History FalloutNewVegas / TropesNToR

* ObviousBeta: As one might expect of a game developed by Obsidian, the story is unique and lovingly crafted, but the bugs and glitches are plentiful and the game is prone to crashing even after several updates.
* OffingTheMouth: You can sell companion Arcade Gannon into slavery as Caesar's personal physician and then arrange for him to die in the quest Et Tumor Brute. Should the Legion win at the Battle of Hoover Dam, Caesar's successor Lanius gets tired of Arcade's witty remarks and has him crucified.

* NoKillLikeOverkill: You can kill low level creatures like ravens or coyotes with a [[NukeEm fat man]]. There's even a achievement with Gun Runners Arsenal for that very thing.

* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: "Cannibal" Johnson got his nickname from an incident where, outnumbered by Raiders and with his back to the wall, he ''tore out a Raider's heart and took a bite out of it,'' hoping to scare the others off. It worked. Though he's actually the most unambiguously good [[spoiler:member of the Enclave Remnants, and the only one who supports the NCR.]]

** Power Fists and other brawling weapons are Veronica's WeaponOfChoice.

--> '''Courier:''' If you stole my brain, then how the hell am I still functioning?\\
'''Dr. Klein:''' WE HAVE NO IDEA! THIS LINE OF QUESTIONING ISN'T IMPORTANT TO US NOW! WHY MUST YOU ASK THESE TANGENTIAL QUESTIONS? STOP IT!

** A [[https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/File:Ranger_at_New_Vegas_entrance.jpg magazine ad]] for the game depicts an NCR Ranger standing along an empty road leading straight into a gated off New Vegas, the "Welcome to New Vegas" standing next to it. In the actual game, this is incorrect: the "Welcome" sign is next to Camp [=McCarran=], nowhere near the actual entrance to The Strip, and the only entrance to New Vegas (barring [=McCarran's=] monorail system) requires you to go through Freeside, looking nothing like the gate present in the ad.
* NewMeat: 10 of Spades. He's called that, because he's too green to earn Ace of Spades as his callsign. According to him, once he gets a few more kills, he’ll be Jack, and he can work his way up to Ace. He's going to skip queen, though.

* NewMeat: 10 of Spades. He's called that, because he's too green to earn Ace of Spades as his callsign. He's going to skip queen, though.

* NuclearNasty: A well-represented trope in a series like this. The only monsters that avert this are the Deathclaws, Super Mutants, Centuars, and newcomers [[BigCreepyCrawlies Cazadors]] and [[MixAndMatchCritter Nightstalkers]] both of whom were made in Big Mountain by Doctor Borous of the Think Tank.

** For the NCR, Colonels Cassandra Moore and James Hsu are red and blue, respectively. For example, Colonel Hsu prefers to resolve the problem with the Kings peacefully by providing them supplies, while Colonel Moore would rather [[KillEmAll kill them all.]]

** With the Terrifying Presence perk, you can intimidate hardened badasses in cowering like children. Of note, you can scare the crap out of Caesar himself, turn Jean-Baptiste Cutting (a murderous psychopath who vaped a dude for ''fun'') into whimpering wuss, and scare an entire team of Brotherhood soldiers into submission when they both ''outnumber and outgun you''. It may be a largely useless perk, but it's easily the funniest.

* {{Reconstruction}}: The game reconstructs the idea of VendorTrash. ''Fallout'' has always had useless items with no purpose but to be sold for a few pennies, but this game's wide variety of crafting options makes it more beneficial than ever to hoard them. Not to sell them, though, but because eventually you can use crafting to turn those useless items in something practical. The [=DLCs=] particularly rely on the player collecting crafting agents due to limited resources in the DLC areas; ''Old World Blues'' lets you collect scrap appliances, old clipboards and books, and useless plant matter, among other items, in order to break them down and reconstitute them as things that you can get more use out of.
* RecycledINSPACE:
** Caesar's Legion is the Roman Empire [-IN POST APOCALYPTIC NEVADA-]! ([[InsultToRocks The Romans take offense to this horrible slur.]])
** The game itself is TheWestern AfterTheEnd.

* PressStartToGameOver: Once you start out in Goodsprings, try heading directly north to New Vegas through [[WhatAnIdiot clearly marked]] [[BossInMookClothing deathclaw]] infested territory. [[TemptingFate See how far it gets you.]]

* NewOldWest: While the other games certainly has elements of the genre, this one is very clearly meant to be a Western. It just happens to be set AfterTheEnd.

* PosthumousNarration: The ModularEpilogue slides were narrated by characters relevant to each slide, even if the character in question died at some point. This is most notorious in Honest Hearts, in which Jed Masterson narrates the epilogue slides regarding the Happy Trails Caravan Company, even though his death at the start of the DLC is unavoidable.

* OffTheRails: Part of the big draw of the game is that there is no one true plotline. All the big names you learn about throughout the game [[AnyoneCanDie are certainly killable]], and the game actually evolves around the decisions you make, to come to drastically different endings that require a massive slide show depicting the consequences of your actions. You ''will'' eventually be railroaded onto the Independent questline if you kill or antagonize enough people, but it's hardly a game over by any means.

* {{Railroading}}: The game is noticeably more plot-driven than ''Fallout 1'', ''2'' or ''3'', and gameplay progression follows this. Getting to New Vegas from Goodsprings either requires you to brave a BeefGate of Deathclaws or follow the counter-clockwise road through Primm, Nipton, Novac, and then Freeside before reaching The Strip. The questlines for Mr. House, the NCR and Caesar each lock you out of the other two when you get to a certain point in one, forcing you to either see your chosen faction through to victory or jump ship to the Wild Card route. There are also many fewer optional areas compared to ''Fallout 3'', and a lot of the locations in the game are either bases of the three major factions, locations relevant to their questlines such as a secondary faction, or a location relevant to a secondary faction's questline, so it's hard to just go off exploring without the plot jumping in again.

** Swap out for the [[{{Unobtanium}} Saturnite]] Fist added in ''Old World Blues'' and you don't punch ''people'' across the room so much as their ''[[OffWithTheirHead heads]]''.

* RousseauWasRight: Vault 11. The mainframe requires one resident to sacrifice themselves each year, or all life support will be turned off, dooming the others. As it turns out, [[spoiler:given the nature of vaults and their designers, it's almost certain Vault 11 was simply a social experiment. The designers added the option that once the residents refused to play along, they would be congratulated for their conscience and the vault would be opened. The population kept on sacrificing each other for years, especially as the politicking to choose the leader/sacrifice made the voting blocs powerful, until (after the sacrifices were made random and a civil war between power blocs broke out) only a handful were left and they decided to just have the Vault kill them. Most committed suicide at the (now open) Vault door when they realized what they had done... except one, who escaped into the wastelands.]]

* RetiredBadassRoundup: The entirety of the quest "For Auld Lang Syne."

* NotQuiteTheRightThing: The ending to ''Honest Hearts'' takes this bent no matter which side you support. It ultimately comes down to whether or not [[spoiler:you believe preserving the natural beauty and sanctity of Zion is worth the human cost or not.]]

* NothingIsScarier: Vault 22, which is seemingly devoid of life apart from [[TheGoomba giant mantises]] and the numerous patches of flora... until you step on said flora and awaken a spore carrier.
* NothingIsScarier: There is a virtual reality room in ''Old World Blues'', only someone smashed the controls and left a note that ends "It has killed us. Now I will kill it." Makes you wonder what the hell was in the VR. And you will never know.

** At the end, you can [[spoiler:join Father Elijah and unleash the Cloud upon the Mojave Wasteland, killing everyone.]]

* RealityEnsues:
** Hardcore Mode, which requires you to eat, drink, and sleep regularly, and keep track of your ammo and money's weights. Crippled Limbs must be healed by either a trip to the doctor or using a Doctor's Bag or Hydra item rather than just pumping stimpacks into it, and companion deaths are permanent.
** The NCR and the First Battle of Hoover Dam served as a reality check for the Legion. Conquering a bunch of disorganized tribes one by one is quite different from trying to take on an actual country that has a (comparatively) well-trained and well-equipped professional army. Also, human wave tactics worked very well in the past against tribals who focus on close combat, but against people with access to semi-automatic firearms and explosives, [[CurbStompBattle not so much]].
** The Mojave chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel got a similar lesson during the battle for the HELIOS One Solar Power Plant. The NCR was able to wipe out most of their forces simply because they had the ability to trade blows and replace lost manpower, while the technologically superior, but far smaller, Brotherhood could not. The fact that the Brotherhood's Elder and commander was a scientist who had no knowledge of military tactics, and a [[ControlFreak personality]] that made him [[GeneralFailure completely unfit for command]] certainly did not help.
** With the [[SillinessSwitch Wild Wasteland trait]], you will get [[WhenEldersAttack attacked by murderous grannies]] wielding rolling pins coming straight from a Monty Python sketch at one point. They last roughly as long as you'd expect violent grannies with improvised weapons would when attacking (without provocation even) a wastelander with a body count numbering in the hundreds wielding anything from a BoringButPractical {{Handgun}} or [[KnifeNut combat knife]] to a GatlingGood or [[EnergyWeapon Frickin' Laser Beams]] whom WouldHarmASenior (even if only in self-defense) and probably is a CombatPragmatist to boot.

** Veronica also points out that both the Boomers and the Brotherhood of Steel are quite similar, both being aggressively xenophobic hoarders of technology.

* NotSoDifferent:
** [[spoiler:Caesar and Arcade Gannon]] are extremely similar. Both are or were members of [[spoiler:the Followers of Apocalypse]]. Both lost their fathers at a young age. Both are well educated [[spoiler:to the point of knowing Latin]]. Both believe in the greater good, even if it is at the expense of the individual good ([[spoiler:although Arcade doesn't take it to the same extremes]]). Both prove to be [[spoiler:remarkably effective military leaders as soon as they put their mind to do so. If you get a very specific ending, the trope is more apparent, as well, due to Caesar's interactions with Arcade]].

** The New Canaanites and Tribal clans in ''Honest Hearts'', which is lampshaded by Joshua Graham. While the Mormons wear more clothing and retain a number of Pre-War customs and technologies, like their would-be converts, they're a spiritual people who treat one another as belonging to one large family.

* PartyOfRepresentatives: Each of your companions represents one of the factions of the Mojave, granting you a degree of insight into their beliefs and flaws. Veronica is a journeyman scribe who helps secure food and supplies for the Brotherhood of Steel, Arcade is a humanitarian aid doctor with the Followers of the Apocalypse [[spoiler:and was born into the Enclave to [[TheRemnant one of the few officers who survived]] the destruction of the oil rig]], Lily was one of the Master's elite operatives and lets you witness firsthand the mental degeneration which affects all nightkin, and Raul is a pre-war ghoul, originally from Arizona, and the only party member who has actually lived in a region under Legion control -- and he says the Legion and NCR are NotSoDifferent for the average civilian living on the ground. Boone and Cass are both proudly NCR, but Boone is jaded ex-military (though he seems to blame himself more than anyone for the incident that led to his departure) while Cass is a civilian business owner who loves her country even though she sees it as deeply flawed.

* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: Caesar's Legion makes no pretense about it: they think women are inferior to men physically and mentally, and should StayInTheKitchen. Also, [[FantasticRacism they think of Ghouls and Super Mutants as nothing more than savage beasts]], even though the majority of them actually aren't so bad. Just one more reason to remember they represent sociological ''regression'', not progress. This is arguably part of the idea, though. Caesar is trying to turn back the clock, and values have to come with that package.