Fallout: New Vegas/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alas, Poor Villain: Chief Hanlon.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: THE GAME. Every faction and every person of note is written specifically so players can ponder their ends, means and motivations.
    • Yes Man: Cheery doormat who's just a tool to let anyone with the will take over New Vegas, or a sadistic Starscream who's been setting the player up from the start (though the latter interpretation has since been Jossed)?
    • Mr. House: A well-intentioned benevolent dictator and the best hope for restoring the world to pre-war glory and stability, or a Corrupt Corporate Executive that is totally out of touch with the realities of the wasteland and is only using the people as justification for appointing himself as an autocrat?
    • NCR: A nation that is dedicated to the ideals of democracy, freedom and individual rights, or a power that is on a slippery slop and is destine to repeat the mistakes of the old United States?
    • Joshua Graham: The Atoner seeking a way to make up for past misdeeds by helping the Dead Horses, or just channeling his thirst for blood in a more benevolent direction and in doing so corrupting a peaceful people?
      • And opposite him, Daniel. A fool who doesn't understand the need for violence even to defend one's self, or a naive but hopeful pacifist trying to shield the tribals from the harshness of the "civilized" world.
  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Wha?! After being Ruined FOREVER by Bethesda, Obsidian Entertainment, the sole surviving son of Black Isle, is developing New Vegas??
    • The fandom (particularly those without Playstation Network/XBOX Live access) also exploded with joy at the announcement of a rerelease of the game as the "Ultimate Edition" for February 2012. It will include ALL of the DLC (not just missions, but weapons and armour packs as well), and be updated to the most recent patch, finally giving those with the bugged console version the full experience.
  • Anticlimax Boss:
    • The Fiend leaders are at least several times more powerful and durable than the generic mooks, but still fall under this.
    • Benny, if you opt to fight him in the arena, will tell you beforehand of his knife-fighting prowess from his tribal days. Depending on your level and skill, Benny is a pushover or, at worst, a mild inconvenience. He is in no way a serious threat. Some knife-fighter you turned out to be, Benny.
    • Legate Lanius, if you're prepared, can become this, as his death is an Instant Win Condition. Most notably, the YCS/186 can easily destroy him with one sneak critical headshot with the right build.
    • General Oliver is almost a Zero Effort Boss if you have the Securitrons, since your own side's weapons are a greater danger to you than he is. Even if you're fighting against him for the Legion, his Elite Mooks are far more of a threat than he is.
    • Father Elijah from the Dead Money add on is actually pretty easy to kill. His turrets are pretty strong, but its possible if you have 50 unarmed to just smash the generator, making those turrets useless, which will cause him to charge you himself, and that's hardly the only way to stop the turrets. His Gauss Rifle deals high damage, but Elijah himself is only wearing a Brotherhood robe and is therefore a huge Glass Cannon, so killing him isn't very hard. The Final Boss was likely this way to make up for the rest of Dead Money.
    • Salt-Upon-Wounds, the White Legs warchief and 'Final Boss' of Honest Hearts, especially if you sided with Joshua Graham and used his idea of simply crushing the White Legs. Joshua will hold him at gunpoint, then Salt-Upon-Wounds will drop to his knees and start begging for mercy. If you don't intervene, Joshua just kills him right there. To actually fight him, you tell Joshua that he should be able to die on his feet, with honor, whereupon he attacks you. While his stats are objectively pretty good (he has high combat skills, a unique power fist, a few mooks backing him, and can have anywhere from 600-700 hitpoints), this hardly matters since Joshua Graham is on your side. You can literally just sit there and do nothing while Joshua kills him and all his mooks. Chances are they won't even manage to knock him down.
    • The Think Tank in Old World Blues, if you opt not to befriend them and talk them down, are pretty big pushovers. There are only five of them, and their health and weaponry are equal or inferior to all the things you've been facing as semi-regular enemies the whole DLC.
      • Assuming, that is, that one does the DLC at the recommended level or higher: Klein is the only one of the Think Tank[1] that scales with level, which all semi-regular and regular enemies also do. In other words, they keep pace no matter the level (indeed, they can even get worse), while 4/5 of the Think Tank becomes less and less of a threat the higher the Courier's level.
      • Klein also makes it clear that without the pacification field there's not much to stop you from easily killing them all. They're scientists, not fighters after all (even with whatever weapons they have).
    • As in all previous installments, all 'final bosses' (save for Father Elijah mentioned above who can be tricked though) can be persuaded to abandon their cause.
  • Anvilicious:
    • If you have the Confirmed Bachelor perk, you can chat up an NCR Major at Mojave Outpost, who will say that he would want to be your "friend", but the mood around the outpost is too conservative for him to want to deal with everyone he works with knowing. This comes across as a snipe at Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which becomes Hilarious in Hindsight following the repeal of DADT.
    • Throughout the game, the moral of "let go of the past before obsession gets you killed" is very obvious. It's even heavier in the DLCs, where the idea is hammered in almost every conversation you have with NPCs.
  • Author's Saving Throw: The revelation in Dead Money that Matter Replicators were "a common pre-War convenience" created all kinds of strange continuity issues, seeing as how the Great War was fought over resource scarcity, broken replicators have never been scavenged from ruins, no replicators are found in the possession of the Brotherhood or the Enclave, etc. So when Old World Blues came out, it was "revealed" that the replicators were an experimental technology developed at Big MT and the characters who told you how common they were either wrong or lying.
  • Awesome Ego:
    • Mr House.
    • Caesar as well.
  • Broken Base:
    • Not only the regular old versus new shtick, but also hardcore mode versus standard mode is emerging.
    • Dead Money has also been causing a debate. Both parties agree that the voice acting is amazing and it's much harder than any other sections of the game, but that's all they agree about. Either it is a brilliant, atmospheric, fun, strategic, Survival Horror adventure, or a frustrating, ugly looking, linear path filled with Trial and Error Gameplay, Fake Difficulty, and Demonic Spider enemies (the Ghost Trappers and speakers in particular get a lot of hate).
    • While most love the game, there's a faction that dislikes the massive amount of assets recycled from Fallout 3, to the point New Vegas has been called an expansion of 3, or even a glorified fan mod.
  • Cargo Ship:
    • The Boomers. They REALLY like guns, and bombs, and cannons... or anything else that uses gunpowder at all.
    • Can't forget that one of the customers in Atomic Wrangler is asking to have sex with a robot. I mean real (metal) robot, not Robot Girl or humanoid-looking things.
    • Oddly, the Stealth Suit and the Light Switches in Old World Blues appear to have crushes on the Courier. Hell, the switches even act like catfighting girlfriends.
  • Complete Monster:
    • Vulpes Inculta. He pretty much razed Nipton to the ground, enslaved most of its people, and put the remaining group through a lottery to determine their fates. The one winner got to go free. The losers suffered various fates, crucifixion being one of the lighter punishments. Admittedly, Nipton probably had it coming, but it is implied this is not the first (or last, if you decide to tolerate his existence) time this has happened. Later dialogue reveals he is also the guy who arranged the chlorine bombing of New Vegas. Not even the Legate approves of his tactics. Put simply, Inculta is one of those rare characters who is right on the line between standard (if rather bloody) villain and Complete Monster. Of course, one must remember that he is part of a Roman-themed army, and Rome used similarly brutal tactics when integrating people they conquered. Rome was able to set up a large, relatively safe, civilized empire because these methods are actually effective in integrating people into their society (after a few generations, the integrated tribes would have lost their old tribal identity and consider themselves Roman). The Legion has the same goals as the Roman Empire and has been getting the same end result based on Raul's comments. It's tricky to determine if Inculta is using brutal, but historically proven methods to reach the end goal of Legion or if he is legitimately a Complete Monster using Legion as an excuse to brutalize people.
    • Also, the Legate. As if not enough bad came from the Legion winning, under his rule, it's even worse. If Caesar's Mojave was a well-run if brutal dictatorship, the Legate's was driven by pure, high-octane murder.
    • The Fiends embody this trope as a group, as they are a bunch of drugged-out maniacs looking to destroy everything in their path. Even the Legion is disgusted by them.
      • Their leaders generally epitomize this trope, but you will be hard pressed to find someone more evil and disgusting than Cook-Cook anywhere in the game. On top of being a drugged out maniac looking to destroy everything in his path, his hobbies include raping and burning prisoners. If they're lucky, he does it in that order. Apparently at one point he bought as slaves three young girls and a teenaged boy, and then forced the girls to watch as he burned the boy to death. Given his occupation and associates, it's also very likely that he's also a cannibal.
        • You can find human flesh on the grill near where you kill him.
      • Special mention also goes out to the pair who sold Cook-Cook the aforementioned slaves. Although even they were disgusted by what Cook-Cook did to them.
    • Father Elijah from the Dead Money DLC tops them all. He's kidnapped and killed dozens of unsuspecting treasure hunters like yourself to use as cannon fodder for the Sierra Madre's security so he doesn't have to go through all of it himself, and never intended to let any of them escape alive even if they succeeded. He forces you to go through a number of painful, tedious tasks and threatens to blow your head up whenever you stray off your task. Also, he brutally tortured and scarred Christine and was the one responsible for most of the Brotherhood being killed by the NCR at HELIOS One. When you call him out on all this at the end of the questline, he blames you for your situation because you were curious and greedy enough to seek out the alluring radio signal he sent out. In that same conversation, he reveals that his true intentions for getting the "treasure" are to turn the Sierra Madre into his own personal fortress, use the invincible Hologram security guards to take over the Mojave, and exterminate everyone he sees unworthy to serve him.
    • You can even be a Complete Monster if you want. Special mention goes to selling your friend into slavery as Caesar's personal doctor.
      • What about Letting Mortimer use one of your human companions as the main course?
      • Mortimer himself might also be an example of trope, since he plans to revert the entire White Glove Society to cannibalism
      • And we mustn't forget teaming up with the Powder Gangers to destroy Goodsprings and kill everyone in it, including the guy who saved your life.
      • Even that's topped by nuking the NCR in Lonesome Road. Congratulations, you may have just doomed all civilization on the West Coast!
    • Clanden. He makes snuff holotapes of himself raping, torturing, and killing women. And if you confront him about it and use a speech check to convince him to leave Gomorrah, what he says to you is just chilling.

Fuck it, I was getting tired of this place anyway. I can find girls to play with somewhere else.

    • It's not often the game gives you good karma for killing someone even if they've done nothing to you. Clanden is one of those rare individuals.
    • The Mojave Brotherhood of Steel does not count as this. Quite a few of them are jerks with a heart of gold, and Elder Mcnamara is a genuinely nice guy... but the group of fanatical Paladins who are so obsessed with ensuring that the Brotherhood stays utterly true to the Codex that they try to murder Veronica because she "poisoned the Elder's mind with her lies" definitely count, especially if you convince Veronica to leave the Brotherhood and join the Followers, in which case they murder every man, woman and child in a Follower outpost, including the sick and injured, under the suspicion that Veronica gave them their secrets, and then try to murder Veronica for "poisoning the Elder's mind".
    • The Omertas. Let's count off the list of human rights violations: keeps sex slaves by getting them addicted, lets one of their "specialists" get away with rape and torture on a snuff film, and they're secretly working for Caesar's Legion to cause a massacre in New Vegas as soon as the battle at Hoover Dam begins.
      • You want more proof? The only decent member of the Omerta leadership is Cachino, a rapist and a real asshole even by Omerta standards, who nevertheless is the only known member who does not care about their plans to attack the strip, and actually is willing to stop it in order to save lives.
      • Cachino does have one partial grace that makes him just a little bit less of a monster: he is aware that his misdeeds are wrong, and wants to stop doing them
    • If you believe what Bitter-Root says, several of the Great Khans massacred by the NCR at Bitter Springs qualify. Of particular note were his parents: his dad would shoot random children with a sniper rifle for target practice, get drunk, then brag about how many children he'd killed to his friends, whereas his mom was a worthless jet addict who tried to sell him to slavers as a child so she could get a quick fix.
    • Salt-Upon-Wounds, the White Legs warlord from the Honest Hearts add-on. Although he isn't given much screen time, he just gives off the impression of being a war hungry, sadistic psychopath. Joshua even remarks he personally killed any children or elderly New Canaanites who weren't quick enough to get away from his warriors. The White Legs in general come off as this, being given little characterization beyond being violent raiders.
    • Not even Game Mods are exempt from having these. The Big Bad of the immensely popular mod New Vegas Bounties 1, the Judge, is described as a butcher and a pedophile who has connections to most of the outlaws you fight in the story (who are all nasty pieces of work themselves). He takes a sick, perverted pleasure in the kill, and according to Randall he once beat a man to death with the man's own jawbone, all while laughing maniacally. His true Moral Event Horizon, however, was when Randall, in his early days as a bounty hunter, was assigned to work with him to track down a NCR deserter and bring him back alive. Not only does the Judge murder the deserter in cold blood purely For the Evulz, he would've also killed a young child who happened to be there at the time had Randall not intervened.
    • Lonesome Road gives us General Devilin, who controlled the missile silos before the war. He rounded up peaceful protesters to be experimented on by Big MT so they can be 'useful to their country', and treated a water plant worker with utter contempt for having the audacity to care about safe drinking water. America was at war with those filthy communists, and anything that dared to detract from that was obviously the work of lily-livered, pinko traitors.
  • Crazy Awesome:
    • No-Bark Noonan. Despite his delusions, hallucinations, and general paranoia, he's the most informed and insightful person in Novac. His observations aren't just hilariously zany, they're more or less spot on. Especially, but regardless of whether one takes his statements figuratively. Either way, he's a lot easier to understand than those nightkin holed up in Black Rock Cave.
    • Lily, a schizophrenic Nightkin grandma wielding a weaponized vertibird propeller, and, apparently, Tabitha and Rhonda, if their post-game narration is any clue.
    • There's nothing stopping the player from roaming around in a pretty floral bonnet and a set of spiked football pads beating the crap out of people with a golf club.
      • Or a leather-clad dominatrix with a hockey mask and a chainsaw.
      • Or (with the latest DLCs) dress up as a rampaging construction worker (complete with hat) "fixing" the mojave with an Arc Welder, a Nail Gun, and/or a sawblade power fist.
  • Creator's Pet: Ulysses. All four DLCs build up the confrontation with him in ways that can seem forced, he's shilled by several other characters as being just as badass as you if not more, and Chris Avellone has acknowledged he's his Author Avatar that represents his views on the Fallout universe. He also has insanely high stats of 10s in every spot, has the most hit points of any human character topping out over 1,000, and regenerates.
  • Creepy Awesome: Vulpes Inculta. Dear Mars is he ever. Probably the reason he has a fanbase despite being the below trope.
  • Crosses the Line Twice:
    • In the final game, Cook-Cook was the worst of the worst. Cut content included dialog option with him, turning him into a fast-talking Large Ham verging into Black Comedy Rape territory. Now he's funny.
    • The entire quest surrounding FISTO. The idea of a sexbot is pretty squicky, and then it's just crossing the line again and again. From Mick and Ralph (who are used to dealing with all sorts of strange things) being freaked out by the idea, to FISTO requesting you to "assume the position", and James Garret's reaction of finally getting his... eh, customer's sexbot.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome:
  • Cry for the Devil: Yeah, Antony's an asshole who stole a little girl's teddy bear to give to his dogs, but the man has a genuinely tragic backstory.
  • Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Can suffer from this. Mr. House is very efficient and competent, but only cares about Vegas and it's unclear whether he can implement his plans for the city. Caesar's Legion are very effective at bringing order and safety to the untamed wastelands, but their kind of order is brutal, unforgiving, technophobic and misogynistic. The NCR means well, but its bureaucracy and military overexertion mean it couldn't effectively govern or protect the Mojave. You could go Wild Card, but can you forge a Vegas that's any better than what was there before?
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • Cazadores. They're as tough as nails, have a very potent poison, and travel in packs as large as eight at some times. They also move too quickly to get a decent shot off outside of VATS, and it's almost impossible to headshot them in V.A.T.S. mode due to a minor glitch which makes their head impossible to click at times. The icing on the cake, however, has to be their poison. Pre-patch, it killed companions basically on contact thanks to a bug that made it never wear off. They fixed that, but in doing so actually made Cazador poison even more potent than it already was. It wears off, but it takes such a long time that you have to dope your companions with nearly a dozen stimpacks if they've taken more than one sting. If that weren't enough, Honest Hearts gives us Giant Cazadores, and those bastards come right out of nowhere if your eyes aren't glued to the compass. Thankfully, Old World Blues adds a perk that makes you immune to poison, negating at least some of the damage they do. They still hit like trains and are insanely difficult to hit without V.A.T.S. though.
    • Deathclaws actually got worse since the previous game. They're just as fast, but now they're stronger, tougher, and crippling them is that much harder without the Dart Gun. Then there's the variants in Quarry Junction, which are even more deadly, featuring twice the health and a stronger attack. Worse still are the boss variants, the Alphas and Mothers, who are about twice as strong as the regular ones. Topped off by the Legendary Deathclaw, which will almost certainly one-shot you on any level and have as much health as the Final Boss, Legate Lanius.
      • Weaksauce Weakness: See Video Game Cruelty Potential.
      • Fortunately, however, this game eliminated the annoying habit Fallout 3 had of randomly spawning them everywhere. Now they never leave a few specific areas they inhabit. Deathclaws are extremely tough, but you can go the entire game without fighting them, which is not typically a characteristic of enemies that fit in the trope. The other examples given are much harder to avoid, and numerous quests will cause you to fight them, as opposed to the handful of optional ones for Deathclaws. Unfortunately, however, they are in the way of several key areas, one of which is vital for the peaceful resolution of a main story quest. They also guard two of the three faction safehouses, and are within striking distance of the main road to Bitter Springs, where Boone's companion quest takes place. In short, while you do not have to fight them, you will if you want to get the good endings.
    • Nightkin, blue-skinned Super Mutants with Stealth Boys that make them near-invisible. Sure, they may shimmer like water, but just try and spot that when they're moving at any speed faster than a walk. These guys hide behind rocks until you're mere meters away, and they don't decloak until they're literally two feet away in mid-swing. On top of that, they're deceptively fast, recloak almost instantly, and can send you flying (no joke here). Even if you have ED-E, who negates a fair portion of their advantages, they can still catch a non-V.A.T.S. user by surprise.
    • With the reintroduction of damage threshold (DT), the Super Mutants are much harder to kill while they use heavier weapons against you.
    • Legion Assassins and NCR Ranger hit squads if you have no followers with you, otherwise they're closer to Goddamned Bats. They spawn in dozens of locations near fast travel points on the main road, appear in groups of four, chase you relentlessly until they catch you, then declare you are a criminal and kill you where you stand before you have a chance to react. Unless you get the opening shot, only a high-level, well-armored player is going to live through their assault. Plus, they target NPCs from hostile factions as well, which means that a pack of Legion Assassins can and will cut down quest-essential NCR characters and merchants if you lead them into the wrong areas.
    • Hmmm... the Ratslayer? Located in an easy to find cave, no enemies except... Giant Rats? They sound like easy pickings...
    • Speakers and radios in Dead Money. Imagine there are these small devices hidden all around the environment. Imagine that if you stay in their field of range for more than about ten seconds, you die instantly. Imagine most of the speakers are indestructible, and the ones that aren't are hard to find due to (usually) being hidden just out of sight and in the dark. Imagine the radios being ham radios, which you will instinctively ignore, or brown Sierra Madre radios, which blend with the background. Now add on to the fact that in addition to making sure your head doesn't explode, you have to worry about the poisonous gas that's usually paired with this obstacle. I hope you studied the locations of the radios and speakers in advance, or you will spend most of the DLC searching for them.
    • The Yao Guais are back in Honest Hearts. In Fallout 3, they were tough, but not Deathclaw tough. Honest Hearts will teach you to fear them.
    • Some of the White Legs in Honest Hearts can pack some pretty strong guns, including 12.7mm SMGs, Brush Guns and Anti-Materiel Rifles.
    • And now, with the Lonesome Road add-on, we have Tunnelers. This subterranean cretins are tough as nails and have highly damaging attacks that have a potential to knock you to the ground, meaning you must sit through a 5 second animation, during which they are still attacking you. Also, they pop out of tunnels in the ground at random intervals, meaning you will never be sure if you are safe or not.
    • Lonesome Road also gives us Deathclaws. But wait! These aren't Mojave Deathclaws. LR Deathclaws level with the player, making them even more dangerous (though not quite as durable) as the Legendary Deathclaw at the highest levels. They're also directly in your path to the end point of the DLC. Oh, and at certain points, the game just spawns them out of nowhere to make your life hell. In one particular instance, walking into an abandoned RV, which you will certainly do because it is a force of habit, causes one to spawn right on top of the RV. Guess the first thing that Deathclaw decides to do. At least Tunnelers can be attacked head-on with reasonable success. You are not bringing down an LR Deathclaw at anything but range.
    • Even at lower levels, the common Jackals and Vipers can still spawn with grenade rifles, which can kill you way before you're inside any of your weapons' effective ranges. Even worse in Hardcore mode, as you typically will have to run all the way back to Goodsprings to get 4 of your crippled limbs healed.
  • Designated Villain: Dr. Mobius. The Think Tank designate him as a threat that you ultimately have to eliminate, but the threat he represents is not immediately stated or explained by them. It's because it turns out he's not a threat, or even a villain, at all.
  • Ear Worm: Just about every song on the radio. "Big Iron", "Ain't That A Kick In The Head", "Jingle Jangle Jingle", the list goes on...
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
    • Many agree that Yes Man, the constantly smiling Securitron, is by far one of the coolest characters in the game, if only for the fact that he opens up the questline to diverge from the standard endings.
    • Veronica has gained surprising popularity.
    • Rose of Sharon Cassidy is also well liked, with IGN calling her "well written".
    • Also, Boone, a man who will likely snipe the heads off of most enemies you make before you even realize you've made them.
      • Veronica = Tali. Boone = Garrus. There, I said it.
        • As a character, Veronica is most similar to Kasumi Goto in fight style and personality, she just lacks the Stealth Boy.
        • Arcade and Joker are snarky, disaffected brothers from other mothers.
    • Raul as well, mainly for being voiced by Machete.
    • The King is very popular, and some even want an ending where he can be crowned the ruler of New Vegas.
    • Fisto seems to have a very high interest-to-plot-relevance ratio, probably because his related quest is both icky and hilarious.
    • Joshua Graham has also become very popular among the fans.
    • Also, Lily. It helps that she's wielding a helicopter blade in melee and occasionally goes berserk and babbles incoherently.
    • No-Bark Noonan and Fantastic are two highly hilarious side-characters, the former being a raving madman who knows more than he lets on, the latter being a man who knows far less than he lets on. "I know exactly what I'm doing! I just don't know what effect it'll have!"
  • Esoteric Happy Ending: Unless the Courier did something about those Tunnelers making their way from the Divide to the Mojave, they'll end up with this no matter what faction they chose. However, the only reason the player might believe the Tunnelers are heading towards the Mojave (or anywhere else outside the Divide) is because Ulysses said they are. Ulysses is an Unreliable Narrator, so they might not be the problem he claims them to be.
  • Even Better Sequel: Fallout 3 created approximately two factions in the fanbase: fans of the first two games that disliked the third game's weaker writing and gameplay and setting shift, and those that liked the third game just fine regardless of whether they played the first two or not. New Vegas appeased the first camp thanks to many of the designers from the first game working on it and bringing back the strong writing and the familiar setting, and the second camp could enjoy more complex and balanced gameplay in addition to the superior writing. The result: New Vegas is generally agreed to be superior to 3.
  • Family-Unfriendly Aesop: One quest fot the Followers of the Apocalypse has this in spades. You learn of a water shortage problem with an NCR farm. Following the trail, you come upon Westside's local FOA missionary, who helps with their crops. It doesn't take much to reveal that he murdered the first NCR officer to investigate the cause, and he'll try to do you in if you threaten to reveal what he's doing. Furthermore, if you manage to get him to turn himself in/extort him for your silence, Arcade will take issue with this and you'll earn negative reputation among them. In other words, the only way this quest ends positively is if you not only let him get away with murder, but help him steal more water, dooming the NCR farmers in the process or get him to turn himself in for something else while keeping the secret.
  • Fanon: The idea that Yes Man is a closet Starscream has become thoroughly entrenched in the fandom due to a single ambiguous line at the end of the game.
    • Jossed by J.E. Sawyer in one of his Formspring posts.
  • Foe Yay:
    • In the epilogue, Arcade Gannon is subject to quite a lot from Caesar, of all people. If sold into slavery, the very anti-Legion Arcade becomes Caesar's "intellectual sparring partner" despite Caesar's general intolerance of people who disagree with him. When Arcade eventually kills himself, Caesar is distraught.
    • Ulysses' obsession with the Courier edges onto this. It's not all because of The Divide, either. He mentions hearing about you long before that, and implies he sometimes followed and watched you while you were on a job.
  • Game Breaker: Having Boone early on makes enemy encounters hilarious. Until the game glitches out and makes him run out of ammo and lose his rifle. The only downside is that the Legion will be hostile to you as long as he is with you, no matter if you don't plan on siding with them though (or maybe yes, see Dressing as the Enemy), Boom! Headshot! is still the best way to go for easy experience and loot.
    • Also, traveling a fairly short and safe distance to Broc Flower Cave from the starting town can lead to you getting the Ratslayer, a unique variant of the extremely common varmint rifle (so it's easily repaired) equipped with all the latter's mods (Day/Night scope, suppressor and expanded magazine) and it does more damage than normal. And it also has a x5 Critical Hit chance multiplier.
    • A mild one, ED-E with the enhanced sensors can make hunting nightkins a breeze.
    • The Gobi Campaign Scout Rifle. Being able to decapitate a Deathclaw from a mile away? Yeah, pretty much the definition of game breaker.
      • I feel like it must be mentioned that the regular sniper rifle has the same critical hit multiplier and actually does more damage than the Gobi.
      • But the Sniper Rifle+ is useless in close-range, thus you have to have another gun. The Gobi is equally effective at any distance. The Gobi's only downside is its high AP usage in V.A.T.S., although still effective considering it can be a 100% crit in V.A.T.S. with the right perks and stats.
    • What you can do by punching the enemy with the Ballistic Fist would make Kenshiro cry manly tears.
    • The Plasma Caster modded with the Plasma Caster HS Electrode basically turns the weapon into the Turbo Plasma Rifle. Add the Meltdown perk, and enjoy seeing your enemies explode in a chain of plasma fire.
    • The YCS 186 Gauss Rifle. You can get it early provided you know where to look. Will kill most human enemies in a single hit even without critical hit. If properly done (using sneak critical), this will turn even Legate Lanius into an Anticlimax Boss.
    • The Abilene Kid LE BB Gun, a shoutout to Fallout 2 (where it was a shoutout to A Christmas Story), is a seemingly harmless BB gun with a long name, but has a devastating critical hit, requires only 1 Strength to carry, lower AP cost than most of the more powerful rifles, has a massive clip size, and has a higher than normal critical hit chance. For a Min Max sneak attack player, this, combined with other critical hit boosting perks, and a few accuracy boosts, makes it THE gun to get, allowing you to pull deadly headshots that turn your opponent's head into Chunky Salsa in Bloody Mess mode. That's right, you can chunky salsa a man's skull. With. A. BB. Ironically, it's easier to get when you aren't in Wild Wasteland mode, where it's just sitting on a shelf in an abandoned shack next to 100 pellets of ammo, while in Wild Wasteland mode, you need Rex along to help you find it (in a well), and it'll only spawn after talking to the dog several times.
    • Although they've both been mentioned separately, having both Boone and Ed-E with you can make long-range sniping a breeze, especially if you have a suppressed sniper rifle *coughRatslayer*. Call yourself AT, 'cause you're gonna reach out and touch someone!
    • Anti-Materiel Rifle + Incedinary Bullets + Pyromaniac + Better Criticals = Gamebreaker.
    • More on sniping: the Laser Rifle is one of the weakest energy weapons in the game, its only redeeming qualities being low ammo consumption and very good manual accuracy due to lasers actually behaving like lasers in this game. There are 3 easy-to-obtain mods for this weapon that slightly increase the damage but more importantly, give it a long range scope that further magnifies the weapon's tremendous manual accuracy. Combine this with stealth and the Better Criticals perk, and now you have a weapon that can be used to score sneak attack critical hit 1-shots on pretty much 90% of all enemies in the game (with the exception of the toughest ones like Deathclaws) from 100 miles away. Spot a group of deadly cazadores in the distance? No problem, just crouch and proceed to 1-shot all of them from relative safety!
    • Give Boone the Anti-Materiel Rifle. Have ED-E float around and detect enemies. The only way anything will ever get close to you is if they were right next to you the moment you entered a building.
    • Shotguns with Slug ammo, combined with the Shotgun Surgeon perk, and Center Of Mass Perk can be horribly devastating. Slugs don't fire multiple small shots, but rather one large shot that can be devastating, since the slug is equal in power to buckshot, just concentrated to one area. The perks negate a good chunk of an enemy's defense, and adds additional damage to all shots to the torso (the easiest part of an enemy's body to hit, nine times out of ten). Add this with a good shotgun, and you're a beast, provided you're armored and have some decent endurance. In Bloody Mess, using this build, a torso shot on an unarmored enemy is... impressively colorful. Although it makes picking out loot from individual remains a bit of a time consuming process, the show is well worth the annoyance. And for extra fun, start with beanbag rounds, which do fatigue damage and can result in knockouts. Now you can just load a slug in, walk up to your unconscious enemy, and finish him.
    • "This Machine", a unique rifle that can be obtained from an unmarked quest. Very high damage (matching a sniper rifle), high accuracy, high durability, and easy to repair, assuming the player takes the Jury Rigging perk. It's also rather easy to feed; .308 ammo isn't particularly hard to obtain mid-game, likely around the same point the gun is found. If the player is using .308 JSP ammo, the 50% damage boost makes encounters with tough enemies, such as Deathclaws, very easy.
    • A surprising gamebreaker is the humble cattle prod. While it does pitiful damage against anything, it still stuns nearly every enemy in 2 or 3 hits, leaving them at your mercy if you repeatedly restore the stun effect. You could literally poke them to death. This includes Death Claws, Giant Rad Scorpion Queens, Cazadores or even Securitrons. If enemies get too close, this is basically the perfect emergency weapon.
    • The Holorifle from Dead Money, if you can find all the mods, turns into a deadly, accurate, slowly-decaying, ammo efficient killing machine, second only to the Gauss Rifle (and arguably even better when you consider what the Gauss Rifle does with ammo). The Automatic Rifle would also be this if it didn't chew through .308 rounds like it does.
      • The Holorifle is better than the Gauss Rifle unless you are sniping with sneak criticals (the only situation where the higher damage per shot is relevant). The Gauss Rifle only fires one shot per reload. The Holorifle fire four per reload that are not that much less damaging. No matter what perks you have, the upgraded Holorifle always does about 133% the damage of the Gauss Rifle. It also has a wider spread, though, so sniping at range isn't always a sure thing.
    • The Pulse Gun. Despite being very situational, it makes robots, turrets and power-armored enemies a breeze. If you're wiping out the Brotherhood, it's a must have.
    • Sneak attack criticals are absolutely devastating, especially combined with a headshot. That's why weapons like the Ratslayer, which has absolutely garbage stats, can be gamebreakers. For reference just how low the Ratslayer's stats are, the Silenced .22 pistol, the absolute weakest pistol in the entire game, has slightly higher DPS than the Ratslayer. Only three pisols (.22 pistol, 9mm and Maria, the unique version of the 9mm) do less damage per shot. Despite this, it becomes devastating when used with sneak attack criticals.
    • Step 1: get 100 Survival. Step 2: get the Chemist perk and the Day Tripper challenge perk. Step 3: cackle madly as a single desert salad heals a whopping 600 damage in Hardcore mode. Anything that has a time limit counts as a chem, and those two perks double the effective length of chems.
    • From Old World Blues, Rank 2 of the Implant GRX perk could count. Rank 1 just gives you five doses of non-addictive (albeit slightly weakened) Turbo. Take Rank 2, and you get double the amount of doses with each dose being just as strong as the chem. On top of that, it refreshes its supply daily. If that wasn't enough, you could blow all ten shots at once for a stacked duration. Want more? Day Tripper, Chemist and the Logan's Loophole trait's effects stack (though Logan's Loophole only applies to Rank 1 only). According to the Fallout Wiki, Rank 1 with the trait and perks grants you a duration of 30.4 seconds in real time for each dose, whereas Rank 2 with the perks only gives you 22.8 seconds for each dose. If for some reason you decide to blow all available doses in one go, Rank 1 with trait and perks gives a total of 152 real time seconds (or around 2.5 real time minutes) of Turbo daily. Not impressed? If you don't take the trait, you can get to Rank 2, allowing you a whopping 228 real time seconds (that's nearly four actual minutes!) of Bullet Time per in-game day. At this point, you don't even need the Fast Times perk... or hell, you don't even need the drug to begin with after getting the perk. And to top it all off, if you haven't even touched the Dead Money questline when you get the perk, it won't be removed from your inventory at all.
    • Jury Rigging is a pretty big game breaker. You can repair anything with anything even remotely similar to it, so you can fully repair that Hunting Shotgun with a few cheap Single Shotguns and then sell it for tons of caps. It requires 90 repair to unlock, but that is totally worth it for the massive benefits you get.
    • All the gold bars in the Dead Money DLC. The game made them incredibly heavy so you would be forced to leave them behind to demonstrate the necessity of letting go of greed. Except that with a stealth boy and some precise timing, you can sneak off behind Elijah's back with all the gold with the total value of 389,943 caps.
    • The compliance regulator from Honest Hearts, does almost no damage, but every time it lands a crit it will stun the target for several second making them easy to pick off with a more powerful weapon. It also has an amazing fire rate so it's easy to spam hits at a distant target and land at least one crit before it reaches you and uses the very easy to find SEC's for ammo. Best part nothing in the game is immune to the stun, this includes all end game/DLC bosses, if you crit it, it will fall over stunned for quite some time.
    • C4 Explosives can be dropped without attracting attention and can be detonated in hiding, this allows the player to basically murder anyone they want without anyone the wiser.
  • Gameplay Derailment: Subverted in Dead Money.
    • Several of the general meta game "dump" stats are obviously important for both stat checks and because you can't use items or companions to try to replace the function of those stats.
    • You lose all of your equipment for the duration of Dead Money. The weapons of choice are mainly an energy weapon with limited ammo, an automatic weapon that requires higher than average strength and explosives. All weapons often ignored by meta gamers.
      • Noooot really, at least postpatch. The holorifle is like the ultra-useful Drone Cannon B from Mothership Zeta, which players of that will feel at home with. The automatic rifle is a more powerful version of the Light Machine Gun, which is a more than capable weapon by itself for some players, and explosives have recieved a noticable boost. Failing that, there's the police pistol that uses .357 magnum ammo but deals a more damage at the cost of accuracy.
    • Sneaking around requires a high amount of the skill and proficiency in actually sneaking around (walking quietly, not walking into direct line of sight, turning off your light, etc). You can't hoard stealth boys and walk straight past everything.
    • Your funds, ammo and consumable items are limited. You can't run off to farm caps. You have to make do with what you have.
    • Reading messages and postings on terminals gives a lot of major clues about the easiest method to get past obstacles. You can't just keep following the arrow, shooting everything in your path.
    • Your choices matter far more than in the main game. Elijah will kill you if you mouth off to him even a little, and whether or not Dean and Christine betray you is determined by your choices throughout your time with them, not simply during your final dealings with them as you may be used to.
    • Companions aren't expendable. If they die, you die due to linked bomb collars. Their contribution in battle is also important due to your limited ammo.
  • Goddamn Bats:
    • Geckos, coyotes, rats, giant mantises, nightstalkers, small radscorpions/bark scorpions (thanks to their venom, larger radscorpions are Demonic Spiders), etc. Also, Cazadors at higher difficulties. They can't do much damage to a hulking player character wrapped in power armor and carrying a plasma caster, but they move around lightning fast, close in on you in seconds, are almost impossible to hit outside of V.A.T.S., have a bug that prevents from targeting their heads in V.A.T.S., come in groups, and poison you, forcing you to waste Antivenom and stimpaks.
    • Tunnelers from the Lonesome Road DLC. They have incredible strength, attack in packs, can crawl on the walls and ceilings, can pop out of the ground beneath you, and take a lot of punishment. If you get surrounded, you're screwed. Even by using their weakness of the flaregun, they only panic for a short while and run away from you, forcing you to chase them so you can use the small window of opportunity to kill them. Oh, and they're found in small cramped tunnels with minimal running room.
    • Bear traps in Dead Money. Prolific in many areas, hard to spot, don't do enough damage to kill you but are likely to cripple your legs, forcing you to waste a stimpack healing the damage.
  • Good Bad Bugs:
    • While attempting to kill or disable Mr. House in one quest, all the Securitrons in his penthouse will just stand there rather than attacking you. Considering that they may have all been upgraded to their Mark II OS, and are now armed with rocket and grenade launchers, this is extraordinarily helpful. This was fixed in a later patch; the Securitrons will now fight, but still won't use their heavy weapons.
    • A glitch on the PS3 version renders the Mick and Ralph's crier unable to spawn. Shouldn't have spoken up about having stuff they aren't even allowed to sell.
    • One developer revealed that Boone's utter lethality was actually out of proportion compared to how he should have been (with a guns skill going straight over 117% at level five). Now that IS a good bad bug.
    • ED-E's laser weapon may randomly change to an Alien Blaster.
    • It's actually possible to gain infinite XP by killing Big Sal and repeatedly shooting his corpse.
    • Before patch 1.2.0.310, various kitchens and ovens had shaped human flesh inside them due to a mixup by area designers, suggesting that said inhabitants were cannibals. This has since been fixed.
    • Unarmed weapons tend to have a habit of turning invisible, which may make it irritating when trying to figure out what weapon you're using, but the fact that your bare fists can launch people into the skybox as if you're Goku makes it amusing, nonetheless.
    • While the doctor's at the Followers safehouse, the fridges can be looted repeatedly for infinite food.
    • While under the effects of Turbo, certain fully automatic weapons will expend their magazine and then some when used in V.A.T.S., especially during bad framerate.
    • The Holorifle and the Anti-Materiel Rifle can be repaired past their max conditions using weapon repair kits, thus increasing their condition and value to completely insane amounts.
    • Once you've completed the "That Lucky Old Sun" quest after setting the power to "full region", keep telling it to Ignacio for infinite XP, stimpaks and Doctor's Bag. Just make sure you have at least one companion to help you carry those bags!
    • Switching ammunition types drastically cuts reload time for weapons that load bullet-by-bullet; when switching, only one bullet is loaded, but it fills the whole clip.
    • The Autodoc in The Sink can wreak some real havoc by swapping out Traits. It only works once, but that's all you need. Swap out Skilled to keep the free skill points but lose the XP debuff, or just select it again for another free +5 to everything (you can also do this while leaving Goodsprings, granting a staggering 195 free skill points, 15% of those available in the entire game, or a 130 (10%) without a drawback). Take Logan's Loophole, then swap it out around level 29 (the drawback doesn't apply until level 30).
    • You can get infinite money by getting 32,678 chips, dropping them, and them cashing them in again and again.
    • A programming error makes "Big Iron" play twice as often on Radio New Vegas as other songs.
    • The Hotkey Ammo Glitch. Find a type of ammo you'd like to use and equip a weapon that uses that type of ammo. After equipping the weapon, hold down the button to hotkey an item, move left, highlight the ammo you'd like and hotkey it like normal, release the hotkey button, then equip a different weapon. After backing out of the Pip-Boy menu, hit whatever button you've hotkeyed the ammo to and you can use that ammo despite not having the right weapon equipped. This works for any type of ammo on any type of weapon. Have fun with a flare gun that shoots incendiary grenades, or using the Laser Detonator to fire an endless, rapid stream of mini-nukes, or giving boxing gloves the same attack power as a mini-nuke (only without explosions)! Even better, you can use coinshot with weapons like the MF Hyperbreeder to shoot an endless stream of money. Or use 4/0 buckshot ammo with C4 causing four explosives to appear where you threw one essentially giving you an endless source of easy money when you sell them so long as you have at least one C4.
    • On one quest, the player is tasked with tracking down a serial killer who's been targeting refugees; you get positive karma for persuading him to stop killing without violence. However, the murderer is (rightfully) at Very Evil Karma, which isn't changed if you convince him to stop; therefore, you can get good karma for getting him to stop killing nonviolently, then another shot of good karma if you choose to shoot him in the back as he's walking away.
    • The fully functional missing laser pistol that you're tasked with retrieving for a couple of Brotherhood of Steel students is classed as a key item, meaning that literally nothing and nobody in the entire game can remove it from your inventory until you voluntarily give it back to complete the quest. It can even be taken into Dead Money; Elijah will still steal any of the ammo you brought, but more can be found easily enough.
  • Harsher in Hindsight Arizona Killer is the quest in which the player character assassinates President Kimball, of the NCR. Consider the events in Tuscon, Arizona in January of 2011.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: One response you can give is "I was a courier. Then I took a bullet to the head." Note that this came out before The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
  • Ho Yay:
    • There's a panel in All Roads that has a quite a bit of subtext.
    • Manny Vargas; he sounds downright jealous of Boone's wife, not just disdainful of her like the others. A female with Black Widow can't get relevant quest information out of Manny, while a male with Confirmed Bachelor can.
    • If you play as a woman with the Cherchez La Femme perk and try flirting with Cass, she'll admit sometimes she gets so drunk she doesn't care who she shares a bed with.
    • You can do this with Dr. Dala in Old World Blues, too. Mind you, her attraction to the PC is irrespective of gender, and it's the fact that the PC is a living organism that gets her off.
    • Keely and Angela Williams (from the There Stands the Grass Quest) seem to be quite fond of each other, to the point that Angela will pay you a good amount of money to ensure that Keely makes it back alive. This happens even if you destroy the Vault 22 data.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Cachino, if what he says in his journal is true. He knows that raping and hooking the prostitutes on drugs is wrong and wants to quit, but he seems to lack the willpower. He's essentially a slave to his own evil.
  • Magnificent Bastard:
    • You can very well be one if you go for the Wild Card ending. You manipulate and use the three biggest political factions in the Mojave so you can come to power and variably kill their leaders or exile them from the region, and in the process the other major factions in the Mojave are either dead or have sided with you. By the end of the game, through a combination of guile and bloodshed, you've gone from a humble package courier to the liberator of one of the most powerful civilizations in the world.
    • Mr. House. Instead of letting New Vegas be annexed by NCR, he's been exploiting them both economically and politically to build up New Vegas while slowly gaining influence over NCR, as well as gaining lots of intelligence on them while keeping his own abilities and agenda hidden from them. The result is that he's fully capable of taking over the Mojave once he gets the Platinum Chip, is intending to execute just that sort of plan very soon, and the NCR has no idea.
    • It was Yes Man rather than Benny who masterminded the Courier's ambush outside Goodsprings, and despite the Courier's position as head of an independent Vegas at the climax of the Wild Card ending he/she is still dependent on Yes Man's control of the securitrons and the power plant.
    • Vulpes Inculta was named after the Trope Namer, and it shows; as The Spymaster to Caesar, he's all about subterfuge and sabotage to take out the Legion's enemies. You meet him after he's done destroying Nipton by bribing them to capture the Powder Ganger and NCR forces they serviced, then sprang a trap to round up all of them as prisoners. His quests show just how far the Legion's reach spreads, and makes you realize he's possibly the most powerful man in the Legion.
  • Memetic Badass:
    • Boone, a thousand times over. People have even begun referring to awesome things in other video games as "Boone-tier".
    • Joshua Graham in-universe. Just to hammer home the point, 1st Recon has had several "confirmed kills" against him, and after failing Caesar at Hoover Dam, he was covered in pitch, set alight and thrown into the Grand Canyon. Caesar's slaves seem to revere him as some sort of heroic figure and even Caesar himself has spies patrolling Utah looking for him, suggesting his reputation as an unkillable badass might not be too inaccurate. He shows up in the second DLC. He really is incredibly tough, with a damage threshold of 50. This basically means any weapon not called the rocket launcher, anti-material rifle, YCS-186, Holorifle, Fatman or Alien Blaster will only do Scratch Damage.
  • Memetic Molester: Veronica has become this due to the Power-Fist pun.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
    • Nobody's dick is that long. Not even Long Dick Johnson.
    • I GOT SPURS THAT JINGLE JANGLE JINGLE
    • Easy Pete. For whatever reason, Tumblr just loves making Easy Pete into a Memetic Badass.
    • Benny's first line upon meeting the Courier again ("what in the goddamn-"), along with his utterly bewildered expression.
  • Moe: Veronica Renata Santangelo. Bonus points for being voiced by Felicia Day.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • While horrific, most of the Legion's early actions seem to follow a guideline of the ends justify the means or are designed to punish wastelanders fo their depravity. However a slave at the fort reveals that they endorse rape, sometimes even targeting children and old women. She'll even warn the female player character that some of the soldiers are planning on raping you. Combined with Centurion Aurelius's cannibalism and chilling holotape message where they brag about raping one of the soldiers in Ranger Station Charlie, this pushes many players from seeing them as extremely dark well meaning extremists into complete monsters and hypocrites.
    • It's hard to say where exactly Elijah crossed it- was it when he got hundreds of people killed over his own pride? Was it when he brutally tortured and scarred Christine? Was it when he enslaved a mentally handicapped Nightkin? Or was it when he kidnapped and murdered dozens of people in an attempt to access the Sierra Madre? The answer is none of the above. It was when he plotted the mass murder of everyone in the Mojave Wasteland using the Cloud, and got damn close to accomplishing this. In fact, he WILL accomplish it if you side with him at the climax of Dead Money, though this results in a Nonstandard Game Over.
    • Vulpes Inculta manages to cross this the very first time you meet him. If not, he's getting damn close to it, though, and when you learn about what he did against the NCR camp at Searchlight and his plans of massacring the civilians at New Vegas, then he's definitely crossed it, big time.
    • The Courier can probably cross one of the largest in all the Fallout games. In Lonesome Road, you can chose to launch ICBMs at either one particular or all the factions vying for power in the Mojave.
    • Ceasar passes this in Honest Hearts when he orders the destruction of New Canaan to get back at Joshua Graham. While previous Legion targets at least had some military significance of were at least morally questionable, New Canaan had never fought the Legion and was actively trying to improve the Wasteland, while Casear destroyed purely for personal revenge on one man.
    • When Lanius passed this is somewhat debatable due to his multiple-choice backstory. If what Caesar claims is true, it was when he demanded the surviving males of his tribe be exterminated in exchange for his admission into the Legion. However, he definitely passes it when he threatens to rape a female Courier.
  • Most Annoying Sound:
    • Dead Money's incessantly beeping collars.
    • Yes Waking Cloud, I know Zion was a nicer place before the White Legs showed up, stop telling me about it.
    • How many times must you talk about paper squares, giant dinosaurs, and the oddity of the foreign flora in the Valley, Chalky?
    • Okay, we've upgraded ED-E's laster, armor, multitools, ammo-recharging facilities and onboard construction equipment. Can we do something to make his engine run quieter?
    • Dean, I get that the Sierra Madre isn't getting any younger. You can stop reminding me.
    • I don't think either Dr. Klein OR Dr. Borous are particularly cute, Stealth Suit. Yes, I know my Pip-Boy light is on, shut up!
    • '"RETRIBUTION!"Screamed by every single Legion member in a ten mile radius anytime you attack one of their soldiers. Every. Single. Time.
    • Goddammit NCR troopers, will you fucking shut up about wishing for a nuclear winter. It's hot! We get it! Shut up!
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The sound effect and music cue when your character levels up. Very rewarding each time.
    • The Good karma sound cue is nice to hear as well, which indicates that, in one way or another, you've just made the wasteland a slightly less terrible place.
  • My Real Daddy: How most of the hardcore fans feel about this game being made by Obsidian; turns out, they're pretty justified. It really does feel like the sequel to Fallout 2.
  • Narm Charm :
    • Benny always comes off as weirdly emotionally bland.

Benny: (while being crucified) "HAPPY now, you twisted bum??"

    • This seems to be a reflection of everyone who works at the Tops, which takes Camp and Narm Charm and turns it into an art form. There's the tap dancing show, for one. Talk to one of the clerks there, and they will ask you how they can make your stay "the Tops." With. A. Straight. Face. Benny's second in command also seems as emotionally bland as Benny is, even after his Klingon Promotion. The Tops and its employees all seem to be trying hard to embody the Camp of the days of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.
    • The ending narration for Dead Money is either sad or touching depending upon your actions, and very effective at conveying emotions. That being said, hearing everyone chant "It's letting go" at the end is more funny than poignant.
  • Nausea Fuel:
    • Try to fight cazadors in first person view, you will see nasty and scary giant wasps attacking you in fast speed, even if you aren´t afraid of bugs you won't forget them.
    • One of the clients for the Atomic Wrangler wants a male ghoul Cowboy dominatrix. And indeed you can find a ghoul meeting all of the requirements except that she is female. The client you hire her fire expresses sadness that it wasn't a he, but that you can't get everything you want. You can also use her services.
    • The "Bill of Sale" you find in Boone's companion quest, because it is sickingly official and specific. The line "Payment of an additional five hundred bottle caps will be due pending successful maturation of the fetus" was enough to send the Legion into complete Monster territory for me.
  • No Yay: Happens a lot with the Legion. According to Siri, several Legionaries want to rape the Courier if you're female. Lanius himself can potentially threaten to rape you, depending on your choice of dialogue.
  • Older Than They Think: The Lonesome Drifter's song "The Streets of New Reno" is a retooled version of a much older folk song.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Even if you dislike the NCR, you have to admit that President Aaron Kimball is really good at giving a speech.
  • Paranoia Fuel:
    • The Ghost People from Dead Money. What's that clicking sound? Is someone there? Hey wai- why is there a spear in my shoulder?!?
    • Vault 34, especially if you have no companions. Ghouls behind unaccessible doors? You just know they'll break out eventually after your back is turned... so you end up constantly looking behind you, expecting them to be charging at you at any given moment. In general if you're alone and with the radio turned off, any dark derelict building, vault or cave can quickly make you creep onwards very slowly and carefully. The horror-esque ambient music these areas often have doesn't help.
    • There are some terminals in Vault 22 mentioning noises coming from inside the air vents. Turns out they are right. And those whispering noises never, ever stop. As it turns out, they are produced by giant mantises; they never jump out of the vents, but still...
    • Vault 11. Everyone inside is long dead... the IEDs they left behind aren't.
    • The mines in Lonesome Road.
    • Silver Peak Mine if you know about the Legendary Cazador in advance, but don't know what triggers its appearance.
  • Player Punch: The Lonesome Road DLC delivers a couple of these. [[spoiler:Most notable is a deliberately engineered one where as you journey through the Divide with ED-E, you learn more and more about the Eyebot's past, and can even interact with it. Then, at the end, it can potentially sacrifice itself to prevent missiles from being launched.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Boone isn't the first voice acting role Jason Marsden took for the Fallout series. He previously voiced Myron in Fallout 2.
  • Rooting for the Empire:
  • Ships That Pass in the Night: For some reason on the Kink Meme, Julie Farkas/Veronica has gained a large following despite the fact that they never directly interact, save for one instance in Veronica's quest... where the player does all the talking anyway.
  • Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: It's entirely possible to go into a casino, buy a whole load of chips, blow everything at the betting tables, and get so involved that you end up pawning off your possessions to buy more chips in pursuit of that fabled hot streak that will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. Just like in the real Vegas.
  • So Bad It's Good: Tabitha's radio show, which is described as "less for outcasts and more for weirdos."
  • Squick: Siri reveals that women in Legion territory are constantly raped, though children and old women are usually left alone... usually. She also warns you that some of the soldiers are planning to "try you out". And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, JE Sawyer confirmed that all women in Legion territory are used for forced breeding until their bodies can’t take any more.
  • That One Attack:
    • Characters using ranged weapons like Guns and Energy Weapons will actually have a really easy time beating Lanius, due to the fact that he is only armed with a BFS and it is possible to take him out with one sneak critical from the YCS/186. However, melee characters have to go up against him up close, and up close he may randomly use an attack that sends the player flying 50 feet and stuns them for several seconds, more than enough time for him to run up to you and beat you to death while you are helpless. If he uses that attack and you don't block it, it's pretty much a one hit kill.
    • Lakelurks' armor-piercing sonic shriek will rip anything from a player to a Veteran Ranger apart in seconds, especially since they're nearly always found in groups.
    • Cazadore Poison. It's long lasting and drains your health at a surprisingly rapid rate. This is why you'll see experienced players hoarding all of the Antivenom they come across. And prior to a patch, the poison never wore off of your companions, meaning that, yes, it will kill them. It's best to tell them to wait far away from areas with Cazadores.
    • Enemies armed with grenade launchers and other explosives can easily one-hit you, and even if you survive, you will get crippled. Even worse in Hardcore.
    • Enemy satchel charges in the Lonesome Road DLC. In addition to being hard to see thanks to their brown packaging blending into the road, they have a ridiculously short fuse and do massive damage, more than the bottlecap mine.
  • That One Boss: You thought the Bloatflies were nothing but weak cannon fodder? The Legendary Bloatfly would like to tell you just how wrong you are. To wit: the thing can fly above melee range at high speed, kill you almost instantly with its plasma projectiles, and has 2000 hit points. The Final Boss has 920 and the Legendary Deathclaw has 1000 hit points.
  • That One Level:
    • Dead Money: It's telling how punishingly difficult the entire DLC is when mods exist that register it as complete when the game begins.
      • There's a segment where you have to activate a bell tower. After you do, you get a Zerg Rush of about forty Ghost People. By this point, you should be very low on health and ammo, so fighting your way back through them is gonna be anything but a cakewalk. On your way up to the tower, you keep seeing "RUNRUNRUN" written near doorways in the "wrong" direction. After setting off the fireworks, on your way down, oh yes... now you know why "RUNRUNRUN" is written on some of the doorways.
      • Even more fun if you didn't realize there was the Police Pistol and burned through ALL your ammo on the way up. Cue trying to fight off the Ghost People with a melee weapon.
    • Lonesome Road wasn't out long before many players began tearing their hair out due to The Courier's Mile. To elaborate, the area is small, about the size of Quarry Junction. You just nuked it, so it's teeming with radiation (at least +10 rads). One side is filled with Marked Men, who regenerate health at an absurd rate thanks to the radiation. The other side is filled with Deathclaws, and the radiation has made them stronger, too. Add on to that the fact that DLC Deathclaws and the Marked Men level with the player, making them even stronger on top of that (unless you managed to get there at a low level). Get spotted by even one Deathclaw, they Zerg Rush you. They can take two shots to the face from the YCS unless you get a sneak critical, and you'll only get one of those. It's a ridiculously difficult battle.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Oddly, inverted. New Vegas takes place in an entirely new area. Of the pre-existing factions, only one (NCR) plays a large role, and the rest (the Super Mutants, the Brotherhood, the Enclave) are heavily altered from their traditional takes. The game adds a lot of elements to the overall worldbuilding. The level of society in the wasteland is higher than it's ever been. And yet, many old-school fans prefer New Vegas over 3, when the latter mostly tried to stick to pre-existing factions and conceptions of them, and many specifically cite the above - praising the game for putting new toys into the toybox, or for being willing to take certain factions to their logical endpoints.
  • Uncanny Valley: Festus!
  • Unfortunate Implications: Used intentionally at the ROBCO building with the "Who can you tell" brochure. To paraphrase: "Sure you can tell your wife. But since women have to tell stories she will blab no matter how much you tell her not to." This is to show that the pre-war Fallout Verse never really left the 50s behind.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion: In an early Xbox Magazine article, Tabitha was said to be an insane cross-dressing male. She's female, but Super Mutants lack secondary sexual characteristics and thus males and females look exactly the same at first glance.
  • Vindicated by History: The game initially received mixed reviews, thanks to Obsidian rushing the game to release in an unfinished state (13 months, 3 of which were spent on stuff like Q/A, as Bethesda mandated). Reviews criticized the game for its numerous bugs and for using the same engine as Fallout 3. To this day, New Vegas is now heavily praised for its open-ended choices, its Grey and Gray Morality, and its excellent writing. Many RPG fans consider it one of the best modern role-playing games of the last ten years. In fact, many people now consider it a Tough Act to Follow for Fallout 4.
  • Win Back the Crowd: For the many who were disappointed in Fallout 3, New Vegas was a welcome return to form.
  • The Woobie: Most companions count
    • Veronica can become one. If you finish her companion quest, I Could Make You Care, by persuading her to leave she will attempt to join the followers of the apocalypse, which results in the Brotherhood destroying a small outpost and its inhabitants. She not only blames herself for this, but is so traumatized by what has happened, she refuses to enter the Brotherhood bunker with you anymore.
    • Boone. After everything that he has been though, it is no surprise that he became a Cold Sniper.
    • Raul's background story. Basically ever since the Great War, everyone that he cared about or loved died a horrible death with him being unable to do anything about it.
    • Cass' father left her at a young age. Then in her adulthood, the caravan company that she worked very hard to build up got wiped out just because she was caught in a conspiracy outside of her control. She is now broke and alone, sitting at a bar all day long. Until you come along.
    • Lily was living a peaceful in a vault as a kindly grandmother before being taken by the Unity and transformed into a Nightkin. She still has memories of her grandchildren, which most likely died a long time ago. Even sadder when you encounter her for the first time and she confuses you for her probably long-dead grandson, Jimmy.
    • Dog is a violent glutton, but doesn't appear intellectually capable of actual malice. He's also in constant pain and has God verbally abusing him every waking moment, unless he mutilates himself enough to make the voices stop.
    • The Stealth Suit in Old World Blues is incredibly lonely due to being a stealth suit and never being seen. That's right, an inanimate suit of armor is a Woobie. When wearing the armor the on board computer will chime in asking if The Courier likes her, declaring The Courier as her best friend, pointing out she thinks she's the most unnoticed thing, telling The Courier to take a stimpack because she doesn't want them to die, etc.
    • Muggy's entire existence literally revolves around his creepy obsession with coffee mugs, and he's painfully aware of it and how much of a joke it makes him. About half his dialogue is him bitterly lamenting his torment while clearly on the verge of tears.
  1. ↑ The current Think Tank, that is. Mobius also scales with level.
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