< Fallout 3

Fallout 3/YMMV


  • 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 you destroyed Megaton or not.
  • 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:
    • Autumn, 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.
    • You can convince President Eden to kill himself with just two lines of dialogue. The argument you make isn't even particularly impressive, either.
    • Sibley has only slightly more health than a normal Power Armor wearing minigun wielding mook. The only real problem in fighting him is that he's supported by a squad of elite mooks.
    • 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 just a brain in an easily shattered jar 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.[1] Charon and Cross are fairly tough compared to other followers.[2] 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.
  • 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 ending the suffering of his victims permanently and trapping him in his own simulation completely alone, presumably for all eternity.
    • 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 turned tree to death, poison the Capitol Wasteland's water, annihilate the Brotherhood of Steel's headquarters via orbital bombardment, and so, so much more.
    • Wernher even has shades of this, towards the end of The Pitt's quests you learn that he's willing (but fortunately prevented from) harming the infant Marie to acquire the cure. 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 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.
    • 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. They 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:
    • The Enclave has shades of this. Oh, they're evil; they experiment on Wastelanders, incinerate anyone who fails to pass genetics screening at their outposts, and have a "shoot on sight" policy with most outsiders. However, all except the last point is left to flavor text. The story itself 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. Diplomacy and negotiation probably left the table when Autumn shot a lab assistant before Li's eyes, but when the story is presented this way, it makes the Enclave-Brotherhood war come off more as a matter of personal pride than stopping an evil army.
    • The Brotherhood Outcasts aren't the nicest folks around, but you can work with them to help them out now and then and their patrols are neutral to you and fight against enemies like Raiders, Slavers, Mutants, etc. Yet their rank and file troopers are designated as "evil", meaning they leave fingers for you to collect if you have the Lawbringer perk.
  • Disappointing Last Level: The last story missions is designed for low-level players as the devs assumed that players would just breeze through the entire game, playing only the story missions and leveling up accordingly. As such the player character has absolutely no part in the final battle. Sarah Lyons and her Lyon's Pride mop up anyone Liberty Prime didn't already kill, Colonel Autumn can be talked out of fighting and if you don't want to keep Save Scumming, he and his two goons aren't all that tough as Autumn doesn't have any armor nor heavy firepower and his guards are just rank and file soldiers. And then the ending: either kill yourself and get the "Good" ending or send Lyons and get the "Bad" ending and if you want to send Fawkes, your radiation immune Super Mutant buddy who's life you saved, to do it he gives some hokey "it's your destiny" crap to push it onto you or Sarah. Broken Steel makes the Purifier ending less annoying but not by much.
    • Broken Steel's ending isn't much better as the Enclave Squad Sigma aren't as "elite" as they are hyped up to be and the ending boils down to being pointlessly evil or pointlessly good by selecting who gets blown up.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: 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.
    • Many people who played the game thought Colonel Autumn was a super nice guy, even though he's a Jerkass racist who only betrayed the Big Bad because he wanted absolute control over the water supply, and Eden was going to poison it. Some even wanted him as a companion.
  • 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.
  • Fandom Gank: The original ending got a negative fan reaction almost as bad as that for Mass Effect 3's ending. But rather than a half-hearted effort like Bioware's, Bethesda's efforts to fix the ending dramatically improved the endgame play.
  • Fan Dumb: Try reading an argument about the "Meaning" of Butcher Pete and keeping your sanity.
  • 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.
  • Goddamn Bats: Talon Company mercs or Regulators, depending on whether the player has good or evil karma. Both constantly hound you throughout the game and have an obnoxious habit of ambushing you as you're stepping outside from somewhere or fast travelling around. One plus side of getting constantly ambushed by Talon mercs, though, is they provide a steady supply of Combat Armor and spare sets of good weapons (the Assault Rifle, Laser Rifle and Combat Shotgun) to perform repairs with.
    • Wild dogs. They can give low-level players one hell of a hard time thanks to being everywhere, hunting in packs, and if your Agility is low, are much faster than you. A pack of them can easily chew through players in seconds, which is compounded by the fact that they'll likely see you long before you see them unless you pay close attention to the compass or abuse VATS to look over long distances.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: Anytime you gain Good Karma, it has a very delightful tone.
  • 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 Fallout 3 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?
  • The Scrappy: Amata tends to get tons of hate for kicking you out of Vault 101 even if you get her father to give up peacefully.
    • 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 violently slaughters every human in Tenpenny Tower save for his fellow monster Burke 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.
  • "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: The game was hugely influential for the seventh generation of consoles, for many reasons- it's incredibly large and detailed open world, it's adaption of traditional RPG mechanics into a first-person perspective with VATS and dialogue trees as well as it being the first introduction to the world of Fallout for many gamers that missed it on PC. Nowadays, while it's still beloved, it's sequels New Vegas and Fallout 4 are more appreciated for being major improvements to the standard that 3 set. Quest design is improved in New Vegas as well as having a more dynamic story, and 4 is a massive improvement in the gameplay department with updated shooting and looting mechanics. This leaves 3 as the weakest of the three of the games, though it's still appreciated for it's own merits as being a fun game and for the popularization of Wide Open Sandbox and it's subsequent evolution with games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed during the latter half of the seventh generation of consoles.
  • 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.
  • That One Boss: Defender Sibley 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.
  • That One Sidequest: Finding all of the Vault Boy Bobbleheads. Hoo boy, where to begin? There are 20 in all and the game gives absolutely no clue or hint where to find most. Some are located in the far corners of the map in well hidden bunkers or isolated rooms, some are tucked away in places swarming with deadly enemies and some are found behind locked doors in HOUSES OWNED BY NPCS (which counts as trespassing, something unlikely to be done by good characters). Even worse, the Energy Weapons and Medicine bobbleheads are located in Raven Rock and Vault 101 respectively, making them Permanently Missable without so much as a notification if the player doesn't grab them as soon as they are given the chance (though Trouble On The Homefront gives the player a second shot at the Medicine bobblehead), meaning the player can still get screwed after many hours of hard work. Getting the achievement for finding half of these damn things isn't so hard, but anyone shooting for all 20 is gonna need either a guide or a hell of a lot of luck and patience on their side. At least the reward (massive stat boosts per Bobblehead found) is well worth the trouble.
  • 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: Activate purifier, + 1000 Karma. Understandable, so far.
      • Possible ending 2: Poison purifier and activate it: no karma change (the game docks 1000 for the poison, but you also get the 1000 boost for activating it), unless you were on the evil side, in which case you will be neutral after that. Oh, and you just doomed the whole Wasteland to a long and painful death.
      • Possible ending 3: Poison purifier and then walk away, leading to its destruction. -1000 karma, and the Wasteland is no better or worse off than before.
      • There's a possible ending 4: Poison the purifier, then have Sarah Lyons sacrifice herself to activate it instead of you. This grants -1000 karma and, upon reflect, is the most logical choice for an evil, non-idiotic character.
    • 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 her to be captured by the enclave and shot to death for not revealing where Vault 101 is.
    • 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 helping murder Tenpenny Tower's residents should you convince Tenpenny to let Roy's gang stay 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.
  1. ↑ They gain HP every time the player levels up: Dogmeat and Fawkes have 30,000 HP when the player hits level 30 with RL-3 not far behind.
  2. ↑ Charon is good at Sneak while Cross is above average with all weapons.
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