congo oh no no no no
 * He just hacks, whacks, choppin' that meat!
 * ''I'm in love... I'm in love... I'm in love... I'm in love... I'm in love... I'm in love...with a wonderful guy!"
 * Ensemble Darkhorse:
 * LIBERTY PRIME!
 * Fawkes is the most popular Fallout 3 companion. His being an honorable super mutant may have something to do with it.
 * Or let's be practical: it could also be that he's a bright yellow, eight-foot-tall walking tank. With a Gatling Laser.
 * Despite being a ghoul, Charon has a ridiculously large fangirl following, and is also loved for being a competent follower like Fawkes.
 * And in typical Fallout tradition, Dogmeat is beloved for being a cute dog companion and for being a very useful partner come Broken Steel.
 * Fan Dumb: Try reading an argument about the "Meaning" of Butcher Pete and keeping your sanity.
 * Fridge Brilliance: The names of the weapons in Mothership Zeta are incredibly generic and dull, "alien atomizer", "alien disintegrator", "drone cannon", etc. Then you realize these aren't their actual names, they're just the names your character has given them in-universe to tell them apart, they probably have proper names but there's no way you could ask the aliens to tell you.
 * East Coast super mutants getting Stronger with Age neatly justifies Fawkes being such a Game Breaker with Broken Steel: He's an original super mutant, nearly 200 years old, making him potentially much older than the muties you and he chew through. And he still has all his faculties.
 * Fridge Logic: Pretty much everything to do with Little Lamplight. The town has been around since the bombs hit, but where do the citizens come from since it is only populated by children and the adults are sent away? It also lies right next to the Vault the super mutants come from, and in fact a door in the town connects right to the Vault, so how is it they haven't been wiped out? And when you grow older you're sent to Big Town—it's halfway across the wasteland, why is it so far away and how did anyone survive the journey there when from what you see they're sent off with nothing but the clothes on their backs?
 * Assuming contemporary real-life standards, puberty generally occurs somewhere between 9 to 14 years of age. The Little Lamplight exile age is 16, so there's enough time for reproduction.
 * Game Breaker: Several.
 * For starters, every single add-on gives you at least one weapon that would be considered an Eleventh-Hour Superpower before the eleventh hour.
 * Broken Steel gives you the Tesla Cannon, which can kill most enemies with one hit and all but the strongest enemies with two, and it runs on one of the most common ammunition in the game.
 * Almost every item you can find in Mothership Zeta is a Game Breaker. Of particular note is the Captain's Sidearm, a better version of the Infinity Plus One Gun of the base game. The other items are almost as powerful.
 * Operation Anchorage gives you an indestructible suit of Power Armor (although the indestructible bit is a mistake in the code) and a suit that will basically give you the effect of a Stealth Boy permanently, thus giving you the ability to have perfect invisibility and be undetectable to all enemies in the game, as long as you're using a silenced or melee weapon.
 * To follow that up, The Pitt has the Infiltrator, a silenced machine gun with a scope, and it's not a unique weapon. It has an even more powerful version of itself called the Perforator. With this and the stealth suit, you can breeze through the game without ever being seen.
 * Point Lookout gives us the Microwave Emitter, which ignores armor. All armor.
 * Fawkes, who can take on any enemy with almost complete impunity. Good once you hit level 20/30, since you won't have to use your own weapons any more.
 * Unless you go to one of the DLC zones. Your Wasteland companions can't follow you there.
 * The Chinese Stealth Armor from the Operation Anchorage DLC. Allows you to kill anything without ever being detected.
 * The Grim Reaper's Sprint perk, restoring your action points once you leave V.A.T.S. if you killed someone in it. And you will kill someone, unless that someone is an Albino Radscorpion, Overlord or Behemoth.
 * Remember how in Fallout 1 and 2, healing while resting was a function of time and only restored hitpoints? In Fallout 3, one hour of sleep will restore you completely.
 * With Broken Steel, RL-3 levels up with the player at 10 times the rate he should, giving him absolutely ridiculous health. That, combined with the fact that he can be obtained very early provided the player knows where to look (and where to get 500-1000 caps) makes pretty much every other companion useless (except Fawkes, but that is pretty late in the game).
 * The same can be said for Dogmeat, who receives the same Broken Steel benefits as Fawkes and RL-3. Go right to the Scrapyard at the beginning of the game and you have a nigh-invincible (Dog) Meat Shield right off the bat! Oh, and unlike RL-3 and Fawkes, Dogmeat can be recruited regardless of your Karma.
 * And of course, there are plenty of glitches in the game that will give you a huge advantage. The ones above are by design.
 * The Dart Gun has a very high chance of crippling the legs of whatever it hits, turning melee enemies into a joke, including Deathclaws.
 * Good Bad Bugs: Again, several.
 * The repair shop merchant in Point Lookout has continually increasing repair skill. He is eventually the merchant capable of repairing everything to pristine condition.
 * The developers mistakenly placed the simulation version of The Winterized T-51-b Power Armor as the reward after completing Operation Anchorage, which results in it becoming almost totally indestructible since it has nearly 10 million item HP (i.e., it doesn't ever have to be repaired).
 * In vanilla Fallout 3, Dogmeat, Fawkes, and Sergeant RL-3 are fixed-level characters, due to being creatures rather than human NPCs. The Broken Steel DLC upgrades them to allow them to level up with the player, in order to stay competitive against the super-powerful new enemies introduced in the expansion. The Good Bad Bug is that their health and damage increase 10 times more than what the designers intended... making them pretty much indestructible killing machines (For example, Dogmeat has 2,500 health at player level 1 and 15,000 health at player level 30!!! For comparison, a Super Mutant Behemoth, by far the toughest monster in the game, has 2000 health). Note that this only occurs if Broken Steel is installed before you actually meet and recruit those characters... otherwise they receive no upgrade, and get curbstomped by the new Demonic Spiders.
 * The inventory system has a small bug where, if there are two or more of the same equip with different conditions and the more damaged equip is below the less damaged equip, moving the more damaged equip will instead move the less damaged equip. The same bug applies to equipment shops, only now you can buy the item that is less damaged for the price of the more heavily damaged one, then sell it back for it's real price. Repeat the process as many times as you want and you will have quite literally robbed the shop blind of all it's stock and money.
 * The game applies perk based skill bonuses upon selecting them, rather than after confirmation. During the level up screen, you can select a perk that gives skill bonuses, then go back to the skill distribution and see the game has added them already. But if you go select another perk and return to the skill screen, the added points remain. Repeat for more points.
 * Grey and Gray Morality: At the end of the Pitt, you're faced with a real kicker of a choice. You can aid the slave rebellion, which wants to destroy the raider army oppressing them (who really are evil jerks) and kidnap the boss' baby daughter so they can try to create a cure for a massively degenerative disease from her. However, the raider army's the only thing bringing food into the Pitt other than the meat of 'Trogs', the degenerated semi-humans created by the disease, and they have no scientific or medical knowledge and won't treat that baby well. Or you can side with the genuinely good intentioned Lord Ashur, who leads the slaves and raiders so that he can create an industrial powerhouse that'll be free of disease so he can conquer the surrounding area to provide food, shelter and medicine for everyone.
 * Harsher in Hindsight: Liam Neeson plays the main character's father and a widower. Less than a year after the game's release, Neeson's real life wife, Natasha Richardson, tragically passed away in a freak skiing accident. The scenes where he sadly talks about his dead wife in the game felt very strange after that.
 * Apparently, Megaton having a warhead buried in the town's center hit closer to reality than any of us imagined. Shudder...
 * Iron Woobie: Gob. He seems to keep a stiff upper lip, (well, if he had lips) but the fact that his normal way of saying goodbye is crying "Don't hit me!" shows that Moriarty's done a number on him.
 * Irony: The Brotherhood of Steel's original mission in the Capital Wasteland was to recover lost technology and the Outcasts left because Elder Lyons made the decision that helping the local Wastelanders was more important than their original goal. By the end of the game (especially with the add-ons) the Brotherhood of Steel has made entirely new weapon systems, reactivated a super robot from the Pre-War period that single handily curb stomped the Enclave, and have recovered so much of the Enclave's advanced technology that they are practically swimming in it. No good deed goes unrewarded, eh?
 * Jerkass Woobie: Scribe Bigsley in Broken Steel is a smug, snarky, arrogant jerk who shows you nothing but disdain until you offer to help make his workload easier, and yells at his subordinates. However, he's stuck working around the clock in a dimly-lit room with no windows, has little support from the Brotherhood because their resources are still focused on the Enclave war, and has to oversee the distribution of the water to the various cities of the wasteland, which he does with limited manpower and limited money to hire more. He's also incredibly sleep-deprived is noted to pass out as his desk due to being overworked. He even acknowledges that he's being far too harsh on you if you call him out and makes it clear that he does appreciate what you've done for the Brotherhood, but it's hard to be happy when you're stuck with the job from hell.
 * Moral Event Horizon: As the player, you can if you want: Nuking Megaton, following Eden's orders and poisoning the Wasteland with the virus, and aiming the Enclave's Kill Sat at the Citadel in Broken Steel.
 * While you're the one carrying out the deed, Mr. Burke also crosses the line by trying to rope you into nuking Megaton with everyone inside, despite Tenpenny ordering him to evacuate the town's civilians first.
 * Charon in particular has a personal moral code despite coming off as True Neutral, and certain acts (such as murdering innocent Ghouls, robbing Underworld blind, or killing female slaves) get an audibly horrified reaction from him, and he'll try to blow you away if you dismiss him immediately afterward. The same can happen with Fawkes, though you have to be much more of a bastard to get on his bad side, and if you do then you'll be facing off against someone with a Gatling Laser and skin tougher than two Vault doors welded together. Good luck!
 * While it happens off-screen, still counts.
 * It's your call whether Tranquility Lane specifically or all the Vault's inhumane experiments in general put Dr. Braun far over the line.
 * Colonel Autumn probably crossed this a long time ago due to his involvement with the Enclave, but he gets to cross this onscreen by
 * Then, at the start of the game we have Vault 101's Overseer going off the deep end when James leaves the Vault. He goes nuts with paranoia and has James' young assistant Jonas beaten to death during an interrogation, then decides to put his foot down and assume a tyrannical reign over the Vault's other inhabitants as a means to keep them under control. He even lets his own daughter be tortured during the initial chaos. Sure, he was trying to protect the Vault's dwellers from the horrors outside, but damn...
 * Most Annoying Sound: "You appear to be wounded sir/madam, may I suggest you seek attention treatment as soon as possible?"
 * The tone that plays every time you lose karma.
 * Doc Church if you rely on him for stimpaks and other meds early in the game: "You best have cancer, because from the look of it your breaking rule number one right now."
 * Be prepared to be berated by random bystanders for so much as looking at items that don't belong to you all the time.
 * Nightmare Fuel:
 * The Dunwich building is bad mojo. Stay away from there.
 * The Radscorpions are pretty terrifying. The Giant Radscorpions even more so.
 * Compounded by their seemingly uncanny ability to sneak up on you. You can just be trotting along, minding your own business, you hear something and turn around just in time to see a scorpion the size of a small car bearing down on you.
 * Super Mutants can be pretty scary sometimes, especially if one is barreling down on you in a confined space waving a nailed board or a sledgehammer in the air, not even flinching as you run backwards firing your gun in his face. The first Super Mutant Behemoth you're likely to meet is introduced by exploding two buses after a Scare Chord hits, and then out from the smoke comes a Super Mutant twice as big as the rest so far swinging around a piece of sewage pipe like a baseball bat.
 * Very often you stumble into tableau-like scenes of skeletons that were killed doing things when the bombs hit. For example, you can frequently find "Pulowski preservation shelters", phone booth-like pods designed to protect people. However, almost every single time you open them a skeleton falls out. On occasion you'll find two skeletons in a shelter, or a skeleton with a handgun clutched in its hand with a blood spatter on the wall. While wandering around pick up a radio broadcast of a couple with a critically injured son child taking shelter in a nearby drainage pipe, but when you get there you find a ham radio broadcasting the messages and two adult skeletons. Stop and take a moment to think about what happened to these people that you find their skeletons in these conditions...
 * Listen to Keller Family Transcript 3 of 5. "Mom, it's Candace. Oh my God, it's really happening. I can see the cloud... it's so big... Mom, I'm so scared." The background noises on the tape just make it all the worse.
 * In Mothership Zeta, the screeching of the Abominations as they run at you pointing with their Black Eyes of Evil wide can be pretty creepy.
 * All the Vaults are pretty bad in this regard, but possibly the worst is Vault 92. What makes it the worst is that the game builds up a hugely creepy atmosphere all the way through it, with plenty of detail provided about exactly what was going down and what went wrong, expecting you to find the worst things around every corner, until you find...
 * Non Sequitur Scene: The entire Mothership Zeta DLC, which pits you up against an army of green aliens with a plucky little girl, a fellow wastelander, a military man, a cowboy, and a samurai backing you up. While the other DLC's help flesh out the world by showing other areas that have been affected by the fallout of the bombs falling (Or in Anchorage's case, exposes you to the war that changed the world itself), this one is just an excuse to have fun killing aliens in a campy setting.
 * Some of the random encounters might fall under this, but they are, by nature, a bit out-of-the-blue.
 * Only the Creator Does It Right: The game is hated by some of the more die-hard fans of the first two games because it was created by Bethesda Softworks and not Black Isle Software. Especially noticeable when you consider that Fallout: New Vegas was given a more accepting reception and that some of the old employees of Black Isle incidentally worked on it.
 * Which is ironic, considering how one DLC of the sequel and a lot of Continuity Nods in the stock game and the other DLC confirm it exists, it uses over 75% of this games assets and code, and even uses every core mechanic Fallout3 does (including the hated ones), even expanding on some of them. And, as bonus irony, the player WAS invincible when using the first two games interpretation of VATS, so the Fallout: New Vegas version that removes this is technically LESS in line with the first two Fallout games.
 * Painful Rhyme: They have things like the atom bomb ... so I think I'll stay where I ahm ... civilizatiooooonnnnn, I'll stay right heeeerrreee!!!
 * Rooting for the Empire: It's easy to want to side with the Enclave in this game. As a sharp contrast to Fallout 2 where they were fascist, genocidal monsters, in this game they're just looking to take control of the Capital Wasteland with intent to begin rebuilding "true" America. The only one of them who seems to be prejudice against outsiders and want to eradicate them is President Eden, Colonel Autumn seems to actually want to rule over the people. Granted they're still Jerkasses and are hostile towards you, but they don't really do anything evil and actually act like a more extreme version of the Brotherhood of Steel. Imagine if Autumn and James had been more reasonable to the other during negotiations—the project is peacefully turned over to the Enclave, they raid Vault 87 and get the G.E.C.K., the purifier is started and the Enclave begins using their vertibirds to fly clean water across the wasteland. Also keep in mind they have the manpower, resources and willingness to take out the raiders, super mutants and Talon Company mercenaries that make the wasteland such a nasty place to live. The only downside is that the local humans live under Enclave rule, but considering the abundant anarchy that threatens them, how much worse could it be?
 * Only if you never visit an Enclave wilderness outpost. The computers note they're experimenting on the denizens of the wasteland, then killing them. Of course, a Villain Protagonist LW probably wouldn't care.
 * It's made worse by the Wasteland being filled with a disproportionate amount of Raiders (psychotic), Super Mutants (psychotically powerful), and Talon Company (who are under standing orders to be as huge Jerkasses as possible), while everyone else clings to life in ramshackle huts. The Enclave is, quite simply, awful. But they're a preferable kind of awful compared to the other three factions. Is the idea of finally scrabbling together some semblance of civilization worth the dystopic hellhole that will likely result? That's up to you. And while you're thinking about that, Lord Ashur would like to have a word with you...
 * The Scrappy: Amata tends to get tons of hate for
 * Mayor Macready and Princess of Little Lamplight are also well hated for being annoying little brats who you can't punish due to the fact that children such as them are invincible.
 * Sticky as well due to his annoying "stories" during his hellish escort mission to Bigtown. Funnily enough, he's voiced by Craig Sechler, who voices fellow Oblivion scrappy The Adoring Fan who he has been compared to by the fanbase.
 * A lot of Jerkass characters such as Colin Moriarity and Knight Captain Durga get lots of hate simply because they're pretty damn good at getting their unpleasantness across to the player character.
 * Roy Phillips. Take a Complete Monster who and is still viewed as the good guy in-game to the point where Three Dog calls you out for killing him, and you have a perfect hate-able character.
 * The insane preacher Confessor Cromwell is an obnoxiously loud blabbermouth who tends to preach nonsense regarding the atom bomb in Megaton, and will do it EVERY DAY for most, if not all day.
 * Straw Man Has a Point:
 * Dr. Zimmer in the Replicated Man quest actually makes a very good point. He's out to capture an android that escaped, and the player is either given the option of locating and bringing back the android or helping the android avoid Zimmer. The first option gives negative karma, the second gets positive karma. However, Zimmer repeatedly points out that the android is his property that he created himself, and that you couldn't enslave an android anymore than you can enslave a water purifier or a computer.
 * The obvious flaw in his reasoning is that water purifiers cannot decide they want to be free. Androids can - that is the point of the quest!
 * (Admittedly) obvious flaw aside - and his ignoring it is supposed to show why Zimmer is the "wrong" choice - the android is still a significant financial investment that took time and caps to build and activate.
 * The Overseer's reason for being such an extreme isolationist is actually pretty sound. He thinks that the dangers of the outside will result in the deaths of everyone in the vault, particularly if a large group of raiders finds them. Considering what happened to Vault 3...
 * Although the Vault 101's Overseer can be portrayed as an stubborn idiot, in this case the game doesn't really portray him as a strawman but rather acknowledges that this argument has merit. When returning to the Vault for Trouble on the Homefront, the player can hack into the Overseer's computer to learn that the Enclave have been trying to gain entrance to the Vault. The player can then use this information to convince Amata and the rebels to keep the Vault locked and you're rewarded with positive karma for this decision. And rightfully so—imagine what the Enclave would do if they got their hands on some of the last "pure" females of breeding age in America...
 * Vault 34 and Vault 11 also show what can happen if an Overseer allows his people to get too much out of hand. Totalitarian authoritarianism seems more nuanced when balanced by the fact that all it takes is one asshole to get careless in the engineering area to doom the entire vault (something Butch was dangerously close to doing himself in 101's case).
 * Vault 34 failed because the overseer was too totalitarian and refused to left them leave the Vault. If they did they would never had a food problem which was a major reason for the unrest, and Vault 11 had a Lottery of Doom.
 * Tear Jerker: "If anyone can hear this, this is Bob Anderstein. [My] family and I have taken refuge in a drainage chamber not too far from a radio relay tower outside of D.C. My boy is very sick, needs medical assistance. Please help if you can. We're listening for your response. 3950 kilohertz."
 * For those who are curious,
 * There's just a lot of little things that get you down. A skeleton behind a sealed door with a pistol in its hand, a note from a nurse dying of radiation sickness who laments that she'd prefer to die last so she could take care of her patients, a corpse in the wilderness with a note about a man who killed his kids in front of him... who doesn't exist in-game, denying you the satisfaction of enacting some justice in this sick sad world.
 * Also, the story of Little Lamplight and Vault 87. Little Lamplight began as a series of caverns that a troupe of children happened to be taking a field trip in during Armageddon. Vault 87 was in an adjacent cave complex. The kids pounded and pounded on the door begging to be let in, but a man inside said that they were "already dead" and should go away. That man was one kid's father, who believed his son killed in the holocaust, and his voice a hallucination.
 * And, right outside Vault 101, there are a couple of skeletons. And a picket sign saying, "We're DYING, assholes!"
 * At one of the Drive-in theaters, there are two skeletons embracing on the hood of an old car. And if you check the mailboxes in the various small towns, you'll eventually find rejection letters from the Vault program.
 * In one house, the player can find the undisturbed skeletons of a couple spooning on a bed, apparently sleeping peacefully when the bombs fell. There's a child's skeleton in another bedroom. The child's room has a crutch and medical brace nearby. Yeah, basically they killed Tiny Tim.
 * In another random house, you can find a skeleton in a bathtub. Also, a toaster.
 * When some characters are killed, they'll cry/mutter the name of a loved one as their last words. Even for gamers who enjoy playing evil characters, it can be heart wrenching to be reminded the man you just shot had a wife or kid.
 * One drawn-out side quest involves trying to gain entry to  where a family had taken shelter. Once you get in, you find four skeletons and a feral ghoul.
 * There is one house in Georgetown where a robot sits silently in a room, untouched for the two hundred years since the bombs fell. When activated on a certain command, the robot will drolly float to the child's room where a small charred skeleton lays where the child died sleeping, with its teddy bear still cradled in its hands. The robot, not realizing this, will read its designated bedtime story...There will come soft rains.
 * This one is especially tragic if you think of it as the parents possibly preparing their children for what the war will bring...
 * Going to Arlington Cemetery invoked this feeling in me. It seems so sad that all the sacrifices and suffering of the ages experienced by all these soldiers was in vain because the world that they fought to protect and uphold was all destroyed in the nuclear fires of the Great War. Even after the apocalypse all it brought was a sad new chapter in humanity's long history. It got me to thinking if perhaps the men in those graves were luckier then we for the dead have seen the end of war, the survivors of the war have not because war never changes.
 * Talking the Ant-Agonizer into surrendering. She immediately drops her supervillain persona, and is reduced to begging you to let her go. She sounds about three seconds from crying the whole time. To bad there isn't a way for your character to hug her...
 * That One Boss: in Anchorage, mainly because he has a bunch of heavily armed Mooks backing him up and it doubles as an Escort Mission of sorts.
 * And General Jingwei in Anchorage. He has a massive amount of health and an oversight in programming causes the American Powered Armor troops to turn hostile to the player without provocation. Add in the fact that you have no stimpacks in the simulation, and you're in trouble if you can't talk him down with the speech check because the damage he deals adds up really fast.
 * That One Level: In general, Point Lookout is really unforgiving. While it's meant to be hard and is intended to be played after Broken Steel, it doesn't change the fact that the swamps are home to the most dangerous enemies in the game. For homegrown enemies, you have the Tribals during the main quest and the Swampfolk as normal enemies, and they are ridiculously powerful thanks to appearing in packs, taking a lot of hits to kill, and having unfair unblockable damage bonuses for their weapons. And returning enemies from the main game include Mirelurks, Sentry Bots, and FERAL GHOUL REAVERS. It's safe to say that you'll be dying a lot out here.
 * The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Certain weapons have a special effect of dealing additional damage per hit that ignores damage resistance. The catch? This only activates when an enemy NPC is using it against you.
 * Ugly Cute: Take Animal Friend, and the normally vicious mole rats will trundle harmlessly along the Wasteland. Sometimes they sit up to sniff the air, then drop back down to yawn and shake themselves.
 * Unfortunate Implications: Whoo, boy. The karma system is, to put it mildly, a complete and utter mess.
 * You get a Karma boost for killing certain evil characters in the game. While it's very understandable if you're murdering, say, Eulogy Jones or Mister Burke. But getting Good Karma for brutally murdering senile old Mr. Tenpenny... isn't that a tad bit much?
 * Another point is the rather small range of -1000 to 1000 karma points. Nuked Megaton (-1000)? No problem, just pay 2000 to the local cult and you are the shining beacon of goodness again. Since the game is nice enough to send mercenaries after you if you are too evil or too good, this pays off in no time!
 * Note that once you EVER hit evil karma, Regulators will come hunting for your head. In fact, going back to good karma from evil karma means that BOTH the Regulators and the Talon Company mercs are gunning for you, your call to decide that is good or bad.
 * And then there's the ending:
 * Possible ending 1:.
 * Possible ending 2:
 * Possible ending 3:
 * There's a possible ending 4:
 * The quest Tenpenny Tower has this. If you convince Tenpenny that ghouls are not all mindless, cannibalistic murderers, he allows them to move in to the tower. A few days after this occurs, the ghouls murder every resident, strip their bodies, and unceremoniously dump their corpses with feral ghouls around to presumably eat them. This includes the one resident who is extremely tolerant of ghouls. The major bigoted stereotype is actually justified by this quest.
 * Reverse-pickpocketing a grenade onto a swamplurk (Point Lookout) is somehow bad karma. What.
 * Useless Useful Spell: Multiple.
 * Any perk that only boosts a skill.
 * Swift Learner: +10% experience for each level, but there's an infinite amount of experience available.
 * Lead Belly: -50% radiation from drinking water, radiation-free healing is easy to come by.
 * Fortune Finder: More caps found in random containers, there is an infinite amount of caps available.
 * Rad Resistance: +25% radiation resistance, clothing and RadX make it moot.
 * Impartial Mediation: +30 to Speech skill at neutral karma, but remaining at neutral is tedious. Speech challenges can be exploited for a 100% chance of success, either through save scumming or maxing out the speech stat.
 * Animal Friend: Normally-hostile mammals become non-hostile. You can go for a second rank to get them to help you in combat, but they aren't usually that tough or annoying enough to be worth getting the perk (except if you encounter yao guai.)
 * Mister Sandman: Adds prompt to instantly and stealthily kill sleeping people for maximum experience, but it often glitches up and causes entire settlements to go hostile on you.
 * Mysterious Stranger: He'll occasionally show up in VATS to provide a One-Hit Kill to any enemy, but he can glitch up, anything he kills doesn't provide you perk or quest-related benefits, and he has a low chance of appearing at all.
 * Night Person: +2 Intelligence and Perception between 6:00 PM and 6:00 AM, which can be done with drugs or clothing.
 * Here and Now: Level up again instantly. Wasted perk slot due to the fact that infinite experience is available, the perk only functions at level up when you take it.
 * Cannibal: Can devour human corpses for +25 HP / +8 rads / -1 Karma, but the animation is lengthy and getting caught turns settlements hostile.
 * Master Trader: 25% discount buying anything, moot with infinite caps available.
 * Computer Whiz: Can try to hack a terminal you get locked out of. Only use three attempts when hacking and the problem will never show itself.
 * Infiltrator: Can try to pick a lock you broke once more. Save and reload instead. Even worse than Computer Whiz, as locks don't break unless you try to force them (as opposed to picking them. By contrast, locking a terminal happens by botching a hack).
 * Nerd Rage!: Descended from an equally terrible Perk (Adrenaline Rush) in the previous Fallout games, you gain a bonus to strength and damage resistance, but only when you're on death's door (Health < 20%), making it far too tedious and fragile for actual use.
 * Concentrated Fire: +5% accuracy for each action in VATS targeting the same part of the same enemy. Only useful for guns with low AP costs.
 * It's worth noting that Concentrated Fire can actually be a Gamebreaker used properly, giving multiple headshots at maximum range for a pistol.
 * Solar Powered: +2 Strength, +1 HP every 20 seconds while outside between 6:00 AM and 6:00 PM. Moot with drugs, health is easily replenished, and the HP recovery is incredibly slow.
 * Explorer: All map markers are revealed, but not counted as "discovered." The Pip-Boy has a compass that directs you to all nearby map markers as soon as you exit the Forced Tutorial.
 * Deep Sleep: Sleeping anywhere gives you the +10% "Well Rested" experience bonus, normally available only at your house or from a hotel. Swift Learner is terrible at level 2 with it's constant 10% that stacks with Well Rested; if Deep Sleep weren't bad enough, it becomes available at level 22...out of a maximum of 30!
 * Puppies!: If Dogmeat(or Dogmeat's Puppy) dies, Dogmeat's Puppy appears outside Vault 101 after a few days. Only available in Broken Steel, which causes Dogmeat('s Puppy) to become a bullet sponge. Useful only for the follower exploits.
 * Devil's Highway / Escalator to Heaven / Karmic Rebalance: Instantly sets your Karma to very evil, very good, or neutral. Karma is easily adjusted by theft, murdering respawning NPCs, and donating to churches.
 * No Weaknesses: All SPECIAL stats below 5 increase to 5. Made moot with the Almost Perfect which raises all SPECIAL stats below 9 to 9.
 * Rad Tolerance: Nullifies the debuff of minor radiation poisoning. RadAway is easy to get and minor rad poisoning is...minor.
 * Warmonger: Instantly get all weapon schematics to level 3. Most are pretty easy to get to level 3 anyways and only Nuka Grenade and Bottlecap mine really gain much from being level 3.
 * Nerves of Steel: Effectively boosts your AP recovery...by 1 point every 10 seconds (for comparison, firing a pistol costs 17)`. Someone programmed it wrong.
 * Rad Absorption: -1 rad every 20 seconds. Radiation is easy to get rid of and the rate of reduction is incredibly slow.
 * Nuclear Anomaly: At 20 HP or less, you lose all your radiation, your health rises to 20 HP exactly, and you create a small nuclear blasts where you're standing. Although it's an amusing gimmick, anything that could drive you to under 20 HP at level 30 is probably going to be dealing MORE than 20 damage per hit, the blast re-irradiates you, damages your clothing, often cripples your limbs, damages any friendly NPC in it's radius, and occasionally it glitches up and fails to provide the healing; causing you to kill yourself.
 * Punga Power!: Boosts healing and radiation removing effects of normal and refined punga fruit considerably. Stimpaks and RadAway are weightless and much more effective at their respective purposes than punga fruit. At least it's a perk given to you for free.
 * They're not weightless on Hardcore, mind.
 * Except that Hardcore is only available in Fallout: New Vegas...and Stimpaks and RadAway are still weightless when it's turned on.
 * The Woobie:
 * Gob and Harold. The former is a guy who is forced to work at Colin Moriarity's bar basically as a slave, and is abused with impunity by him (In fact, the abuse is so bad that he begs you not to hit him sometimes when you exit a conversation with him). The latter however is stuck in a hellish existence as a living tree-like creature, rooted to the spot and unable to move or die, and it doesn't help that his only company are crazed cultists who interpret every plea for a merciful death of his as a divine riddle.
 * If you decide to be a terrible person, you can make Amata's life hell growing up by teaching bullies to mock her weight, killing her dad, destroying her home, and causing
 * While that bastard Roy Phillips is heavily unsympathetic, his girlfriend is someone who's definitely worth pitying. Bessie-Lynn is a diminutive flower of a Ghoul who was once very pretty, only to be shunned and hated for her ghoulification. It's very clear that she simply wants to be loved again, and is willing to hang around her sociopathic boyfriend in order to feel wanted once more. It helps that she had no part in making her the only truly innocent member of Roy's trio.
 * Woobie Species: The Feral Ghouls. Sure, it can be hard to sympathize with them after you've had your ass shredded like paper by the Reamers, but it's hard not to pity what were essentially decent folk turned insane and trapped in a miserable state of life until they're put out of your misery. Hell, if you sneak around (or use the Ghoul Mask) and watch how the Ferals move when they're acting benign, and you'll often see them start spasming violently, as if they're in constant agony.
 * On a similar note, the Trogs from the Pitt. Like the Feral Ghouls they were once men, but unlike the Ferals, they still have some level of self awareness... and their existence is painful. In fact, some will flat-out thank you for killing them.