| 1 | '''Tropes A-B''' | [[FalloutNewVegas/TropesCToD Tropes C-D]] | [[FalloutNewVegas/TropesEToH Tropes E-H]] | [[FalloutNewVegas/TropesIToM Tropes I-M]] | [[FalloutNewVegas/TropesNToR Tropes N-R]] | [[FalloutNewVegas/TropesSToZ Tropes S-Z]] |
| 2 | ---- |
| 3 | !!!''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' provides examples of the following tropes: |
| 4 | |
| 5 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 6 | |
| 7 | [[folder:#-A]] |
| 8 | * HundredPercentHeroismRating: The karma meter returns from ''VideoGame/Fallout3'', but rarely comes into play (one companion, Cass, will abandon you if you're evil). What actually matters is your reputation with each faction, which changes dialogue with even minor [=NPCs=], affects quests offered and their outcomes, and can of course block certain endings if you can't get near a given faction without them opening fire. Since you can't lose popularity or infamy, people could end up singing your praises for all the {{Fetch Quest}}ing while simultaneously calling you out for blowing another of their outposts last week. |
| 9 | * AbandonedMine: Quite a few. There's the Coyote Mines, Lucky Jim Mine, Ruby Hill Mine, Searchlight Mines, Silver Peak Mine... Many have been taken over by creatures as dens. One, the Techatticup Mine, has been converted into a makeshift Legion camp. |
| 10 | * AbnormalAmmo: 12 Gauge coin shot, a shotgun shell loaded with [[MoneyToBurn Legion denarii]]. |
| 11 | ** The Gun Runners Arsenal add-on kicks this up a notch with pulse slugs that do bonus damage to robots, flechette shells to shred armoured targets, and [[PlayingWithFire dragon's breath rounds]] [[ShownTheirWork that create bursts of flames, at the cost of wrecking the barrel]]. |
| 12 | ** The ''Gun Runner Arsenal'' version of the Fat Man along with [[ICallItVera Esther]] can use mini nukes that cry as they fly through the air or mini nukes that bounce (even off somebody's chest) before their timer goes off. |
| 13 | * AbominableAuditorium: One of the many venues within the Sierra Madre Hotel and Casino is the Tampico Theater, an auditorium meant for only the best performers in America, including such stars as Dean Domino and Vera Keyes. However, by the time you visit it, it's every bit as deadly as the rest of the Sierra Madre: the murderous holograms are actively patrolling the area, speakers can set off your bomb collar, and Elijah is still watching you for any sign of rebellion. [[spoiler: Also, Dean Domino is currently using this place as a hidey-hole; if you've gotten on his bad side, he will turn the theatre's security against you and try to kill you in person if that doesn't work.]] |
| 14 | * AbortedArc: If you take the NCR route, confronting Benny at the Tops and/or retrieving the Platinum Chip is completely dropped in favor of enhancing the NCR's position with other minor factions in the Mojave ahead of the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, outright ignoring the Courier's entire initial motivation to travel the Mojave and reach Vegas. |
| 15 | * AbsurdlySharpBlade: The Cosmic Knife from the ''Dead Money'' add-on. Log files left behind by the chefs in the Sierra Madre Casino stated that the material the knives were made of made them so sharp that what might be a minor knick from a regular knife equals ''almost cutting off a finger'' with a cosmic knife. Added on is the fact that using the knives to do their jobs resulted in them inadvertently destroying their cutting boards and requesting ''daily'' replacements after the knives cut right through them. This is [[GameplayAndStoryIntegration reflected in-game too]] as a cosmic knife does +25% extra damage to an enemy's limbs, even more so if the clean cosmic knife is created at a workbench which upgrades it to +50% damage. |
| 16 | * AbsurdlySpaciousSewer: The New Vegas sewers and storm drains are very extensive. Many of New Vegas's poor live in the North Sewers, while other sections are filled with Fiends, Feral Ghouls, and of course giant rats. Under Westside is the (literally) underground fighting arena, The Thorn. |
| 17 | * AcceptableBreaksFromReality: |
| 18 | ** Hardcore Mode averts several of these. Ammo is no longer weightless[[note]]although the unformed components of ammo still are, except for lead which already had weight in Casual Mode[[/note]], you need to eat and drink and sleep regularly to survive, most companions can die permanently, and wounds are not instantly healed even with Stimpaks. |
| 19 | ** J. E. Sawyer himself [[http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=60505 released his own personal mod]] to avert this even more. In particular, Stimpaks are less potent, they have weight, the majority you find are expired (and thus even less powerful), and the ones you make yourself are slightly weaker and come with a minor stat penalty. Base carry weight and health are decreased, primary needs increase faster, and food/water loot is dramatically less common. As Sawyer said, "Being shot three times in the gut and slowly bleeding out over five hours before dying permanently isn't very fun." |
| 20 | ** A B29 bomber that crashed in Lake Mead is still salvageable despite having been underwater since ''1948''. |
| 21 | * AceCustom: Played with in the case of the unique weapons. While some do fit the bill by being either tricked out (for example, Vance's SMG/9mm SMG, Ratslayer/Varmint Rifle and AER 14 Prototype/Laser Rifle), customized (Paciencia/Hunting Rifle, Medicine Stick/Brush Gun and All-American/Marksman Carbine) or finely ornated (La Longue Carabine/Cowboy Repeater, Lucky/.357 Revolver and Maria/9mm Pistol), others are just [[PaletteSwap recolored]] (Golden Gloves/Boxing Gloves, Cram Opener/Bladed Gauntlet and Knock-Knock/Fire Axe) or just dirty, battered and/or rusty (Chance's Knife/Combat Knife, Survivalist's Rifle/Service Rifle and Oh, Baby!/Super Sledge). The full aversions are Liberator, Recompense of the Fallen, Elijah’s Advanced LAER, and Blood-Nap, the unique Machete, Dog Tag Fists, LAER, and Bowie Knife respectively, which look exactly like their generic variants. |
| 22 | * AcronymsAreEasyAsAybeecee: The ''Old World Blues'' DLC is set in the Big Mountain Research Complex. Wastelanders refer to it as "the Big Empty," due to both misunderstanding "Big MT" and because of the area's desolation. |
| 23 | * ActorAllusion: In ''Dead Money,'' Dean Domino's EstablishingCharacterMoment is to trick you into sitting on a bomb. Creator/BarryDennen's other big name role, [[VideoGame/MetalGearSolid2SonsOfLiberty Fatman]], died sitting on a bomb himself, which you had to find and disarm. |
| 24 | * AerithAndBob: Par for the course, as most of the world still uses conventional first and last names but nicknames and assumed names are common throughout the wasteland, with {{Meaningful Rename}}s and {{Rite of Passage Name Change}}s being standard among tribals and raiders -- the latter leading to many names which are that much more [[NameThatUnfoldsLikeLotusBlossom evocative and descriptive]]. |
| 25 | ** Caesar's Legion is a quasi-Roman-inspired war machine composed of 87 tribes brought under one banner by force and the several men we meet reflect that. Many names are Latin-derived, such as Caesar himself, Legate Lanius, Vulpes Inculta ("[[Film/TheDesertFox Fox of the Desert]]"), and Aurelius of Phoenix (Arizona). Compare that with Canyon Runner, Dead Sea -- and Karl. |
| 26 | ** The Legion also provides former Legate Joshua Graham, the infamous Malpais Legate and later the legendary Burned Man, who had kept his old name from his days as a New Canaanite (Mormon) missionary from Utah. |
| 27 | ** The Fiend lords are Motor Runner, Cook-Cook, Violet, and "Driver" Nephi. The latter is a lapsed New Caananite (like Joshua Graham) -- Driver is a punny reference to both his old job as a "driver" for the brahmin which pulled the caravans, as well as his new preferred weapon (a unique [[GolfClubbing 9 iron]]), but Nephi is simply his name.[[note]]Nephi is the son of the prophet Lehi and author/namesake of the first two books of the [[UsefulNotes/{{Mormonism}} Book of Mormon]].[[/note]] |
| 28 | ** Potential companions include Lily, Raul, (Craig) Boone, Veronica, and even ED-E (pronounced "Eddie" or "Edie-E"), relatively normal names when contrasted with [[Literature/TheGrapesOfWrath Rose of Sharon]] Cassidy and Arcade Gannon, as well as [[GuestStarPartyMember tutorial "companion"]] Sunny Smiles. |
| 29 | ** The "scientist" in charge of the Helios One solar power plant is named Fantastic. He works in the same room as the much more sensible and sensibly named Ignacio Rivas. It's heavily implied he came up with the name himself, and notably no one but the Courier is willing to call him by this name. They simply refer to him either as 'that scientist' or 'that moron.' |
| 30 | * AnAesop: |
| 31 | ** The DLC, together, all pretty much end with the lesson, "Let go of the past." All the primary characters of the DLC are, in some way, unable to move on after a point in their life [[note]]Elijah's refusal to leave the treasures of the Sierra Madre, Graham's "execution" by Caesar and his own past, the Think Tank's refusal to cease their experiments, and Ulysses' witnessing [[spoiler:the unwitting destruction of the Divide by the Courier]][[/note]], to say nothing of the huge emphasis on old-world technology. |
| 32 | *** ''Dead Money'' takes this from the point of view of fortune-seekers. Dean and Elijah's greed for the Sierra Madre's vault (Dean's having ripened for more than 200 years), Christine's thirst for revenge on Elijah, and [[SplitPersonality God/Dog's]] desire to lead and be led all threaten to destroy them -- only by letting go can any of them survive the DLC. |
| 33 | *** ''Honest Hearts'' takes this from the point of view of well-intentioned meddlers trying to influence a new civilization based on their past experiences. Joshua Graham, an ex-Legion soldier looking to atone for his past by protecting an innocent group of literate tribals, Daniel, a preacher trying to preserve his culture by peacefully converting those innocents to his faith, and Randall Clark, a long-dead soldier who founded the tribe in order to replace his lost family. Aiding Graham fully turns the tribe into a vicious warband; aiding Daniel fully drives the tribe from their fertile home into the harsh wastes. The best solution is to aid Graham in defeating the bloodthirsty usurpers, then persuade him to show mercy to the defeated leader -- this leads the tribe to understand how justice must be tempered with mercy, creating a new civilization. |
| 34 | *** ''Old World Blues'' does this from a society's point of view. The [[TitleDrop titular expression]] is explained by a [[MakesSenseInContext talking jukebox]] to be a state where one is so focused on the glories of the past that he can't concentrate on the present -- or the future. |
| 35 | *** The add-on "Lonesome Road" is a guided tour through a series of Old World military installations, frozen in the act of setting off the apocalypse, and culminating in a chance to destroy the New California Republic and/or Caesar's Legion with a ''nuclear weapon''. The best ending is to abandon the WMD insanity of the past and solve the problems of the wasteland yourself. While this makes sense in a post-Apocalyptic world, it's still true in RealLife. |
| 36 | ** The quest involving the [[RagtagBunchOfMisfits Misfits]] has one in the form of CheatersNeverProsper. There are 4 ways to end the quest, two that are honest ways of improving the squad's performance, while there are two other options that simply involve cheating, either by using performance-enhancing drugs or altering their test scores in the computer system. Doing either of the latter [[spoiler:causes the Misfits to either die humiliatingly from the Legion during the Battle of Hoover Dam, or eventually go AWOL on a Psycho frenzy before being court-martialled and executed by FiringSquad.]] |
| 37 | * AffablyEvil: |
| 38 | ** The nice old lady that runs the motel in Novac? [[spoiler:She sold a woman and her unborn baby as slaves to the Legion simply [[EvilIsPetty because she didn't like her]].]] |
| 39 | ** Benny [[spoiler:seems genuinely affable most of the time -- but hey, business is business (nothing personal). His evil is pretty debatable though, seeing as his endgame is an independent New Vegas and he seems mostly heartfelt to a Black Widow Courier who spares him, even though he tries to kill you as a rival even if you do spare him.]] |
| 40 | ** Motor-Runner, provided you pass the Vault 3 speech check that allows you to sell drugs to him, is extremely nice, especially for a fiend. He treats you with a measure of respect, is willing to bargain for drug prices, genuinely cares about the Fiends under him (referring to them as "my people" and leading them to Vault 3 to help protect them), and will even graciously accept the player's challenge to a fight... despite having butchered the Vault's defenceless inhabitants, [[TooDumbToLive who welcomed them with open arms]]. |
| 41 | * AfterTheEnd: Civilization is [[AWorldHalfFull getting back on its feet quite nicely]] in this game, especially when compared to the total CrapsackWorld of ''Fallout 3.'' It is implied that California has now been mostly rebuilt and that it's Nevada that's the current "frontier." |
| 42 | * TheAgeless: Ghouls and Super Mutants, per series tradition. In particular, Raul was apparently a teenager living outside of Mexico City when the bombs fell some 200 years prior. |
| 43 | * TheAggressiveDrugDealer: Dixon in Freeside, who spikes his alcohol with addictive chems in order to ensure customer loyalty. |
| 44 | * AirFictionOne: The New California Republic's president uses a vertibird named Bear Force One. |
| 45 | * AKA47: There are a lot more familiar looking firearms compared to ''3'', though most are given generic names: |
| 46 | ** The "Cowboy Repeater" is an old Winchester 1886 Lever-Action rifle, the "Trail Carbine" is a Marlin Model 336, and the "Brush Gun", while not a direct representation of any single real gun, is primarily based on the Marlin Model 1895. |
| 47 | ** The "9mm pistol" is the Browning Hi-Power, and the "9mm Submachine gun" is a miniature [=M3A1=] "Greasegun." |
| 48 | ** The "Hunting Shotgun" is the Remington Model 870, the player even pumps it one handed after reloading just like Sarah Connor in ''Film/Terminator2JudgmentDay''. The "Riot Shotgun" is a semi-auto Chinese copy of the same weapon. Speaking of ''Terminator'', the lever-action Winchester 1887/1901 shotgun that Arnold uses appears as the "Lever-Action Shotgun" as well[[note]]sort of. The gun in the game is a 20-gauge, whereas the real 1887/1901 was only chambered for 12 gauge (black powder) and 10 gauge (smokeless) respectively[[/note]]. |
| 49 | ** The "Silenced .22 SMG" is an American 180, complete with optional drum magazines. |
| 50 | ** The Silenced .22 Pistol is the Ruger 22/45. |
| 51 | ** The "Service Rifle" is an AR-15/M16 with wood furniture, the Assault Carbine is an M16-based Colt Model 733, and the "Marksman Carbine" is a Model 933 with a variety of real-life modern features. Strangely, the Assault Carbine doesn't use the same ammo as the other M16-based weapons, instead using the Minigun's 5mm round. |
| 52 | *** The unique service rifle found in ''Honest Hearts'', the 12.7mm-chambered "Survivalist's Rifle", is a send-out of the Beowulf .50-cal conversion of the AR platform. |
| 53 | *** The "All-American" is a unique Marksman Carbine that prominently bears the logo of the real-life 82nd Airborne Division. |
| 54 | ** The "Light Machine Gun" is a mishmash of the FN Minimi and M60. |
| 55 | ** Two of the weapons that come with the Dead Money DLC are the M1918 BAR and Colt New Service revolver, appearing as the "Automatic Rifle" and "Police Pistol," respectively. |
| 56 | ** The ".45 Auto Pistol" in ''Honest Hearts'' is the Colt [=M1911=]. This one merits special attention because Joshua Graham [[GunPorn goes out of his way to tell you about the gun's history]] [[WritingAroundTrademarks without actually naming it]]: |
| 57 | --->'''Joshua Graham''': This type of .45 Automatic pistol was designed by [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Browning one of]] [[UsefulNotes/{{Mormonism}} my tribe]] almost four hundred years ago. Learning its use is a New Canaanite rite of passage. |
| 58 | ** The Thompson submachine gun appears in ''Honest Hearts'' as the ".45 Auto Submachine Gun," and has a laser variant in the base game in the form of the "Laser RCW." |
| 59 | ** The "Grenade Rifle" is an M79 grenade launcher, known by its nickname: "the Blooper." Notable in that the sound effect is spot-on. |
| 60 | ** The "Grenade Launcher" (a different weapon) is a China Lake NATIC. The Holorifle from Dead Money also resembles a China Lake, though only visually - the internal components have been stripped and replaced with advanced HardLight weaponry. |
| 61 | ** The S&W Model 29 returns from ''VideoGame/Fallout3'' as the ".44 Magnum." |
| 62 | ** The ".357 Magnum" is a mishmash of the Colt Single Action Army Revolver and the Ruger Vaquero. |
| 63 | ** The "Hunting Revolver" is a mishmash of the Magnum Research Big Frame Revolver and the obscure Super Six Classic Bison Bull[[note]]Although the Hunting Revolver is a double-action gun with a swing-out cylinder, where the actual BFR as well as the Bison Bull are single action and are loaded through a loading gate[[/note]]. |
| 64 | ** The "Single Shotgun" is the New England Pardner. |
| 65 | ** The "Anti-Materiel Rifle" is a PGM Hécate II. |
| 66 | ** "This Machine," as well as its non-unique "Battle Rifle" version from the Gun Runner's Arsenal, is an M1 Garand. The unique version's name is a reference to the motto carved into Woody Guthrie's guitar, "This Machine Kills Fascists". This gun has a carving of its own responding "Well This Machine Kills Commies". |
| 67 | ** A ton of Fallout-only weapons have their own in-universe brand names, obviously not being real guns but some having real companies behind them. |
| 68 | *** The 12.7mm Pistol is a rechambered Sig Sauer 14mm pistol. |
| 69 | *** The "Plasma Caster" is a Winchester P94 Plasma Rifle. |
| 70 | *** The "Plasma Defender" is a Glock 86 Plasma Pistol. |
| 71 | * TheAlcoholic: given the [[CrapsackWorld state of things]], it's no surprise that drunks and junkies can be found everywhere -- even the player can become one! |
| 72 | ** Fiends are violent tribes of druggies who are so completely and constantly off their heads that they're basically rabid animals |
| 73 | ** Cass, or "Whiskey Rose". She really likes her whiskey. |
| 74 | ** One task involves cleaning up two former Followers of the Apocalypse |
| 75 | * AllCrimesAreEqual: |
| 76 | ** You haven't lived till you've had all of [[BadassArmy Camp McCarran]] come down on you like the [[DisproportionateRetribution fist of an angry god after ganking one of their butter knives]]. However, if your reputation with a faction is high enough, then instead of just starting to shoot at you, the person who saw you stealing may just take the item back from you while throwing some "WhatTheHellHero" comment. |
| 77 | ** Lampshaded in one of the loading screens, which mentions that NCR military aren't happy with their role as Mojave's police force, which is why they've made most crime punishable by instant execution. |
| 78 | ** The King has two places in which he sits when you enter the King's School of Impersonation. One of them is next to a Jukebox. Apparently turning a jukebox on or off is a crime worthy of being shot at, punched, hacked, or stabbed by everybody in the building. This could be a reference to ''VideoGame/{{Wasteland}}'', where in the Quartz Bar several punks turn hostile for coming close to a jukebox playing [[HairMetal Ratt]]. |
| 79 | ** Another example of this is during an unmarked sidequest to figure out who or what is killing some brahmin in Novac. If you are using any kind of weapon with spread, and you miss the [[spoiler:Nightkin who is shooting the cows,]] the entire town will turn against you, including a potential companion. That's right, the town will side with a [[spoiler:giant blue mutant toting a minigun who has been killing their cows because you accidentaly nicked one.]] |
| 80 | * TheAllegedCar: Virtually all of the prewar technology left in the wastes is either no longer functioning or teetering on the very edge of breaking down permanently and irreparably. Some of the guns you can pick up are quite literally held together with electrical tape. Technology that was produced postwar, or which has been continuously maintained, generally averts this, though -- the NCR and the Gun Runners employ some very skilled engineers. |
| 81 | ** In ''Honest Hearts'', you're hired because you have a Pip-Boy, so its a surprise to meet a traveling companion in a Vault jumpsuit with a Pip-Boy of his own. Only it turns out he's a junkie whose Pip-Boy is broken and he's hoping it will go unnoticed because there's good loot in Zion Valley. |
| 82 | * TheAllegedExpert: Fantastic, the technician hired to fix the Helios One power grid, has no idea what he's doing except that the biggest console in his room does things. [[spoiler: It's the intercom.]] |
| 83 | ** If you play the side quest that involves fixing the grid, expect Fantastic to get full credit for your work... And gets sent to Hoover Dam where he is put in charge of the biggest console in the control room. [[spoiler: It's also the intercom.]] |
| 84 | * AllGirlsWantBadBoys: You can invoke the trope while trying to seduce [[spoiler:Benny]], via Black Widow or charisma options. He is understandably disturbed by the offer... at least, at first. |
| 85 | * AllHailTheGreatGodMickey: The Kings became a gang of Music/{{Elvis|Presley}} [[ElvisImpersonator Impersonators]]. After finding a school filled with memorabilia, instructions on how to act like him, and a metric ton of hair gel, they figured it must be a place of worship, and that they'd keep his memory alive. They're not wrong, per se, but they still do this without even knowing the name "Elvis Presley"... the only documentation of their deity lists him as "The King". |
| 86 | * AllianceMeter: Called Reputation, it's used to measure your standing with the various major and minor factions. In the case of Mr. House though, even with maxed Fame with the Strip itself, he'll consider you his employee until the moment you act against him. The Alliance Meter is actually much more important than the Karma Meter in many ways. People don't care if you're good or evil out in the wasteland, they care if you've been killing their friends. |
| 87 | ** One unusual wrinkle to this trope is that Fame and Infamy do not subtract from one another. If you've been very good to a faction, then do something brutal to that faction, you end up with a "mixed" reputation that is not quite the same as being "neutral"; people belonging to that faction will comment to you that they have no idea whose side you're on or what you're up to. |
| 88 | ** Another wrinkle is that your Reputation among factions is reset to "neutral" while you wear the armor of another faction, allowing you to infiltrate a faction that hates you normally by wearing the armor of another faction they like. In turn, wearing the armor of a faction they hate can make normally friendly faction members attack you. |
| 89 | * AllThatGlitters: ''Dead Money'' deals with this. There's a huge pile of gold in the Sierra Madre vault. [[spoiler:It's real, but it's also a trap, and barring trickery, nearly all the gold will remain in the vault forever.]] The inverted version of the trope is also brought up. [[spoiler:The greatest treasure in the Sierra Madre is not the gold in its vault, but the fact that it's an almost-intact Pre-War facility with technology unavailable anywhere else in the Wasteland, with the exception of the Big MT. Side with Elijah and gain control of the facility, and a NonStandardGameOver shows that you become an unstoppable force capable of trivially annihilating all the warring factions of the Wasteland.]] |
| 90 | * AllThereInTheManual: Some bits of backstory, like what happened to the NCR in between ''VideoGame/Fallout2'' and ''New Vegas'' and what the Legion's territory is like, are only available to people who bought the Collector's Edition Strategy Guide. |
| 91 | * AlwaysChaoticEvil: |
| 92 | ** Part of the job description for raider gangs like the Jackals, Vipers, Scorpions, and ''especially'' the Fiends. |
| 93 | ** The Powder Gangers do trade with at least one town (which happens to be full of degenerate lowlifes), but they're escaped convicts with little loyalty even to each other and it shows. |
| 94 | ** The White Legs in ''Honest Hearts'' have had a RapePillageAndBurn mentality for so long that they've never bothered to develop any skills they'd need to be self-sufficient, such as agriculture or foraging. Harassing caravans and settlements to steal supplies is the only way they know to survive. |
| 95 | ** Just about everyone in the Legion fully endorses Caesar's violent, authoritarian cruelty. |
| 96 | * AlwaysCheckBehindTheChair: Sometimes, supplies and other things are pretty well hidden behind something. You can easily miss the unique weapons Ratslayer, All-American, Compliance Regulator, Thump-Thump, and even Annabelle (if you think that the Nightkin on top of the radio tower is nothing special) if you don't bother to check unless you are reading a guide. |
| 97 | ** The Legion also tends to hide their traps very well, mostly by way of land mines underneath corpses. |
| 98 | ** This practically becomes a survival skill (not the actual Survival skill) in ''Dead Money'', as there are lots of supplies hidden out of the way by various "guests" of the Sierra Madre, and just as many traps in the way, if not more to make sure only the truly prepared can reach them. |
| 99 | * AlwaysOverTheShoulder: When in third person. |
| 100 | * AmericansHateTingle: In-universe. While Sunset Sarsaparilla was popular in what became the Mojave Wasteland, where it was first produced commercially, it sold very poorly in the Northeast. Doubles as a HandWave for why it didn't appear in ''VideoGame/Fallout3''. |
| 101 | * AnachronismStew: Let's see here... You wake up in a town with an old western theme, and move outward to find old-west convict chain-gangs, "prospectors" and sarsaparilla, plasma weapons next to lever-action rifles and sticks of dynamite, crime families, Elvis impersonators and swanky casinos; a Really700YearsOld billionaire from before the end, many vaults each sporting different threats from ghouls to plant people, a faction of high-tech hoarding xenophobists, another faction that instead hoards explosives, many varieties of raider groups, and a Roman Empire-inspired army, clad in armor made mostly from football equipment, fighting a war against American soldiers dressed like British Tommies and Texan Rangers. Also featuring robots of all shapes and sizes; such as a cowboy and a sexbot. And that's before you get into the [=DLCs=] which, among other things, feature what amounts to a forced casino heist with ghosts and zombies, a tribal war involving automatic firearms, an interplay of mad science and psychiatry, and finally, an (ongoing) apocalyptic wasteland. |
| 102 | * AnarchyIsChaos: |
| 103 | ** Averted in the Wild Card (Independent) ending, assuming you solve every town's problems and know when to use diplomacy and when to answer with force. If you do, it's actually one of the better endings, and implies post-ending New Vegas to be organized as something more akin to [[UsefulNotes/{{Anarchism}} real world anarchism]]. If you don't do things right, however, this is placed straight, and the Mojave collapses into mayhem and is overrun with raider tribes. |
| 104 | ** This shows in the ideology of NCR and, to some extent, also Caesar's Legion. Both factions consider autarchical communities and tribes as unruly and chaotic and they consider uniting them into one big entity the only way to maintain any kind of order. Given the Raiders' activity they are at least partially right. |
| 105 | ** Actually ''invoked'' in the easiest of the Wild Card endings, when General Oliver points out that the Courier just assumed responsibility for feeding, schooling, housing, employing, protecting, ruling, and clothing thousands of people and managing two power plants... with no backup, no sidekick, and no trustworthy allies, while surrounded by hostile countries. Whether or not he's right may come down to the decisions you made. |
| 106 | * AndIMustScream: |
| 107 | ** The entire situation with the real [[spoiler:Mr. House]]. If/when you decide [[spoiler:to remove him]], you have to enter [[spoiler:the control room where his decrepit, ancient physical body is maintained by a Life Support Pod]] and once you [[spoiler:open the pod]], he is [[spoiler:doomed to die because even a second's exposure to the microbacteria in the air is lethal to his unimmunized, 200+-years-old body]]. The player then has the choice of [[spoiler:killing him, conventionally or by overloading the electrical circuits in his LSP]], or, in an invocation of this trope, [[spoiler:disconnecting his brain from the cerebral matrix of the Lucky 38 -- leaving him conscious and sustained physically by the life support machine but barely able to twitch or speak, isolated/forgotten, and with no way to influence or even access his computer network until he finally expires]]. It's to the point that the game files even classify [[spoiler:Mr. House]] as an abomination-type NPC rather than a human. |
| 108 | ** One of the ways to resolve the plot of the ''Dead Money'' add-on (which also grants an achievement) is to trick Father Elijah into entering the vault below the Sierra Madre (with or without taking the exorbitant amount of gold worth tens of thousands of caps for yourself). If the Courier remains hidden and reaches the exit from the vault area before Elijah can detonate their explosive collar, then he is left trapped in the sealed container with no sustainable source of food or water, doomed to die from dehydration/starvation whilst using the last moments of his audio connection to the Courier's collar to curse them. |
| 109 | ** [[spoiler:You can do to yourself as well...if you choose to read the computer and activate the trap yourself. This results in a NonStandardGameOver.]] |
| 110 | ** The Y-17 Trauma Override Harness built in Big MT was designed to bring a soldier automatically back to camp. However, several bugs in the software of the suit included malfunctions in the IFF and the inability to sense if the wearer is even alive, resulting in an "unpredictable wandering state." It left anyone who wore the suit to watch helplessly as it gunned down friends and loved ones and wander aimlessly and ceaselessly before slowly dying of starvation or dehydration. Many of the suits [[AnimatedArmor continued to wander after the occupants died]]. |
| 111 | ** The Marked Men, hostile residents of the area called The Divide in the ''Lonesome Road'' add-on. Being ghoulified is already a pretty nasty fate, with certain perks, but for the Marked Men, ghoulification means they only continue to live after the perpetual storms in the Divide kick up winds so strong ''the flesh is torn off their bodies, leaving the muscle exposed''. The Marked Men live their lives in such terrible pain with nothing at all that can dull it as a result. As a silver lining, it's erased any enmity they once held as members of NCR and Caesar's Legion, joining together in shared pain and the immense hatred for those who don't suffer like them. It's relatively minor in that they still can act and even retain some semblance of themselves, but years upon years of being flayed alive by the very place they're trapped in has to count in some way. To make matters worse, it's the very radiation of the Divide that keeps them alive. Ulysses and the Courier theorize this is why they can't leave, as they'd die without latent radiation healing them. |
| 112 | * AndYourRewardIsClothes: Completing the ''Lonesome Road'' DLC awards, among other decent loot, two unique armors: the Courier duster and Ulysses' duster. The former has a different symbol on the back and different stats depending on your positive or negative standing with the two main factions, as well as whether or not you killed House. |
| 113 | ** Completing ''Honest Hearts'' gives you, in addition to some unique weapons, several outfits previously worn by your allies, such as Joshua's SWAT vest and Follows-Chalk's hat. Exactly why they thought you wanted their clothes[[note]]although Joshua's SWAT vest is some of the best light armor in the game[[/note]], or how they're dressed now, is not mentioned. |
| 114 | * AnimalMotifs: The bear for [=NCR=] and the bull for the Legion. Some characters even refer to the factions by their animal symbols instead of the faction's name, such as Ulysses. Lesser factions include the Vipers, Jackals, Scorpions, and... Great Khans. |
| 115 | * AnimatedArmor: Those Y-17 trauma override harnesses, which are sort of PoweredArmor which can move by themselves. |
| 116 | * AnyoneCanDie: |
| 117 | ** Now all but three characters in the game can die (a fourth exists for part of the game), even companions if it's set to Hardcore mode. Even quest important [=NPCs=] can die. [[ArtificialStupidity Doesn't help when they somehow get themselves killed and fail a quest for you.]] The three invincible characters (excluding children without mods) are Yes Man (so you always have one ending option available to you no matter who you kill or piss off), the Gun Runners' Vendortron, and Festus in the Sunset Sarsaparilla HQ. Yes Man will simply download his software to a new robot body, and the Vendortron had an indestructible shed built around it to dissuade theft and burglary. Until the player reaches the Lucky 38 casino, Victor has the same form of immortality as Yes Man; afterward, you can kill him for good (especially if you're sick of using his dialogue tree to run the Lucky 38's elevator). All other characters, no matter how important they are to the story, can die. Mr. House, Caesar himself, the president of the NCR, you name it, they're mortal, and their deaths will not break the game. |
| 118 | ** The [=DLCs=] add two more: ED-E and Ulysses from ''Lonesome Road.'' However, both are only invincible until the final battle, when their flags are removed and they can die. It would be impossible to enter the final area without ED-E, and Ulysses is actually moving through the Divide ahead of you for most of the DLC, watching your progress. |
| 119 | * ApocalypseHow: In a cut ending, a Class 0 happens to the Mojave if you become a Think Tank at the end of ''Old World Blues''. |
| 120 | * ApocalypticLog: The terminal entries at Black Mountain, recorded when the bombs fell. A particularly disturbing variation happens in ''Dead Money'' with the holograms. In the upper levels of the casino, holograms fashioned in the likeness of a guest have recorded their last words, which they repeat while they're ''trying to kill you''. |
| 121 | ** The Survivalist's data entries in ''Honest Hearts'' are quite poignant, particularly when the vault dwellers enter the picture. Especially gruesome is the story about the old couple that happened to be looking in the direction of the bomb when it went off, and they were instantly blinded. The narrator mentions that he can do nothing for them except lie about how it'll all be fine, then MercyKill them [[OneHitPolyKill both with a single bullet while they are embracing]]. Another one tells of the narrator's attempts to kill all of the members of a cannibal group, messily and in great detail. |
| 122 | ** Ulysses leaves behind a string of logs with him reflecting on his experiences that helped shape him into who he is. [[spoiler:Finding them all - and realizing what he himself had failed to understand - opens up one way of talking him down at the end]]. |
| 123 | ** Trash in the Nuclear Test Site left a log of her attempts to turn into a ghoul by intentionally exposing herself to radiation. The process failed, and the logs reflect her steadily deteriorating mental state. |
| 124 | ** Also the logs of the vault dwellers generally. The vaults turned out to be not such a great idea... though 3 vaults did avoid horrible fates by themselves: |
| 125 | *** Vault 21 actually prospered for 200 years without any major incident, since it was established that gambling would be the answer and solution to any and all problems. Turns out, this actually worked, with the vault prospering. The ultimate fate of that vault is that Mr. House (with a LuckStat of 10) came to them, won the entire vault in a game of blackjack and used the structural resources of the lower portion to build New Vegas, before filling it with concrete. They, for their part, convinced him to allow the top portion to be transformed into a hotel instead. |
| 126 | *** Vault 19 wasn't as fortunate, as the citizens were split up into "Red" and "Blue" sections of the vault, each with its own Overseer, and both sides convinced that the other side was secretly making them go insane. It isn't revealed what the ultimate fate of the vault really is, as by the time you find it, the Powder Gangers who escaped from prison are using it as a hideout. The vault is dilapidated and rusted out, but functioning without any problems. There aren't any signs of corpses or skeletons anywhere, even with the cave of fire geckos living directly beneath it. Just no indication at all of what happened to them. |
| 127 | *** Vault 3 was a shining example of a democratic society, living prosperously with no problems that couldn't be solved though a voting process and regular elections. Much like Vault 21, things actually worked out great for them... but then the day came when they opened up the vault and were greeted by the Fiends... |
| 128 | * AppropriatedAppelation: No-Bark Noonan. He was given that name because "not all of his dogs are barking" after being stung in the head by [[BigCreepyCrawlies Radscorpions]], but he uses it himself because he thinks it's a compliment on how he's "no bark, all bite". There may be some truth to that given that [[TheCuckoolanderWasRight he's often the only one in town who more or less knows what's going on]]. |
| 129 | * ArbitraryHeadcountLimit: You can have only one humanoid companion and one non-humanoid companion at a time. |
| 130 | ** This leads to a rather unfortunate clash with the GuideDangIt aspects of the game. Every companion has a sidequest, which require specific in-world triggers to initialize. Your non-humanoid companions get their quests at the start, but everyone else has to visit certain locations or talk with certain people while with you. Some triggers are location-based and can be repeated, but they'll be in places you'll likely never feel the need to go back to, thereby missing the quests entirely. Most others are based on one-time actions. Boone is hit pretty hard with this.[[note]]you need five "history points" with him before his quest will start, but there's a maximum of about eleven points spread across seven areas; it's possible to screw yourself out of more than half of them before you even ''meet'' Boone, and even some of them won't count anyway unless you do the action during a specific quest[[/note]] Raul's quest can be missed if Loyal is stuck in the old version of the Nellis hangar without the [[spoiler:B-29 bomber]], and Veronica is also rather buggy. |
| 131 | ** There is a glitch that allows you to have all six humanoid companions, although your game will lag and freeze more often due to the increased number. |
| 132 | * ArcNumber: 21. Your first jumpsuit and the doctor who saved you from death and gives it to you is from Vault 21, when captured in the Dead Money DLC you are actually [[YouAreNumberSix Collar 21]], Festus calls it the "magic number", although that's more about his variant of Blackjack than anything else, and lastly [[spoiler:should you be supporting an Independent Vegas, Ulysses will give you a duster emblazoned with a 21 at the end of Lonesome Road.]] Considering [[VivaLasVegas where the game takes place]], this isn't exactly unwarranted. |
| 133 | * ArcWords: |
| 134 | ** "Enjoy your stay." |
| 135 | ** "You can go home now, Courier." |
| 136 | ** "Let go" and "Begin again" stretch from ''Dead Money'' through ''Lonesome Road''. |
| 137 | ** "Two Couriers, each bearing a message for the other." |
| 138 | * ArmorIsUseless: |
| 139 | ** Refreshingly, [[AvertedTrope Averted]]. Due to the way armor is implemented in this game, if you don't match or exceed an enemy's Damage Threshold, you only do 20% of the weapon's damage. This makes armor piercing rounds, overcharged energy ammo, or high damage, long-ranged weapons like a sniper rifle (or a combination of the above) a necessity when fighting deathclaws, Brotherhood of Steel paladins, and the like. For melee specialists, a very big weapon like a super sledge will usually beat the resistance out of just about anything. There are DT-ignoring unarmed weapons, as well. |
| 140 | ** Deathclaws play this straight like they did in the last game, as they do a crapton of damage per hit. Since DT is additive instead of multiplicative, far less of the monstrous damage they inflict is negated by armor than in ''Fallout 3''. Exaggerated with the level-scaled DC's in ''Lonesome Road'', which will kill practically any character in one hit at high levels. |
| 141 | ** The game also has some truly devastating perks that allow you to do the same. The Piercing Strike perk (which is annoyingly governed by Unarmed) makes both unarmed and melee attacks ignore 15 points of DT. For reference, almost everything in the Mojave has an armor rating at that level, which means you always do full damage except to the strongest enemies. The Shotgun Surgeon perk ignores 10 points for shotguns. There are also both Damage Resistance and Damage Threshold values that headgear can improve, and the game accounts for that, too. |
| 142 | * ArmorPiercingAttack: Armor-piercing rounds for modern firearms do this. AP 5.56x45mm rounds, for example, make your rounds automatically ignore 16 Damage Threshold, equivalent to a suit of Combat Armor, or the hide of a Deathclaw. This means armor may as well as not exist, since ''no enemy in the game'' has more DT than that, short of quest-specific boss encounters (e.g. [[FinalBoss Legate Lanius]], the four Brotherhood of Steel Paladins at the end of Veronica's companion mission, Orion Moreno) and the very rare [[HeavilyArmoredMook Legion Centurions]]. |
| 143 | * ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: |
| 144 | ** Some of the "alleged" negative effects of Sunset Sarsaparilla are: Kidney damage, bronchitis, sore throat, organ rupture... and halitosis. Halitosis, for the uninformed, is the absolutely ''devastating'' medical condition of [[FauxHorrific bad breath.]] |
| 145 | ** The computer terminal at the entrance to the H&H Tools building in North Vegas details new rules laid out by Human Resources. |
| 146 | --->3. Any employee seen to be cohabilitating, colluding, or cogitating with any of the following groups will be terminated immediately: foreigners, Masons, carpenters, [[TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering Tragic]] players, illegal aliens, extraterrestrials or the [[UsefulNotes/{{Belgium}} Flemish]]. |
| 147 | ** The notorious crime duo Vikki and Vance led a brutal swath of...shoplifting, cash fraud, and gas pump driveoffs, as well as the unforgivable act of reckless driving. |
| 148 | * ArtDeco: The Sierra Madre Casino in ''Dead Money''. There are also some art deco statues at Hoover Dam. |
| 149 | * TheArtifact: Several traits and perks from ''Fallout'' and ''Fallout 2'' are left in the game. These have gone from being anywhere from decent, to some of the best options, to nearly useless due to the changes in the game engine. |
| 150 | ** Tag! is one of the more obvious examples. A tagged skill in the first two games leveled up twice as fast as a normal skill. This skill also became available around the same point in the game where Energy Weapons and Big Guns started to legitimately be useful weapons. Instead of the ignorable +15 skill points, the old version was +20 skill points and it now progressed twice as fast as normal like the other tagged skills. On top of that, it worked retroactively with skill points already spent in the skill. Taking this skill could basically turn a skill too low to be useful to being essentially mastered. |
| 151 | ** Swift Learner used to make at least some sense to take. You didn't normally hit the level cap in the old games unless you intentionally farmed random encounters for experience for a long time. In the newer games, hitting the level cap is easy, which makes taking this perk useless unless you're playing through the core game quickly and want to level up fast. However, if the player has all 4 DLC, the level cap increases from 30 to 50, which can be fairly difficult for players to reach unless they are trying to do a 100% completion of the game, which means the Swift Learner Perk is not a complete waste if chosen. |
| 152 | ** Life Giver was a much better perk in the older games, because it made your max HP increase whenever you leveled up--something that normally didn't happen, and quickly added up if you took it as soon as you could. ''New Vegas'' flips this around, giving you HP with each level as in ''Fallout 3'', but making Life Giver just a fixed HP increase that quickly becomes negligible (equivalent to six levels in a game with a thirty to fifty level cap). |
| 153 | ** The Pyromaniac Perk increases damage with fire weapons and was initially nigh-worthless, as the only real fire-based weapon (the flamer) was grouped with much more potent miniguns and rocket launchers. The Perk's requirements were based on Big Guns, the skill that governed said Flamer. In ''Fallout 3'', this was moved to Explosives, but when combined with the Melee Weapon, Shishkebab, produced the highest melee DPS in the game. It gains The Artifact status in ''New Vegas'', where it is ''still'' dependent on Explosives, despite Explosives having almost no weapons that use fire damage (and those that do are grenades that are used up quickly), as opposed to literally every other combat skill having more reliable fire-based damage (the existing flamethrower weapons were moved to Energy Weapons, ''Gun Runner's Arsenal'' re-includes the Shishkebab again for Melee, ''Old World Blues'' adds the Superheated Saturnite Fist for Unarmed, and Guns gets both incendiary ammo and ''Lonesome Road'''s Flare Gun). [[WordOfGod The game's director]] has confirmed this was an oversight, that the skill was supposed to require a specific number of points in Explosives ''or'' Energy Weapons, and [[DirectorsCut JSawyer.esp]] changes the skill requirement to Energy Weapons. |
| 154 | ** Fast Shot used to be an amazing trait. By giving up the Aimed Shot skill (precursor to V.A.T.S., which was mostly useless anyway since, by the time you could reliably hit specific limbs with it, you could also reliably stop messing around with the fancy trick-shots and just kill your target) you reduce the AP needed per shot by 1. Depending on your weapon and Agility, this could very well mean you were shooting twice per round rather than once, meaning it doubled your damage output. For anyone who didn't want to cripple limbs at range it was great; for characters who used heavy weapons, which couldn't make aimed shots anyway, it was even better. The new version - due to the lack of the Aimed Shot skill, since as a FirstPersonShooter aiming is now a basic gameplay mechanic - reduces accuracy (which V.A.T.S. already suffers in past wet-cough distance) for a fire rate boost and AP reduction. |
| 155 | ** Skilled, a Trait formerly treated as something to avoid like the plague (it granted extra skill points, which most characters were swimming in by halfway through the game, in exchange for fewer Perks, which a character could never have enough of) is now a powerhouse that a character has to have a legitimate reason to ''not'' take (the most common reason probably being "not owning ''Old World Blues''"); it now grants +5 to all skills in exchange for a permanent -10% XP debuff. Since quests are not level-locked and the rewards from those quests are your primary source of experience anyway, this ultimately amounts to nothing more than gaining Perks at a very slightly slower rate. The fact that there's a bug in character creation and the AutoDoc in ''OWB'' that lets you get the bonus multiple times and/or lose the experience penalty helps, too. |
| 156 | ** Outside of the perks, it's pretty clear that the game only features a KarmaMeter because the ''Fallout'' series [[TropeCodifier codified them]], as the game focuses much more heavily on [[AllianceMeter your actual standing with distinct factions and locations]], down to individual towns (and even individual ''parts'' of towns, in the case of New Vegas itself) giving you a listed reputation among their inhabitants, rather than how "good" or "bad" you are overall (e.g. just because Caesar's Legion is the clearest "evil" faction in the game, that doesn't mean you having having bad karma will make them look the other way if you murder half a dozen squads of legionaries). Whereas which factions you're on good or bad terms with affects any number of things, your karma affects exactly four things: whether one companion out of the eight available will stay with you in the base game, the ModularEpilogue (the part about the faction you sided with has a good karma and a bad karma version), whether you can convince Legate Lanius to fight you one-on-one if you fail his final speech check and which one of three Level 50 perks you can take with ''Lonesome Road'' - and for added uselessness, all three of those perks give nearly the same set of bonuses and then, if not requiring neutral karma, reset it to neutral once you take them. |
| 157 | * ArtifactOfDoom: |
| 158 | ** ARCHIMEDES I. Arcade Gannon will leave you on the spot if you use it [[KickTheDog to kill all the NCR personnel on the ground]]. He doesn't care about [[KillSat ARCHIMEDES II]], though. |
| 159 | ** Unfortunately for its inhabitants, [[spoiler:the Divide]] is practically ''built'' on top of one of these, in the form of a [[spoiler:massive nuclear missile silo complex.]] Similarly, [[spoiler:ED-E can qualify as one, because something as minor as the audio logs in his memory banks were able to set off quite a few of the dormant nukes.]] |
| 160 | ** The Platinum Chip also qualifies, as it seems to be just plain bad luck to anyone who possesses it. [[spoiler:It's lost before Mr. House gets to use it, and it's implied that he spends millions of caps over several years to have scavengers locate it. The courier he hires to deliver it is robbed and left for dead by House's own second-in-command who is betraying him, who in turn may get crucified by Caesar if you don't kill him first. Once you get the chip back, you get to find out what it does, which is to upgrade and activate a massive army of powerful robots.]] |
| 161 | * ArtificialCannibalism: Mortimer from the White Glove Society can be tricked by a substitute dish. Once it's handed out at the banquet, you can then expose him for the cannibalism plot. |
| 162 | * ArtificialStupidity: |
| 163 | ** While the AI is better than in ''VideoGame/Fallout3'', you are still treated to the sight of a [[TooDumbToLive quest-important NPC strolling slowly through several mines]]. Companions still get stuck on obstacles (though they're better about finding their way to you), etc. |
| 164 | ** The game itself [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] this with the loading screen tip concerning a certain perk: "Do companions annoy you by constantly running into the path of your lasers and missiles? Take the Spray and Pray perk to significantly reduce all damage you do to your companions." |
| 165 | ** The AI of enemies are still somewhat smarter though, that they will attempt to take cover if they are outmatched and some creatures won't attack you even if they appear red unless you get too close. However, AttackAttackAttack is deliberately played straight for some enemies - Deathclaws won't retreat, while fiends are generally too drugged up to realize that they are outmatched. |
| 166 | ** A particularly nasty case of this occurs with First Recon Alpha Team, Camp [=McCarran=]'s elite snipers ([[TheCaptain Gorobets]], [[OldSoldier Sterling]], [[NewMeat 10 of Spades]], [[DefectorFromDecadence Bitter]]-[[ColdSniper Root]], and [[RapeAsBackstory Betsy]]). Upon wiping out the leaders of the Fiends, the entire squad will make the transfer to Camp [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Forlorn Hope]], but the route they take going there -- by foot -- leads them past a [[WickedWasps Cazador nest]]. Typically, they will lose at least one or more members to giant wasp abominations of death, though only Gorobets' death is remarked on. Of course, this will only happen if you pay attention to them. Advance the clock a few hours and they'll bounce right to the camp no worse for wear. |
| 167 | *** There's also a problem if you ask them to help you take down Driver Nephi. In order to get full pay for this bounty, you need to have an intact head (so they can prove to anyone that Nephi really is dead, as opposed to using some other head and possibly pulling a fast one) so no headshots. The snipers know this - they hate Nephi and they know the guy who delivers the quest. They are perfectly well informed of the whole "we need the head intact" concept. So, of course, they deliberately aim for the head. That said, the money they give you for letting them have the shot at Nephi makes up for the loss of the full bounty. |
| 168 | ** If you wear armor that disguises you as a member of the faction while [[spoiler:switching on the SelfDestructMechanism in the Brotherhood of Steel's underground bunker]], not only will the inhabitants not turn hostile, they also won't take any notice of the loud warning klaxons announcing their imminent doom. |
| 169 | * ArtisticLicenseBiology: Ranger Ghost is straight up stated to be albino in the game files. In reality, albinism comes with a wide range of health problems, including impaired eyesight, which would make it unlikely for anyone with it to be serving in the military at all, much less qualify as a sniper or for an elite unit. |
| 170 | * ArtisticLicenseChemistry: Scientist Keely wants you to ignite flammable gas in Vault 22 to destroy a [[GardenOfEvil botanical]] [[ScienceIsBad experiment]] GoneHorriblyWrong. Keely explains that you need to detonate explosives right next to the ventilation system pumping the gas because it goes inert when mixed with oxygen.[[note]]For those that don't see the irony here: fire needs oxygen to burn, and gas explosions are a result of the rapidly changing density of burning gas.[[/note]] |
| 171 | * ArtisticLicenseEngineering: |
| 172 | ** Likely included to add gameplay difficulty; the rate at which firearms degrade is tremendously overstated in game, with some firearms being able to fire less than 100 rounds before they break. Even with old, pre-War weapons, this still doesn't make sense. In real life, most guns, even those of only average quality, can fire tens of thousands of rounds before requiring anything more than a cleaning, and high quality firearms can sometimes fire over ten thousand rounds before they even need to be cleaned. People have even managed to dig up old, rusted guns that have been buried for over a century, scrub them down, and then successfully fire hundreds of rounds from them. |
| 173 | ** The Nellis solar array is explicitly said to use photovolatic solar panels (which directly absorb the power of the sun and convert it into electricity) while the HELIOS One solar plant uses a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower power tower]]Â configuration. Despite this, the photovoltaic solar panels and the HELIOS One reflector mirrors use the same model and it's possible to fix the photovoltaic solar panels by salvaging parts from the HELIOS One reflectors. |
| 174 | * ArtisticLicenceGeography: Averted for the most part. While SpaceCompression inevitably means that some features have been rescaled (most notably the Colorado River, which would be narrow enough to jump over if kept at the rest of the map's 1:25th scale), or moved slightly to avoid packing things too close together, most RealLife locations are at least roughly where you'd expect to find them. A few of them have been moved in ways that space compression can't explain though, like the Devil's Throat sinkhole, which is on the wrong side of Lake Mead. |
| 175 | ** The Devil's Throat's odd location may actually be due to a lot of planned Legion content on the eastern shore of the Colorado River being DummiedOut. There is evidence for an earlier draft of the location outside the playable map, around where its real-life equivalent would be, suggesting it was moved at some point. |
| 176 | * ArtisticLicenseHistory: Two in-universe examples: |
| 177 | ** Caesar's Legion. He's cherry-picked the bits of Roman culture and strategy that he finds useful, and left the rest. For example, his policy of exterminating the culture of the tribes he takes over is ''not'' something the Romans did--they thought Rome was superior, and provided plenty of incentives for Romanization, but allowed conquered nations to retain their identities. The Legion's practice of enslaving ''all'' women is also not very Roman. While Rome was pretty sexist (even free women, with a few notable exceptions, answered to a male relative or husband for their entire lives), they weren't ''that'' sexist. |
| 178 | ** Festus's account of how Sunset Sarsaparilla was created. He claims that water and Nuka-Cola were the only soft drinks that existed before Sunset Sarsaparilla was invented, but Sunset Sarsaparilla was invented in the early 1900s while Nuka-Cola came out in 2044. |
| 179 | * ArtisticLicenseMedicine: The main questline for the Legion involves trying to save Caesar from a brain tumor. One of the options is to do the operation yourself (which requires high Medicine skill or luck). The strangest part is that if you do save him, he gets up ''immediately'' and gives you your reward, apparently having recovered both the after effects of the tumor and any anesthetic that may have been used during the operation instantly. |
| 180 | * [[ArtisticLicense Artistic License – Philosophy]]: {{Downplayed|Trope}}. Caesar misrepresents Hegel's Dialectics by saying it was about Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, a formation that not only predates Hegel by several years (Hegel himself attributes it to Kant), but that Hegel was in fact dismissive of. Hegel's actual dialectics were something closer to Abstract (Idea)-Negation-Concrete, meaning we project our abstract ideas onto the world only to find flaws in them (or in the world), and reconciling them allows us to produce something "concrete". The "downplayed" part is that this is actually a 'very'' common mistake in philosophy (much to the annoyance of Hegelian scholars) and something Caesar (or the writers) got wrong on his own, though it does accidentally indicate in-universe that Caesar's knowledge of Hegel is [[WickedPretentious more secondhand than he lets on]]. |
| 181 | * ArtisticLicensePrison: The New California Republic Correctional Facility (now under prisoner control after a riot overwhelmed the NCR guards) was once a pre-war minimum security female prison. Despite being minimum security, it has glaring flaws, such as prisoners in the yard having direct access to the sniper towers, or the admin building and armory being well inside the perimeter, meaning that any effort to retake the prison in a hypothetical prison riot gone out of control would see the armory being the last place to be retaken. There's also no kitchen, dining hall, or showers. |
| 182 | * ArtisticLicenseReligion: The New Canaanites are supposedly followers of Mormonism, yet there is almost nothing uniquely Mormon about them other than the fact that they're based in Utah; the bits of religion and culture that does show up in-game is far more generically Christian and in some places arguably contradicts Mormon theology[[note]]at one point Joshua Graham mentions that Jesus is The Lord made flesh, but in Mormon doctrine God the Father and Jesus are two separate beings with separate identities, though the Lord may or may not refer to God or Jesus depending on context, hence the "arguably"[[/note]]. Also, the Bible used by Joshua Graham and Daniel has a cross on the cover, even though Mormons consider it inappropriate to use the cross as a symbol. Given the real-life propensity for Utah Mormons to name towns and places after ''[[Literature/TheBookOfMormon Book of Mormon]]'' people/places, it's a little surprising for none of that to show up in-game, not even as an EasterEgg or GeniusBonus[[note]]other than Driver Nephi, whose New Canaan connections are only found in cut dialogue anyway[[/note]]. |
| 183 | * AscendedExtra: |
| 184 | ** The entire Nightkin sub-species. In the original ''Fallout'', they were little more than an UndergroundMonkey variant of regular Super Mutants (being translucent). Now they actually have plot relevance. |
| 185 | ** Doctor Henry goes from being a random thievery target in a ''Fallout 2'' side-quest and a way to get a cyber-dog if you do a bit of field-testing for him to being an important character in several of New Vegas' subplots. |
| 186 | ** Marcus the Super-Mutant was the town mayor of Broken Hills, his first attempt at making a mixed species community. No matter what choices you made, Broken Hills would always end up being deserted. His next attempt in Jacobstown features super mutants and nightkin only. And one human and a ghoul. The best part is, as he always was, he is still voiced by Creator/MichaelDorn. |
| 187 | * AscendedMeme: One of the inkblot tests that Doc Mitchell gives you resembles something that isn't available as an option: "Two bears high-fiving." A PC mod [[https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/36850/ rectifies that,]] and it also elicited a response from several devs that that's what they thought it looks like too. Lo and behold in ''Honest Hearts'', if you have the Wild Wasteland trait, there is a Dead Horse tribesman NPC armed with a [[BearsAreBadNews Yao Guai]] gauntlet named [[http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Two-Bears-High-Fiving "Two-Bears-High-Fiving."]] |
| 188 | * AssassinOutclassin: Piss off the NCR or Caesar's Legion enough and they'll start sending hit squads after the player. From this point on, any progress naturally requires surviving repeated assassination attempts. |
| 189 | * AssholeVictim: |
| 190 | ** An interesting deconstruction of this trope can be see with Boone's wife Carla. Talking to the people of Novac makes it clear that she disliked living there. She was prickly, distant, and cold to pretty much everyone in town and they in turn weren't particularly fond of her. But even after all that, she didn't deserve to be sold into Legion slavery [[spoiler:along with her unborn child]]. |
| 191 | *** Worth noting is that the only two people who outright feel Carla was a jerk both wanted her husband for their own purposes; Manny wanted his best friend to himself and [[spoiler:Jeannie May]] wanted him to stay on as the town protector. Both are biased and unreliable character references, because Carla was between them and what they wanted from Boone. Ranger Andy on the other hand says that Carla was a sweet girl who missed the big city and compared any food or hospitality to what she'd had on the Strip, which was rude, but he adds that she did not do this to be intentionally spiteful. |
| 192 | ** According to Sergeant Bitter-Root, many of the Great Khans killed by the NCR at Bitter Springs had it coming. Note that Bitter-Root grew up as a Great Khan, and counts ''his own parents'' among those who had it coming. |
| 193 | ** Private Crenshaw considers himself a happy prankster... who thinks a prank consisting of [[PineappleSurprise secretly pulling the pin from someone's grenade while they're carrying it]] is ''hilarious'', rather than cold-blooded murder. So when you pull that prank on him (as part of a Legion quest), you don't have to feel too bad. |
| 194 | ** When you first encounter the Legion they crucified several people in Nipton. Said victims happen to be Powder Gangers, escaped convicts who have terrorized the roadways on your way there. |
| 195 | * AsskickingLeadsToLeadership: Legate Lanius is a [[MadeOfIron solid iron]] murder machine [[spoiler:and serves as the game's "final boss" for every non-Legion ending path.]] He got the job as Caesar's right hand man by singlehandedly killing off his entire former tribe in combat. Lanius being a sheer freak is acknowledged in the setting, with characters like Lucius indicating that he only has significance because of his freakish, protagonist-like toughness. |
| 196 | * AsTheGoodBookSays: |
| 197 | ** On the edge of Searchlight is a church with a sign with Revelation 9:6 on it. In case you've forgotten, the town is filled with [[spoiler:feral ghouls you've been sent in to euthanize]], but then again, Revelation is rarely ever [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast quoted when things are swell and dandy.]] |
| 198 | -->''Revelation 9:6:'' "During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them." |
| 199 | ** This is also prominent in ''Honest Hearts.'' The achievements are all taken from Bible quotes, and Joshua Graham quotes it frequently (the most memorable being the unpleasant parts of Psalm 137).[[note]] He uses part 1,7, 8 and 9 which focus entirely on anger and pointless vengeance, including the words "Happy shall he be, that taketh thy little ones and dasheth them against the stones."[[/note]] You even get an unreadable Bible at the end of the last quest. |
| 200 | *** Despite first glance, the Psalm Joshua quotes is deeply personal to him. [[spoiler:He's full of anger, especially towards Caesar after he wiped out New Canaan in his own fit of pointless vengeance, and seeks to vent pointless vengeance onto Salt-Upon-Wounds. Telling Joshua to [[{{Motifs}} let go and begin again]] teaches him the importance of giving quarter to those who wronged him.]] |
| 201 | ** Also played with the inscription on the unique gun you get [[spoiler:as a gift after finishing ''Honest Hearts'']]. It is engraved with the passage from John 1:5 that reads 'The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it' in original Greek. The name of the gun? A Light Shining In Darkness. |
| 202 | * TheAtoner: An enforced version with NCR Captain Gilles. After she accidentally ordered NCR snipers to open fire on what she thought were a bunch of Great Khan warrior but were actually women and children, Gilles was demoted and given command of the Bitter Springs refugee camp to assist the survivors. Fittingly, Gilles takes the assignment to heart and the Courier encounters her trying to improve conditions at the camp. During Boone's personal quest, Gilles leads the NCR defense against the Legion and can die trying to save Bitter Springs. |
| 203 | * AttackOfThePoliticalAd: One vault was an experiment about how far people would go to keep on living, with the inhabitants being told that they had to regularly sacrifice one person so that the rest could live. The inhabitants promptly decided that the Overseer was to be the first sacrifice, leading to a system of electing Overseers that then are sacrificed at the end of their terms. As such, the walls are littered with attack ads from candidates smearing their opponents but with the twist that this is supposed to be encouragement to vote for the candidate's opponent. |
| 204 | -->Haley is a known adulterer and communist sympathizer! Elect Haley for Overseer!\ |
| 205 | The rumors about Haley are baseless! Vote Stone for Overseer! |
| 206 | * AuthorAppeal: Zion National Park from ''Honest Hearts'' is a favorite vacation destination of J.E. Sawyer. |
| 207 | * AuthorAvatar: It's generally agreed that Ulysses is this for Chris Avellone, representing his thoughts on the ''Fallout'' series. J.E. Sawyer meanwhile admits that Arcade Gannon and Joshua Graham are based on aspects of his own personality. |
| 208 | * {{Autodoc}}: |
| 209 | ** Appears as a plot device or for specialized procedures, but rarely used to heal the player. For example, the Autodoc owned by Caesar has had its diagnostic module burned out. |
| 210 | ** Autodocs appear in three of the four [=DLCs=], many of which ''can'' be used by the player. The reason why they're here but not in the Wasteland proper is [[spoiler:they were an experimental tech from Big Mountain from not long before the nukes fell. They made it to the Divide because there was a military facility there, and they made it to the Sierra Madre because Sinclair had agreed to let the Think Tank test their new inventions there.]] |
| 211 | * AwesomeButImpractical: |
| 212 | ** The Alien Blaster, though very strong, has the problem that there are [[TooAwesomeToUse no sources of alien ammo outside of where you get the Blaster.]] Because the encounter it's found in only happens with [[SillinessSwitch Wild Wasteland]], it's mutually exclusive with the YCS/186[[labelnote:note]]Even if you use Sink in ''Old World Blues'' to change the trait, picking up one makes getting the other impossible.[[/labelnote]], the unique Gauss Rifle, which is one of the hardest hitting and accurate weapons in the game and, unlike the Alien Blaster, has readily available ammo. |
| 213 | ** The Fat Man. As in ''Fallout 3'', using it without getting caught in your own blasts is quite difficult, and they will hurt a lot. Esther, the named variant in ''[=GRA=]'' is, depending on one's views, the "better" option as it can use ''[=GRA=]'' mini nukes for more options, has more direct damage, adds +10 to your damage threshold and +25 to radiation resistance, more item hit points, and ''never jams''. The drawbacks are just as severe however; it's 10 pounds heavier, costs way more (''18000'' caps compared to 6000), requires other fat mans (and missile launchers with Jury Rigging) to repair her, and uses rare and expensive ammo to fire. And being an Explosive weapon, it falls into their trappings (see bellow). |
| 214 | ** Euclid's C-Finder. Not only will you probably screw up your chances of getting it on a normal playthrough, but if you want to get it you have to sacrifice quite a few caps. But, assuming you do, the weapon causes a contained [[KillSat orbital strike]] to completely destroy anything it hits. [[TooAwesomeToUse Unfortunately, you only get one charge per 24 hour period]], it can only be used outdoors, it takes a couple seconds to actually fire while the satellite links up, and it's an incredibly glitchy weapon in a game that's already filled with glitches - try to use it during the epic final battle, and it'll more than likely [[PowerupLetdown glitch your save]], to say nothing of it simply and randomly deciding to never work again (as discovered during [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miJ6iJTqIFU an attempt to beat the game while only using it]]). Also, [[HoistByHisOwnPetard you can hit yourself with it if you're not careful.]] [[RuleOfCool But MAN it looks cool!]] Veronica explains this trope to Elder [=McNamara=] at the end of her companion quest. Citing the long recharge time and the fact it can only be used outdoors, she explains that, far from being a game-changing doomsday weapon, the ARCHIMEDES system the Brotherhood sacrificed most of its members trying to obtain turned out to be essentially glorified artillery. |
| 215 | *** Euclid's C-Finder "only" does 150 damage without perks, meaning that it's outdamaged by several weapons even when you ignore the ability to fire them more than once a day. |
| 216 | ** The Giant Robo-Scorpion from ''Old World Blues'' is an in-story example, suffering from the same issues as Liberty Prime from ''Fallout 3''. Sure, it's a nearly unstoppable walking tank, but the power requirements for it are so massive that it has to be powered by a direct connection to a building-sized power generator, meaning it can't leave the facility where it was built. Granted, Dr. Mobius is kind of loopy [[spoiler:and only meant to use it as a scare tactic.]] |
| 217 | ** The [[Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail Holy Frag Grenade]], of which you get only [[TooAwesomeToUse three]] ([[ShoutOut "Five is right out!"]]), causes an explosion on par with the Fat Man. Sounds great, until you try throwing it far enough that you won't be caught in the blast radius yourself. |
| 218 | ** The Meltdown perk. Shoot an enemy with an energy weapon, and they explode, possibly causing chain reactions. The downside? Friendly fire possible, including ''self''-friendly fire. You can shoot an enemy point blank with a laser pistol, and you take damage like a grenade went off in your face. With the Gauss Rifle/YCS-180, it can cause a meltdown up to 300 hit points. Even the Compliance Regulator, a high tech taser, can cause a meltdown. But the worst is the Thermic Lance, a melee weapon that counts as a energy weapon, which can cause a very powerful close range explosion with its ridiculous crit chance (it has ''5 chances'' to score a critical hit '''a second'''). |
| 219 | ** The K-9000 Cyberdog gun is made of awesome. It is a more than decent machine gun with added enemy detection beyond your normal capabilities and a night vision telescope to boot. It also has a dog's brain which makes it growl (to show detected enemies), bark happily (when equipped) or yelp sadly (when disappointed at being unequipped). But like all machine guns, it eats ammo, and the relatively rare .357 Magnum/.38 Special at that, so after some fun you just can't use it anymore - or spend a lifetime crafting .357 Magnum from collected other ammunition. Those rounds are better suited for the Cowboy Repeater and La Longue Carabine or Lucky revolver. FIDO is even worse, as it doesn't use the mods the K-9000 has along with upgrading to using .44 Magnum/Special ammo, but not hitting hard enough with it to justify the "upgrade" to an even rarer ammo. |
| 220 | ** On the more hilarious side, the Terrifying Presence perk is basically useless. It doesn't convey any significant benefit and uses up a perk spot you could have spent on something more useful. But it's also the single most awesome perk in the game, because you can send the biggest badasses in the wasteland running (momentarily) with a BadassBoast. |
| 221 | *** The More Perks Mod makes this a more viable option since the Mod adds a few more "Strike First" abilities when diplomacy fails. For example, combine with the "''Merciless''" perk, which grants a higher critical chance if you shoot a fleeing enemy, and you have a golden opertunity to whittle hostiles down before they actually start shooting (Particularly useful on harder difficulties). |
| 222 | ** Playing with Low-Intelligence S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats is frequently this. Sure, if you set your Courier's Intelligence to 3 or lower it leads to several funny conversations with other characters, but these interactions are generally few-&-far between, with most conversations staying the same regardless.[[note]] In sharp contrast to ''[[{{VideoGame/Fallout1}} Fallouts 1]] & [[VideoGame/Fallout2 2]]'', where having low intelligence makes the avatar [[HulkSpeak unable to speak properly]] and does affect how NPC interact with them. Also, those two games had very little voice-acting compared to ''New Vegas'', meaning nearly all conversations were only text-based which has more variety in dialogue than having Voiced [=NPCs=].[[/note]] But the big downside to having Low Intelligence is that it makes leveling up much harder & it takes longer, since you only get 12 or less points per level to allocate. Also, some of the more [[BoringButPractical useful perks]] in the game, such as the "Pack Rat" and "Educated" perks, cannot be picked when leveling up since they have higher intelligence requirements. And finally, since there are more high-intelligence checks in the game than low-intelligence, having a dumb avatar would make persuasion checks harder. Unless you are explicitly [[TheRoleplayer playing the game to roleplay]], having low intelligence is not worth it. |
| 223 | ** The end of ''Dead Money'' features [[spoiler:37 gold bars valued at about 10,000 caps]]. They each weigh 35 pounds, though, and the next part of the quest is a timed escape, so to get more than two or three out you have to strip down, stick all your loot in a container next to the elevator, then deal with Elijah one way or another and sprint out. On top of that, there are no vendors in the Mojave with enough money to buy even ''one'' (sans the ''Gun Runners' Arsenal'' DLC), so outside of using them to buy a metric ton of weapons and ammo from the Gun Runners, the only thing you can really do with them is trade them to the holo-vendors in the Madre for Pre-War Money and exchange the PWM for more Sierra Madre Chips. [[InvokedTrope This is intentional,]] as the [[spoiler:gold bars]] [[RuleOfSymbolism represent one's greed]] and, since they're too heavy to carry, one must learn to let go of them and understand what's really important. |
| 224 | ** By the time you have managed to eat Mr House, Caesar, President Kimball and the King to acquire the ''Meat of Champions'' perk you will be so strong that you simply won't need it. Not to mention that in the process you probably irreparably pissed off every major faction in the wasteland and forced yourself into a Wild Card ending. Also, Kimball can only be met during the penultimate mission of the main quest storyline, so you won't have much left to do once you get the perk. |
| 225 | ** The LAER from ''Old World Blues'' is one of the most powerful energy weapons in the game, and the unique variant created by Elijah is even stronger. The problem is they are GlassCannon weapons with pathetic HP, to the point that every two or three reloads you'll need to use a Weapon Repair Kit to keep them in peak condition because they degrade very quickly, ''especially'' if using modified ammo that accelerates wear on the gun. Even using Optimized ammo doesn't help their weak hit points and it's Jury Rigging components require hard to find/expensive energy rifles like the Plasma Rifle or Laser [=RCW=], both of which last much longer. |
| 226 | ** The unique 40mm grenade machine gun Mercy, found in Dead Wind Cavern. Does huge damage, but you have to kill the Legendary Deathclaw to get it (or get very lucky and sneak past), plus it uses the less common and heavier 40mm grenades instead of the standard 25mm. Also, good luck using it without blowing yourself to smithereens. |
| 227 | ** The Remnants' [[PoweredArmor Power Armor]]. It offers 5 points higher DT than the T-51b power armor, but weighs 6 pounds more, has 13% less rad resistance, is significantly less durable and dings your Charisma by 1 where the T-51b raises it by 1. Quite a few people end up preferring the T-51b because of that. |
| 228 | ** Explosives in general could be considered this. They hit harder than virtually every other weapon type in the game but are also generally rare (e.g. base game Mini Nukes), expensive (e.g. ''Gun Runners Arsenal'' Mini Nukes), and/or require sacrificing ammunition for other weapons (e.g. Fat Mines, which use [[RuleOfThree Mini Nukes]]). The hand held variety has weight for each individual explosive, which adds up and can take up a large chunk of your inventory. Most of them are only useful at mid range when most enemies will either be fighting you at long or close range. They only really become viable once you have access to a reliable source of missiles/25-40mm grenades but by then you've got a dozen other weapons that can get the job done safer, easier, and cheaper. ''Gun Runners Arsenal'' alleviates this some what as it allows for mini nukes and their variants to be bought from traders and from the Gun Runners themselves at a hefty cost but can only be used by the ''[=GRA=]'' Fat Man (which, at least, is modifiable) or the named variant "Esther". |
| 229 | *** Speaking of Mini Nukes, attempting to use the Fat Mine from ''Gun Runners Arsenal'' as a holdout weapon. For starters, it's an advanced holdout weapon, meaning you must have 50 Sneak or higher to bring it into restricted areas. It also requires a ''base game'' mini nuke to craft, despite coming in a [=DLC=] that lets you ''buy'' Mini Nukes. Like all mines, you can sneak an armed Fat Mine into someone's pocket, but ''any'' mine will kill if reverse-pickpocketed, no matter how weak the explosive or how strong the victim, and using a Fat Mine thus presents the problem of putting enough distance between yourself and your intended victim to avoid getting caught in the resulting ''nuclear explosion''. |
| 230 | *** Everything both awesome and impractical about explosives is exaggerated by the Splash Damage perk, which boosts the blast radius on all explosives you use by 25%, making it much easier to hurt multiple enemies, and much, much easier to hurt yourself. At the greatest extreme, it makes the Big Kids mini-nuke from Gun Runner's Arsenal functionally unusable, as the Big Kids mini-nuke does much more damage, has a 30% larger blast, and flies much more slowly, and by extension, shorter, which combines to make it nearly impossible to ''not'' catch yourself in the explosion. |
| 231 | ** Downplayed with the Anti-Materiel Rifle. It has a high repair cost (and even that can be completely mitigated through Jury Rigging, weapon repair kits or ED-E with rank one of the Camarader-E perk from ''Lonesome Road''), low firing rate, weighs 20 units, requires a perfect 100 skill in guns to wield, and its ammo is very rare, relatively heavy and expensive. [[LudicrousGibs But using it on anything that moves results in exactly what you would expect to happen when you use a rifle designed to destroy military equipment on a living, breathing organism]] (let's just say you'll be able to kill a Deathclaw with a single bullet). With the Heavyweight perk [[note]]Reduces the weight of any weapon with >10 weight by half[[/note]] and the Carbon Fiber parts mod from the Gun Runners arsenal [=DLC=] the Anti-Materiel Rifle is now ''6.5 pounds'' [[note]]By comparison, the Varmint Rifle is 5.5 pounds[[/note]], removing one of the weapon's largest drawback. With the Pack Rat perk [[note]]Any item that weighs two pounds or less has its weight cut in half[[/note]] the ammo is now also significantly easier to carry around. |
| 232 | ** Two-Step Goodbye, a Ballistic Fist variant introduced in ''Gun Runners Arsenal'' that causes any enemy killed with a crit to [[ActionBomb explode like a bomb]] after a couple of seconds. It has paltry DPS compared to every other end-game melee weapon. It has higher than average crit chance, but the actual damage on a crit is very low. The actual explosion can easily hurt you if the body wasn't flung far enough away. Finally, it's the single most expensive weapon in the entire game. But come ''on'' - you make your enemies blow up by ''punching them''. How can you hate it? |
| 233 | ** The Blade of the East, a unique bumper sword. One of the most powerful melee weapons in the game, it has the effect of draining away 2 [=HP=] for a duration of 10 seconds when hitting an opponent, and you can pretty much slay anything with it as long as your melee weapons skill is maxed out and you have the right amount of strength points. Sounds awesome, right? Unfortunately, you can only obtain it from the main game's FinalBoss (provided that you don't align yourself with his particular faction), and at that point, you are already at the game's PointOfNoReturn. Since the game does not allow you to continue after the epilogue, it is a tragic disappointment. The Blade of the West from the ''Lonesome Road'' [=DLC=] serves the same intended role as the Blade of the East (although slightly weaker and without the [=HP=] draining effect of its counterpart but makes up for these drawbacks by having a higher [=DPS=]), but is much easier to find and you can get it at any time in the Divide, making the Blade of the East obsolete and a mere BraggingRightsReward. |
| 234 | %%* AwesomenessInducedAmnesia: A Courier with poor skill in Medicine but a sufficient Luck stat can pull this off with brain surgery [[spoiler:on Caesar]]. |
| 235 | %%-->'''Vulpes Inculta:''' That was incredible. How did you do that?\ |
| 236 | '''Courier:''' ...I have no idea whatsoever. |
| 237 | * AxCrazy: The Fiends, serving as the main [[AlwaysChaoticEvil raider gang]] of the game. The ones outside are there for a reason. The only two Fiend leaders not completely out of their minds are Motor-Runner and Driver Nephi as revealed through cut dialog. According to cut dialog, Violet is constantly high on Psycho and [[BerserkButton hates people doing anything to/about her dogs, saying anything to/about her dogs, or even looking at her dogs]]. And then there's Cook-Cook, who even the Fiends fear... |
| 238 | [[/folder]] |
| 239 | |
| 240 | |
| 241 | [[folder:B]] |
| 242 | * BackAlleyDoctor: The medic at Novac, Dr. Ada Straus, has dirty tools, sells addictive chems on the side, and ''explicitly'' doesn't have any sort of training whatsoever -- her Medicine skill rests at a measly ''12''. For comparison, the default Medicine at the start is 15 -- after being shot in the head. |
| 243 | ** Lampshaded by her paid guards: |
| 244 | ---> '''Guard''': You must be desperate.\ |
| 245 | '''Guard''': I wouldn't let her work on me! |
| 246 | * BackStab: In sneak mode, when you attack a target who has not spotted you yet, you deal an automatic CriticalHit and double your damage. Unless it's a melee weapon, then it's a CriticalHit and ''quintuple'' damage. |
| 247 | * BadLiar: Vulpes Inculta tells you that the town of Nipton was overrun quickly and with no resistance. All you have to do is TURN AROUND to see that there is a dead Legionnaire lying in the car park. Open the door to your right and find another dead Legionnaire. Open the backdoor of a house on the other side of town and see two more. If you even ''turn right instead of left'' walking into the town, you find a dead Legion Recruit who's been dusted by a laser-armed settler. Vulpes lost half his men taking the town, and expects you not to notice. |
| 248 | * BadassAdorable: Stripe, a knee-high Deathclaw with dark coloring featured in ''Old World Blues'' if you have selected the Wild Wasteland trait. An Expy of the main villian from ''Film/{{Gremlins}}''. So cute, so able to claw you to ribbons. He hits harder than the Legendary Deathclaw and his small size makes him harder to hit. At least you can stand in the fountain and shoot from a safe distance. |
| 249 | * BadassBoast: The Terrifying Presence perk gives you a few of these. Sometimes they're just something cool to say before you kill someone, other times they're [[ToThePain vivid descriptions of what you're going to do]] to your enemies. But they're all so invariably badass that you can say them unarmed in your underwear, and they'll make fully equipped Brotherhood of Steel Paladins run screaming from you. |
| 250 | ** From ''Old World Blues'' comes this awesome ([[ItMakesSenseInContext if slightly strange otherwise]]) quote: "Come on brain, it's stomping time!" |
| 251 | * BadassBystander: The entire town of [[WretchedHive Nipton]] fell easily to the Legion -- according to Vulpes Inculta, whose force is somewhat... smaller than it should be. Then there's: |
| 252 | ** the lovesick nerd with artillery and a hostile robot (because he programmed it that way); |
| 253 | ** a dead resident with a laser rifle, next to a pile of dust that was once a Legionnaire; |
| 254 | ** and the paranoid-schizophrenic with a house full of mines, rigged shotguns, man-eating scorpions -- and, hey, corpses. |
| 255 | * BadassLongcoat: |
| 256 | ** The NCR Ranger combat armor; it's the armor shown on the cover, also worn by the sniper at the wall around the Strip in the intro. Later [=DLCs=] add the Desert Ranger Combat Armor and the Elite Riot Gear, each Longcoat more Badass than the last. |
| 257 | ** ''Lonesome Road'' graces us with the Courier Duster, which can have one of four symbols (Vault 21 for Yes Man, NCR bear, Legion bull, or USA flag for House) on the back, and Ulysses' unique variant, which also uses the USA flag, both of which you naturally receive after the big finish. The latter goes quite nicely with Old Glory, a wooden staff capped with a golden metal eagle. |
| 258 | * BallisticDiscount: |
| 259 | ** Can be done of course, but many traders and shopkeepers are usually heavily armed themselves as well as having guards and the risk of making the whole town hostile. The Silver Rush is the epitome of this, as they have half-a-dozen guards and one boss character guarding the shopkeeper. Keep in mind that the merchants' inventory and money gets replenished every few days, so killing may be a bad idea for a different reason. |
| 260 | ** The Gun Runners take particular precautions in this regard - they built their reinforced, permanent sales booth ''around'' the Protectron who serves as their sales clerk. |
| 261 | * BastardUnderstudy: Benny tries to be this to Mr. House. [[spoiler:You can be one to House as well, and succeed where Benny failed.]] |
| 262 | * BathhouseBlitz: In the quest "Beyond the Beef", Chauncey meets with you in the Ultra-Luxe sauna to privately discuss recent disappearances, which he knows were the work of a conspiracy of cannibals. Mortimer, the leader of the conspiracy, sends a hitman to silence Chauncey, who you then have to fight. |
| 263 | * {{Bathos}}: The Naughty Nightwear gives a +10 Speech bonus, so it's generally a good idea to put it on before a dialogue that might include a Speech check. This can create situations where you come out of a deadly serious conversation about the fate of the Wasteland to reveal you've been wearing leopard-print pyjamas throughout the whole thing. |
| 264 | * BeamSpam: Gatling Laser (again), and the smaller Laser RCW, which is basically a UsefulNotes/WorldWarII Thompson submachine gun that shoots [[EnergyWeapon Frickin' Laser Beams]]. The [[ShotgunsAreJustBetter Tri-Beam Laser Rifle]] isn't a full-auto deal like the previous two, but it does fire three beams at a time and fires just as fast as its single beam predecessor. |
| 265 | * BearsAreBadNews: |
| 266 | ** Yao Guai make a comeback in the ''Honest Hearts'' DLC and unlike ''Fallout 3'', having the [[FriendToAllLivingThings Animal Friend]] perk won't stop them from coming after you on sight. And now they come in giant size. |
| 267 | ** And then there's The Ghost of She. A GIANT Yao Guai. [[InfernalRetaliation On fire.]] Oh, and don't forget that on the quest that sends you after her, the drugs you take [[YourMindMakesItReal make you see more than one of her and you have to fight]] ''[[MesACrowd all]] '' [[DoppelgangerAttack of them.]] |
| 268 | * ABeastInNameAndNature: Among the Marked Men patrolling the Divide in ''Lonesome Road'' is a unique specimen known simply as Beast, likely due to the fact that his fearsome-looking gear invokes the armour of Legate Lanius (AKA the Monster of the East)... but also because he's an insane, skinless ghoul kept alive by ThePowerOfHate and armed with a gigantic rocket launcher. |
| 269 | * BeastlyBloodsports: "The Thorn" is an underground arena with various mutant creatures that offers both creature vs. creature and creature vs. human fights. You can bet on fights, take part in one or search for creature eggs to restock the arena menagerie. |
| 270 | * TheBeastmaster: The Animal Friend perk is upgraded again from ''Fallout 3''; this time it will also cause domesticated animals to fight with you, or even turn against their masters to help you. |
| 271 | * BeefGate: Used liberally in the beginning. The two north roads to Vegas lead you right into Cazadores and Deathclaws. To the south, straying from the road is a good way to get giant Radscorpions on your tail, and those things are hard to kill in the early game. And if you try to cut directly to the east? There's a route that'll cut past the south part of the map, but it's infested with cazadores again. Generally, if something manages to kill you in two hits while anything you currently have can't inflict a single scratch in return, it's usually a good sign you should probably not be in that area yet. On the plus side, limiting specific monsters to specific ecological regions avoids the "anything can pop up anywhere" problem seen in ''Fallout 3'', where you'd have Deathclaws showing up just outside the walls of major settlements once your character reached a high-enough level. |
| 272 | * BeingGoodSucks: |
| 273 | ** Almost all of the Followers of the Apocalypse endings [[spoiler:has them taking on more responsibility than they can handle or being screwed outright. One of the only ''"good"'' endings, ironically enough, is an ending which Caesar lives. [[PetTheDog He spares their lives and lets them leave the Mojave Wasteland peacefully out of respect, as they had taught him as a boy]].]] |
| 274 | ** Their best ending, also somewhat ironically, [[spoiler:is if you get the Followers to support the NCR and then choose to end the game by siding with the NCR. Old Mormon Fort expanded its services and is able to aid more people, becoming a refuge for the less fortunate citizens of New Vegas. It is ironic because the Followers are particularly wary and ambivalent about the NCR, and would prefer independence, an ending which either mildly or severely screws them over, depending on your choices.]] |
| 275 | ** Subverted with the Courier; even though EvilIsEasy, so much good karma is rewarded for winning unavoidable fights with evil enemies that no matter how much you [[SociopathicHero kill]] and [[KleptomaniacHero steal]], you'll almost always be seen as a saint. |
| 276 | ** Also played straight in the ''Honest Hearts'' DLC. [[spoiler:No matter which ending you choose, Daniel will still get the short end of the stick.]] Sure, sometimes it's only as bad as missing the paradise-that-could-have-been Zion, but it's ''very'' easy to make "good" decisions that cause him trouble. |
| 277 | * BerserkButton: Boone ''hates'' the Legion, and for very good reason. It's nearly impossible to get the Legion ending with him as a companion because he murders every single Legionnaire you come across. |
| 278 | * BeneficialDisease: The Rad Child and Atomic! perks will respectively cause health and action points to be restored faster when exposed to radiation. You will still suffer other stat penalties from radiation sickness, and drop dead if it reaches 1000. |
| 279 | * BestialityIsDepraved: It's heavily implied, but never said outright, that Cook-Cook (one of the [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast fiends]] leaders) screws his brahmin, Queenee. His cut dialogue, creepy cutesy-talk to Queenie, doesn't help. |
| 280 | * BestServedCold: [[spoiler:Dean Domino]] of ''Dead Money'' is a firm believer in this. If you try to get the better of him in your first meeting (by beating him in a Barter check,) he'll patiently wait until the circumstances favor him again before stabbing you in the back. |
| 281 | * BettingMiniGame: As expected of a game with [[VivaLasVegas Vegas]] in the title; the game has a grand total of five casinos you can play in (and a few more you can't), each with their own theme and win limit. You can also play the Mojave's very own card game, "Caravan," if you're willing to learn the rules. |
| 282 | * BettyAndVeronica: [[OptionalSexualEncounter Sarah Weintraub and Red Lucy]] respectively. Sarah is a sunny, cheerful blonde who manages a themed hotel from her old Vault and takes a fancy to you if you bring her enough Vault Suits. Lucy is a bloodthirsty redhead who runs a bloodsports arena and whose pants you can get into by going out and killing dangerous creatures. |
| 283 | * BewareTheNiceOnes: |
| 284 | ** The game's most powerful NPC is none other than Primm Slim, the Protectron sheriff robot in the Vikki and Vance Casino, who has more than 2,000 HP at level 30. That's just health, of course. It may take you a while, but he's a dolled-up Protectron and couldn't kill you if he wanted to. |
| 285 | ** Yes Man. Oh, how nice and helpful is he. He also has a sadistic streak that comes out in a few lines. |
| 286 | ** Of course, there's you. Particularly if you're a good karma character capable of tearing down entire armies. |
| 287 | * {{BFG}}: The Heavy Incinerator, Tesla Cannon, Grenade Machinegun, Minigun, Gatling Laser, Plasma Caster, Gauss Rifle, Light Machine Gun (note that 'Light' is a strictly relative term), and Anti-Materiel Rifle. All of them leave nice, chunky messes. |
| 288 | * {{BFS}}: |
| 289 | ** The Bumper Sword. |
| 290 | ** Lily carries a {{BFS}} made from a Vertibird propeller blade. |
| 291 | ** Legate Lanius' {{BFS}}, the Blade of the East. It hurts. A lot. |
| 292 | ** Marked Men in the ''Lonesome Road'' DLC may carry imitations of the above weapon called Blades of the West. They hurt. A lot. |
| 293 | * BigBad: Caesar, as the leader of Legion, who are basically Roman-themed, fascistic slavers hellbent on assimilating Mojave and bringing their genocidal reign of terror on the inhabitants. While you never actually ''have'' to deal with him (unlike TheDragon, Legate Lanius), he's clearly the most villainous of the main faction leaders and drives the main conflict of the game. Although, unique among Fallout Big Bads, it's possible to kill him far before the final battle actually happens. If you do, then Lanius steps into the position of BigBad. |
| 294 | ** For ''Dead Money'', it's Father Elijah, former head of Mojave chapter of Brotherhood of Steel |
| 295 | ** For ''Honest Hearts,'' it's Salt-Upon-Wounds, chief of White Legs, with Caesar as the GreaterScopeVillain who gave the White Legs machine guns and ordered them to commit genocide due to a personal grudge on Caesar's part. |
| 296 | ** For ''Old World Blues'', it's [[spoiler:Dr. Klein, leader of the Think Tank, rather than Dr. Mobius]]. However, none of them are truly villainous. Just really, really deranged and delusional. |
| 297 | ** For ''Lonesome Road'', it's Ulysses, former courier and Legion agent, who has personal grudge against Courier. He has a plan to [[spoiler:nuke all of the major factions, which would kill thousands and doom thousands of others to poverty, anarchy, and radiation sickness.]] |
| 298 | *** In an indirect way, Ulysses is also this for the main game and all the other DLC.[[spoiler:He first scouted the Dam and NCR for Caesar, leading him to march west in the first place; he turned down the Platinum Chip delivery knowing it would bring trouble and even death to the Courier; he armed and trained the White Legs to destroy New Caanan, kicking off ''Honest Hearts''; he jarred the Think Tanks out of their loop and renewed their interest in experimenting on the world outside Big MT; and he was the one who told Father Elijah about the Sierra Madre, sending him off to try and crack it. In every major conflict the Courier gets caught in, Ulysses is a major instigator, even unintentionally.]] |
| 299 | * BigDamnGunship: You can see up to two of them in the final battle, provided you do their prerequisites. First one is the Boomers in their B-29 Bomber, the other is the [[spoiler:RetiredBadass Enclave [[TheAtoner Remnants]] arriving in a Vertibird to kick the ass of your choosing]]. It's even stated that the second one reminded everyone in the Mojave why they had feared the [[spoiler:Enclave]]. |
| 300 | * BilingualBonus: |
| 301 | ** "Cazador" is spanish for "Hunter". Raul will speak the word with a spanish pronounciation too. It's also why it's pluralized as "Cazadores". |
| 302 | ** Doubling as a StealthPun: A scientist named "Brazos" (meaning "arms" in English) is the one who worked on the Stealth suit gauntlets. |
| 303 | ** It's easy to miss, but there's a tow winch in Calville Bay with instructions written in French on it which translates as "Danger of death: High-tension cables. Distance: 0 m. 00. Depth: 0' 60". |
| 304 | * BitchInSheepsClothing: [[spoiler:Jeannie May Crawford]] in Novac. |
| 305 | * BittersweetEnding: |
| 306 | ** The "best case scenarios" for Veronica and Lily qualify big time. For Veronica, [[spoiler:she either stays with the Brotherhood and reluctantly keeps her mouth shut about her disagreements with their methods, or she leaves, willingly or they banish her, and she wanders the wastelands as a lone tinkerer fearful of getting close to people in case the Brotherhood is monitoring her]]. As for Lily, her "good" endings either have her [[spoiler:go off to find her grandchildren, who are almost assuredly dead by now, or finally having her mental state stabilized at the cost of the memories of her past.]] |
| 307 | ** The best ending you can hope for in ''Honest Hearts'' is [[spoiler:helping Graham crush the White Legs. If you convince him to spare Salt-Upon-Wounds, or at the very least make it a fair fight, then the only "good" character who gets a sad ending is Daniel who, as mentioned above, is so idealistic that he's screwed no matter what happens.]] |
| 308 | ** Every faction ending in the main game is this, with [[spoiler:The NCR ruling as a democracy, but every town suffers their overbearing presence, leading to exoduses and thriving towns dying out. The Legion either crushes every spot of prosperity in the Wasteland then collapses, or conquers and enslaves the entire state of Nevada. Mr. House establishes a benevolent dictatorship that prospers, but it is heavily implied he has been playing the PC to establish a Big Brother type scenario. The independent is possibly the worst AND best, with New Vegas being an independent city free from control, but anarchy spreading to the main wasteland outside of its walls, with (depending on the player's choices) every big town being a safe haven, but the rest an anarchic land controlled by several factions]]. Although it is possible to avert that last bit depending on your choices. |
| 309 | * BlackAndGrayMorality: |
| 310 | ** There are no completely "Good" factions in this game. Some of them are decent but have their flaws, like the Followers, many are a mix of virtue and vice like the Chairmen, and several, most prominently the Fiends, are certainly evil. With the three major factions, the NCR and Mr. House are firmly Grey (it's up for the player to decide who's ALighterShadeOfGrey between them), and the Legion is Black with a small touch of Grey to them. |
| 311 | ** Even a Wild Card Courier with Good Karma, will have to make certain decisions to "liberate" New Vegas, and nothing indicates that "liberating" New Vegas is the right decision. |
| 312 | * BlackComedy: Not nearly as much as ''VideoGame/Fallout2'' but it's there. ''Old World Blues'', however, is dripping in it as it focuses on the crazed brains of morally-bankrupt scientists performing absurd experiments such as combining a lobotomite with a robot to make a Robobrain (who wants to see the wonders of life but dies soon after) or making a high-school as a means to get revenge on bullies long dead. It becomes subdued when you see the concentration camp... |
| 313 | * BlackComedyRape: |
| 314 | ** The Biological Station in ''Old World Blues'' threatens to seed the ''shit'' out of you, and has seeded Muggy before. |
| 315 | ** In the cut audio files for Cook-Cook (who could be approached as friendly), he will constantly hit on you and make veiled threats at rape. Talking to Driver Nephi as a female will have him repeatedly warn you not to talk to him. |
| 316 | * BlackComedyCannibalism: |
| 317 | ** During Beyond the Beef, if working with Mortimer, you have the oportunity to offer one of your companions to be eaten in the place of Ted Gunderson. If you offer [[TheAlcoholic Cass]], Mortimer will comment that he thinks the chef can skip the whiskey marinade with her. |
| 318 | ** Also in a Cook-Cook's cut dialogue, while he's introducing himself, he will say something like "someday I will make you dinner". Considering [[AxCrazy who]] you are talking with, it can be interpreted either as "I will make dinner for you" or "I will make YOU the dinner". |
| 319 | * BlastingItOutOfTheirHands: The weapon an enemy is wielding can be separately targeted in VATS, and also in real-time if you aim carefully. This is of limited practical use, and understandably this heavily damages the weapon. |
| 320 | * BlatantItemPlacement: You'll find stashes of useful items all over the place, despite the fact that a lot of them should have been looted a long time ago. Particularly jarring when it comes to medical supplies, which several Followers of the Apocalypse even say are some of the biggest targets of looting there are. {{Lampshaded}} by one NPC when talking about how the Sunset Sarsaparilla machines should seemingly have been emptied out years ago and that maybe Ol' Festus is going around refilling them. |
| 321 | * BlatantLies: |
| 322 | ** Those radioactive barrels you see both here and in ''Fallout 3''? In the REPCONN headquarters, they're "safety barrels," and being buried in the ground is supposed to be totally safe! Some extremist hippy whackos are just lying to you about their radioactivity! |
| 323 | ** Quite a few with the Think Tank in ''Old World Blues''. |
| 324 | --> '''Dr. Klein:''' How ''dare'' you! Branial beam oscillation was solely ''my'' discovery! I expressly told you that and deleted all evidence to the contrary! |
| 325 | ** Vulpes Inculta will claim that Nipton didn't put up a fight. Looking around the town you can find several corpses of Legionaries showing that, no, a lot of Nipton's people went down fighting. |
| 326 | * BleakBorderBase: Camp Forlorn Hope, an NCR military outpost located just south of the Hoover Dam. Not only is the place rather grim, with only tin shacks and sandbags for shelter and cover, but the troops that are there are underequipped, unhealthy and demoralised. To make matters worse, they're not far away from Caesar's Legion, whose recent attacks have limited their efforts to patrol the area and inflicted multiple casualties. Fortunately, the Courier can make life for them much easier, partly by taking pressure off the NCR further east which allows them to deploy better troops as reinforcements, and partly by doing in the Legionnaires that are harassing them nearby. |
| 327 | * BlessedWithSuck[=/=]CursedWithAwesome: The positive and negative effect of the trait ''Wild Wasteland'' is described as "Adds wackier versions of current content." |
| 328 | ** There's an example of this [[spoiler:if Arcade gives you his father's Enclave armor]]. He's really proud of it and brags that it will stop almost anything short of a plasma bolt. But due to its associations, wearing it could get you hunted down and killed, or if you're lucky, just thrown in an [=NCR=] jail for a long, long, long time. (Which [[spoiler:is what happens if ''Arcade'' wears it during some of his endings.]]) Uh ... thanks, man? What a ''blessing''. Luckily, StoryAndGameplaySegregation is in full effect if you decide to wear it. |
| 329 | ** Although, you don't have any Enclave ties ([[MysteriousPast probably]]), so if anyone asks you about the armor, you could feasibly say "I found it off a dead scavenger" (which ''is'' possible in-game) or something. Arcade's are there, it's just that nobody's bothered to look hard enough. This is also why in every ending where Arcade does not keep a low profile, his Enclave past is found out. |
| 330 | * BlindIdiotTranslation: |
| 331 | ** Most likely an InUniverse example. The [[AceCustom Survivalist's Rifle]] in the ''Honest Hearts'' DLC has the word "Stop!" and its French translation, "Arrêt!", hastily carved on the stock. The problem is that "Arrêt" is a noun or an infinitive and wouldn't really make sense as an order in the same way as "Stop". Since [[BadassNormal Randall]] [[CrazySurvivalist Dean]] [[PapaWolf Clark]], the Survivalist was stationed at a U.S Army checkpoint in Ontario, Canada during the U.S invasion it was probably carved in case he needed to stop French-Canadians. |
| 332 | *** Note that while grammatically this is correct, note that Arrêt/Stop is in fact how it is shown on Canadian stop signs (especially in Quebec). This may be a case of [[ShownTheirWork Shown Their Work]] |
| 333 | ** The French translation of the game is a complete disaster at times, which is a shame considering the ''VideoGame/Fallout3'' one is quite good. At times it feels like whoever did the translation just ran the English text through a 2010-era Internet translator and didn't bother double-checking. |
| 334 | *** "Gypsum Train Yard" (a [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin train yard]] infested with Deathclaws) is translated as "Cour d'entraînement de Gypsum" (Gypsum's Training Yard). |
| 335 | *** "Climbin' Ev'ry Mountain" (a quest where you investigate some mountains to find a sniper preying on refugees) has been translated as "Grimper la montagne d'Ev'ry", as in, "Climb the mountain of Ev'ry". |
| 336 | *** Some of the weapon mods in the original game are "forged receivers" which increased a gun's health by replacing the receiver with a superior one. The French translation called them "faux récepteurs" ("false receivers" with forged as in "forged documents" instead of "forged metal"). |
| 337 | *** The Brush Gun was translated as "Arme de petit calibre" ("Small caliber weapon", it's actually a .45-70 Gov't lever-action rifle, hardly "small caliber"). |
| 338 | *** The K9000 cyberdog gun is labelled as a "pistol" instead of the ChainsawGripBFG it is. |
| 339 | *** While the Fiends as a whole have been nicknamed "Tox" (from Toxic) in the dub, [[{{Mooks}} generic Fiends]] are simply called "enemies". |
| 340 | *** Two chems you can use, "Fixer" and "Med-X" are labelled as "Some Fixer." and "Some Med-X." (yes, with the period). |
| 341 | *** The [[MoreDakka Light Machine Gun]] and [[StuffBlowingUp Grenade Machinegun]] are both referred to as a "mitraillette". The problem is that a "mitraillette" is a sub-machine gun firing pistol rounds and is not a generic term for an automatic weapon (which would literally be "arme automatique") or for a machine gun firing rifle rounds, the word "mitrailleuse" would have been acceptable. |
| 342 | *** The word "beam" (beam of light, choosing to answer this skews you towards Energy Weapons skill) in Doc Mitchell's tutorial test has been translated as "poutre" (which is a beam of steel of wood) instead of "faisceau" (which is a beam of light). |
| 343 | *** In ''Lonesome Road'', the prompt to get the unique Bowie Knife (Blood-Nap) is simply "Take Blood-Nap". In French this was translated as "Faire une sieste sanglante" (Literally, "do a bloody nap", in French you don't ''take'' a nap, you ''do'' a nap) instead of the much more reasonable "Prendre Sieste-Sanglante". |
| 344 | *** The tree logs you can sit down on in some areas are translated as "journal" instead of "bûche". "Journal" in this context means "log" as in "Captain's log" or "diary", not the wood log. |
| 345 | *** Armor-piercing ammo is translated as "Peut percer une protection" (literally "Can pierce a protection"). It's ''technically'' accurate, but it's a huge awkward mouthful. A proper translation would simply be "balle perforante" (perforating bullet). |
| 346 | *** The 9mm SMG Light Bolt mod, which increases the firing rate of the 9mm SMG, has been translated as "Boulon Léger" and not "Culasse Légère" (A firearm's bolt in French is "culasse", while "boulon" refers to a metal fastener you screw, that other kind of bolt). |
| 347 | *** The "Jean Sky Diving" landmark near Goodsprings, is incorrectly referred to as "Jean, pro du sky-diving", as in "Jean, a pro of sky-diving". |
| 348 | ** The French, Spanish, German, ''and'' Italian translations name the suave gambler hat worn by Franchise/IndianaJones' skeleton with Wild Wasteland "gambler hat 2". |
| 349 | * BlindWithoutEm: The ''Four Eyes'' trait, which gives a bonus to Perception so long as you're wearing glasses. Without them, it's a decrease to Perception. Will become useless later on, since power armor helmets, for obvious reasons, require you to take off your glasses. Again, this is assuming a character is even capable of / willing to wearing power armor helmets. |
| 350 | ** Of course, this also poses serious problems; mechanically it reduces your base Perception by 1 and makes every pair of glasses give +2 Perception. Fairly nifty, except that certain perks require moderately high Perception to get, which this perk will more or less lock you out of--and [[DumpStat that is by far the most useful thing about the Perception stat]]. |
| 351 | * BlingBlingBang: All of the unique handguns, especially Maria, Lucky and the Ranger Sequoia. Surprisingly not with the larger guns, except the Prototype Matter Modulator, which has a neat brass paintjob. |
| 352 | * BlownAcrossTheRoom: |
| 353 | ** The Gauss Rifle often send the opponent flying for considerable distance. |
| 354 | ** Averted, however, with Armor Piercing rounds...which do a little LESS damage on unarmored opponents than regular rounds BECAUSE of their overpenetration, which is actually TruthInTelevision. |
| 355 | ** The Anti-Materiel Rifle can send ''Deathclaws'' flying back with a chest shot. It is not a gun that messes around. |
| 356 | ** [[MeaningfulName Pushy]]. If your killing blow is an uppercut, you could easily send them 20 feet up and 30 feet away. If your unarmed is high enough, you can punch them with the force a football player punts a ball. |
| 357 | *** Or combine it with the ranger takedown (which knocks people down), and an activation of super slam (which knocks people away), and the total force is the sum of the 3 components. Which can send even still-living targets far. |
| 358 | ** ''Dead Money'' perk "And Stay Back" grants 10% chance per shotgun shot of throwing the target back. The sawed-off fires 14 buckshot per blast, practically guaranteeing an airborne ragdoll if fired at close range. |
| 359 | ** The Fire Axe's special has a knockback effect; chaining the special lets you ''juggle an opponent in the air''. |
| 360 | * BodyguardingABadass: Depending on how you build The Courier this is a likely situation for the companions to end up in. |
| 361 | * BodyMotifs: The ''Old World Blues'' add-on gives us [[EyeMotifs eyes]]. The cover of the DLC is a digital eye, the projection from the satellite at the Mojave Drive-In and on Mobius' broadcast screen is a moving eye, the Think Tanks make use of eye monitors with Dr. Mobius having a damaged one, and before their current design, they were [[https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Think_tank?file=ThinkTankConceptArt3.png#Gallery originally intended to be a single eye monitor]] connected to their brain. |
| 362 | * BombThrowingAnarchists: |
| 363 | ** Averted by the Followers of the Apocalypse who, despite being derided as anarchists by some, arguably are the only "truly good" faction in the game, next to the Kings. |
| 364 | ** Played straight by Samuel Cooke, the founder of the Powder Gangers, who was imprisoned by the NCR for being a literal example. The other Powder Gangers are aversions, however, as they are little more than another gang of raiders. |
| 365 | ** 'Honest Hearts' introduces the perk 'Fight the Power!' which gives a combat bonus against members of 'lawful' factions. It is accompanied by the picture of stereotypical rioter with a scarf on his face and a Molotov cocktail in his hand. |
| 366 | * BonusDungeon: Up to three are added by ''Lonesome Road''-- the Courier's Mile, the NCR Long 15, and the Legion Dry Wells. The latter two are only accessible if [[spoiler:you decided to nuke them.]] None of these are particularly long, but they're overflowing with radiation and irradiated ghoul soldiers (causing them to hyper-regenerate) with some chests of high-grade equipment hidden in back. |
| 367 | * BookEnds: "War. War never changes." |
| 368 | * BonusFeatureFailure: The various pre-order packs, individually or collectively as the ''Courier's Stash'' DLC. While they do provide a decent advantage in the early game, limitations in the game's engine prevents DLC from interacting with other DLC, meaning the pre-order items don't work with DLC perks at all. This leads to strange, counter-intuitive and anti-synergistic scenarios, such as the pre-order shotgun being the only shotgun not affected by the otherwise outstanding "And Stay Back" Perk. Similarly, the Vault 13 canteen, a bottomless water source which your character periodically drinks from to regain a little health, is only truly useful in Hardcore more (since only hardcore mode measures dehydration), the period between drinks and the amount of dehydration reduced/health restored per drink isn't significant enough to have much if any effect on gameplay, and the periods between drinks is calculated from real time instead of using the in-game clock (which means that wait or fast travel in hardcore mode will usually make the Courier severely dehydrated). |
| 369 | * BoomerangBigot: One line used by Boomers if you have ED-E with you states that they can take care of that robot problem for you. The same line is used by the robots on the base. |
| 370 | * BoringButPractical: |
| 371 | ** The Guns skill. Energy Weapons, Explosives, Melee, and Unarmed have some flashier options, but for reliability, ease of repair, and availability of ammo, plain old slug-throwers just can't be beat. |
| 372 | ** There are quite a few common "rifle" type weapons which are available from the start of the game and remain useful deep into it. The best example is the bog standard Varmint rifle. You'll find just about everybody and their brother carrying it at low levels, it uses extremely plentiful 5.56mm ammo, and it has an easy-to-find scope mod which turns it into a light sniper rifle. Even better, there is no skill requirement that must be met to use it, so even a player who is not investing in the "Guns" skill has it as an option for sniping enemies outside of their aggro range. (It also has a unique variant, the "Ratslayer," which falls into [[DiscOneNuke another category altogether]].) Slightly less boring but still practical for the same reasons are the Hunting Rifle and Marksman Carbine. |
| 373 | ** The Cowboy Repeater is this to a T. Its relatively high accuracy, high damage, fast firing rate, and abundance of ammo will see you through a good chunk of the game - any lever action in general is this, save for the Brush Gun, which uses the rare .45-70 Gov't rounds. If you can get a hold of it, La Longue Carabine is a straight upgrade of the repeater that remains useful for much longer. It uses the same common ammunition while also having a scope and better stats, making it a handy long-range weapon even once you've acquired a Brush Gun, as it's still useful for nailing weaker enemies and saving the prohibitively expensive .45-70 rounds. |
| 374 | ** The Lever-Action Shotgun is usually obtainable around the middle of the game. Although its not the most glamorous weapon and its damage isn't as high as the Hunting or Riot Shotguns, its quick firing rate and easy handling still make it a reliable side-weapon well into the end-game. It's especially useful for taking out weaker or unarmored foes, or switching to it mid-combat when one of your main weapons is spent. While you have to take the laborious reloading into account, working around that by switching between weapons covers for its weaknesses (plus the Rapid Reload perk will alleviate it). Combined with the Cowboy, Stay Back, and Shotgun Surgeon perks, it remains potent and reliable even when used alongside the 12 gauge shotguns. It's got the highest DPS of any weapon that uses 20 gauge shells, which by that point in the game are extraordinarily common (along with the more potent slug rounds and 3/0 buck), meaning ammunition is never a concern. It also lacks a jamming animation, meaning its one of the few weapons that will never jam irregardless of the condition it's in. The Lever-Action Shotgun pairs especially well with Chance's Knife, as you can quickly knock an enemy down with a blast and then run up and slash them to death. |
| 375 | ** The weapons added by the ''Courier's Stash'' DLC, available from the very start of the game, fit the bill. In particular, the Broad Machete, Weathered 10mm Pistol, and Sturdy Caravan Shotgun are more than enough to get the player through the early stages of the game, at least to New Vegas, before they start becoming outclassed. Other bonuses are that they each come in perfect condition, while very few other weapons available that early do, and they each lack the skill requirements of their standard counterparts. (For example, no Guns or Explosives skill requirements of 25 for the Weathered 10mm Pistol and Mercenary's Grenade Launcher, respectively.) |
| 376 | ** The Recharger Rifle. You're most likely to find this weapon at the beginning of the game, and it does lower damage than many other energy rifles. However, it makes up for this by being rechargeable, rather than using energy ammo. That's right, it's an energy weapon that has ''infinite ammo''. Kinda makes up for the slight shortage of energy ammo in the game, huh? It falls behind the other energy weapons when you're able to more easily find ammo later in the game, however. The humble Laser Rifle is one of those better weapons but still qualifies. It can see you through right to the end of the game if you train well in Energy Weapons and keep an eye out for its weapon mods that increase its damage output to ridiculous levels. |
| 377 | *** The Recharger Pistol veers surprisingly close to DiscOneNuke status, with the same recharging capabilities as its larger counterpart, but for a slightly lower damage. In exchange, it's just under half the weight and at max charge has almost twice the shots. It also fires significantly faster. |
| 378 | ** Several Perks which don't do anything flashy but pay off in the long run qualify. In particular: |
| 379 | *** Strong Back: +50 to your carrying capacity. Helps immensely when hauling loot, but really stands out in Hardcore mode where everything (including ammo and healing items) has weight. |
| 380 | *** Pack Rat: reduces the weight of anything that weighs 2 or less to half their weight. A hardcore mode must since that included ammo. |
| 381 | *** Educated: Grants +2 skill points per level. Best taken as soon as it is available to maximize the skill points you can get before hitting the level cap. |
| 382 | *** Grunt: +25% damage with any weapon even remotely military, and many quality weapons qualify. |
| 383 | *** Rapid Reload: -25% to your reload time. Can be an absolutely lifesaver, especially if you prefer using slow-to-reload weapons like revolvers and lever-action rifles. |
| 384 | *** Jury Rigging: Allows you to use any weapon of a certain class to repair any other weapon in that class, rather than needing an exact copy. Need to repair your precious (and expensive) anti-materiel rifle? Use ''a varmint rifle'' since they're both in the "bolt rifle" family. Use that caravan shotgun you never needed! Same family! Hell, ''use a child's BB Gun to fix your military-grade rifle''! |
| 385 | *** Light Step: In Hardcore mode at least. It allows you to walk over traps without setting them off and will save you a fortune in Doctor's Bags. This becomes doubly useful in both the ''Dead Money'' and ''Lonesome Road'' [=DLCs=], where the former has many floor-based traps where you least expect them and the latter has the extremely powerful Satchel Charges which do ridiculous damage and have very short proximity fuses. You'll be very glad to have this perk if you choose it. |
| 386 | *** Toughness and Stonewall: They're fairly generic perks that give a little bit of extra Damage Threshold (+2DT overall and +5DT against melee attacks, respectively), and while their increases are minor, when playing on higher difficulties they are extremely important when you want as much defense as you can get. |
| 387 | *** Center of Mass: +15% Damage when [[AttackOnTheHeart targeting the torso]] with V.A.T.S. The torso is by far the easiest body part to target using V.A.T.S., so to players who rely a lot on the system, the increase in damage is very useful in taking down enemies more quickly rather than simply relying on Headshots & Critical Hits to do the job. |
| 388 | ** The simpler crafting recipes. Cooking meat into steaks and converting ammo into the type you need is always useful and worthwhile. |
| 389 | ** From ''Dead Money'', the Cosmic Knives. Not only are they easy to find, but you can clean one [[IncendiaryExponent and superheat it later]] to give it a massive stat boost and the power to set things on fire. Helps out in the first few quests, when you have almost no ammo or items. The Knife Spear (a stick with knifes taped on it) can actually carry you through the entire DLC, barring a few instances where shooting things is necessary. |
| 390 | *** The Knife Spear also comes in Throwing Varieties, meaning shooting is only required for things that they simply can't destroy, such as speakers. |
| 391 | *** The Police Pistol in ''Dead Money'' as well. All the other weapons are exotic and powerful, and this is just a bog-standard revolver. However, it hits hard enough to easily dismember Ghosts, and the ammo is everywhere. |
| 392 | ** From the ''Lonesome Road'' DLC comes the flare gun. Doesn't have the greatest damage, but uses a fairly common ammo type only used by a few other weapons in the entire game, and has the distinct power to ''scare deathclaws''. |
| 393 | ** The humble throwing spear is an excellent choice of weapon for a melee character looking to stealthily take down opponents from a distance, and supplies are easily replenished by killing Legion Mooks. |
| 394 | ** A high Luck skill. It doesn't seem like much, but the extra critical hits could save your life, and with 9 Luck it becomes nearly impossible to lose at the blackjack table. |
| 395 | ** Why on earth would anyone want to hoard Scrap Metal, Scrap Electronics, wrenches, wonderglue, and duct tape? Because them's the ingredients to craft Weapon Repair Kits, and they are almost ''everywhere.'' Using them instead of paying for repairs can save you thousands of caps per weapon. |
| 396 | ** The personality matrices in The Sink can turn unusable items like toasters and mugs into useful crafting components. The Book Chute in particular can turn otherwise useless books into blank books, which can in turn be used to make skill books. |
| 397 | ** Hand Loaded ammunition. A few minutes faffing around at a reloading bench will turn standard ammo into better ammo. The ways in which it is better vary from round to round. |
| 398 | ** You can rent a room in Novac early in the game, where you can safely keep all of your gear. It's not as glamourous as the casino hotel rooms which become available later, but it's much quicker to get in and out, because it's on the outside of a building instead of two or three loading screens deep inside one. Also, unlike the casino suites, it's located almost in the center of the map, which makes it very useful if you don't like to use fast travel. |
| 399 | ** The Mad Bomber perk may seem like it falls into AwesomeButImpractical, but it allow the crafting of MFC Grenades. Three Microfusion Cells, which are not that expensive, creates a single MFC Grenade, with low power and a '''HUGE''' blast radius, surpassed by few other explosive. This means you can crank out hundreds of what are essentially cheap, wide ranged plasma grenades at crowds to watch them dissapear. |
| 400 | * BottomlessMagazines: Companions have a form of this, where their default guns use [[http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Magical_companion_ammo "magical companion ammo"]] which never runs out. However, it only works with their normal gun - if you want them to use something stronger, you have to supply ammo for it too. |
| 401 | ** The Recharger Pistol and Rifle use a "microfusion breeder" that constantly recharges itself for ammo; the tradeoff is that they are prone to {{Overheating}} and are some of the weakest energy weapons in the game[[note]]Although you can make quite the damage with them with the right perks and the Gun Runners Arsenal Add-On introduces the MF Hyperbreeder Alpha, a buffed version of the Recharger Pistol[[/note]]. Euclid's C-Finder works much the same, though since it calls in [[DeathFromAbove a laser strike from space]], it only holds one charge and takes a full day to recharge that. |
| 402 | * {{Bowdlerise}}: |
| 403 | ** Just like in ''VideoGame/Fallout3'', the Fat Man launcher is renamed "Nuka Launcher" in the Japanese translation, due to [[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki what happened to Hiroshima]]. However, the "Little Boy" mod for the Fat Man is [[SubvertedTrope left as is]]. |
| 404 | ** Also in the Japanese version, the Cannibal perk is renamed "Mystic Power" with its picture and description removing all references to cannibalism. |
| 405 | * BrainInAJar: The Robobrains. There's also the Think Tanks of ''Old World Blues'', who come with monitors for eyes and a mouth. Amazingly enough, [[spoiler:there's '''your''' brain, which you can actually talk to (and [[ScrewYourself come onto]]).]] |
| 406 | * BrainTheft: At the beginning of the ''Old World Blues'' DLC the Courier's brain along with their heart and spine are removed and replaced with advanced technology.Near the end of the story the player can choose to keep the implanted technology or have the organs returned with the help of a Auto-Doc Machine. |
| 407 | * BribingYourWayToVictory: The ''Courier's Stash'' and ''Gun Runners' Arsenal'' DLC, the former moreso than the latter. ''Courier's Stash'' is a compilation of several pre-order bonus packs which gives the player four full item sets at the start of the game, including a bottomless water canteen which reduces the amount of water you need to drink. No matter which set of armor you choose, you're a lot better off than in the vanilla game. ''Gun Runners' Arsenal'' adds a ton of new weapons to be purchased from shops, as well as weapon mods for them. At least these you actually have to buy in-game, and they are ''friggin' EXPENSIVE!'' That said, once you've paid for some of the better ones, they are every bit as dangerous as advertised. |
| 408 | ** Mitigated with the ''Ultimate Edition'' which comes with the above mentioned [=DLC=] plus the four story related [=DLC=] pre-installed, and can be bought for about the same amount of money, if not less so, as the vanilla game. |
| 409 | * BrickJoke: |
| 410 | ** In ''Old World Blues'', normally anyone that ventures into Big MT gets captured and has their brain extracted. This is supposed to leave their intellect intact (somehow?) but the process is flawed and leaves all subjects except you as a mindless lobotomite. The reason that it works correctly on you is [[spoiler:because your brain has an unusual anomaly that causes the brain extraction to work properly - an anomaly caused by getting shot in the head at the very beginning of the game.]] |
| 411 | ** ''Lonesome Road'' has one that goes back even farther - [=ED-E=] has some recordings that he plays at various points on the way to the Divide. One of them is of him picking up "Jingle Jingle Jangle" on a radio station and then getting shot twice - which happened in one of the pre-release trailers for New Vegas. |
| 412 | * BrokenAesop: |
| 413 | ** The ''Dead Money'' DLC is all about hammering home the aesop of letting go of the past and not letting one's greed get the better of them. Which would be a good aesop--if the player ever had any opportunity to actually leave Sierra Madre; once you step into the DLC, you never once have the option of saying "Screw this, it's not worth it", given that you're stripped of all of your gear and get an explosive instadeath slave collar locked around your neck. After much frustration, many a player would be more than happy to leave at any point in ''Dead Money'', [[ButThouMust if they had a choice.]] |
| 414 | ** The overall theme of the DLC ''Dead Money'' is how greed can make people unable to let go of their own vices, and it gets them killed. To illustrate this point, the casino vault is filled with dozens of gold bars that are far too heavy for you to carry to escape alive, proving that even the player must set aside their greed in order to move on... except that it's fairly easy to exploit the game mechanics to get away with all the gold without a scratch. (Good timing with a Stealth Boy or using Elijah's dismembered body as a bag are two tricks.) And even without the gold, there's a ton of money to be made by looting everything in the Villa. So the real Aesop is "Greed can get you killed if you follow it blindly; choose your battles and KnowWhenToFoldEm, and you'll get away scot-free." |
| 415 | ** The notion of "letting go" in the DLC also doesn't account for the player picking up a Snow Globe in Salida Del Sol that (depending on your Barter skill) awards up to ''20,000 caps'', a Casino that provides automatic comp tickets in the Mojave (accounting for enough chips to either trivialize healing or weapon repair, or trade for items that can be sold for absurd amounts of profit) or vendors with functionally-unlimited stacks of Pre-War Money, which you can trade all the junk around the Madre in for. The question is not if you get a MontyHaul, but ''when''. |
| 416 | ** The Sunset Sarsaparilla star cap quest. It's supposed to be a little parable about allowing greed to override your common sense (and, in Allen Marks' case, basic human decency), but the "treasure" vault contains thousands of bottle caps (which would be worthless to a modern person, but amount to a considerable amount of money in the ''Fallout'' games) and a unique, very powerful laser pistol, so it's hard to argue that your quest for the star caps was a waste of time and effort. |
| 417 | * BrokenBird: Veronica is screwed no matter how you finish her personal quest. |
| 418 | ** Do nothing? [[spoiler:She gets exiled anyway.]] |
| 419 | ** Convince her to stay? [[spoiler:She ends up alienating herself from her fellows and hides in libraries, just reading.]] |
| 420 | ** Convince her to leave? [[spoiler:The Brotherhood ''butchers innocent Followers on the mere possibility of them receiving Brotherhood knowledge'' and she spends the rest of her life as a lonely wanderer.]] |
| 421 | * BrutalBonusLevel: ''Lonesome Road'' has the Courier's Mile, which appears after you launch the missile from the Ashton silo. The area is irradiated to hell and back, and is swarming with Deathclaws and Irradiated Marked Men, the latter of which are much tougher than normal Marked Men and regenerate their HP thanks to the radiation. This area is not required to complete the main quest, but there are two warheads here, which must be detonated as part of the Warhead Hunter achievement. Bring plenty of Stealth Boys, Rad-Away, and sniper/anti-materiel ammo. At the end, if you launch the nukes at NCR and/or Legion territory, you gain access to two more irradiated areas housing the {{Optional Boss}}es Colonel Royez and Gaius Magnus, who have even more rapid HP regeneration in addition to heavy armor and maxed-out SPECIAL stats. |
| 422 | * BulletTime: VATS of course. Turbo and the Implant GRX perk will also produce this effect. |
| 423 | * BullyingADragon: |
| 424 | ** Keith, a hustler at the Aerotech business park, gets cornered by Captain Parker after you provide Parker with evidence of Keith's misdeeds. Parker tries to arrest Keith, who resists. Keith then starts taunting Parker about how his wife left him. Which prompts Parker to let fly with his service rifle. Taunting a man armed with a military rifle about his estranged wife... [[TooDumbToLive smooth.]] |
| 425 | ** No matter how high-level you are, how much gear or how many companions you have, thugs, thieves and animals will attack you. |
| 426 | ** Averted by thugs in Freeside if the Courier has a bad reputation in Freeside. The thugs will try to rob you, realize who you are, and run away begging for their lives. |
| 427 | * BunnyEarsLawyer: All over the place, as is typical for ''Fallout''. |
| 428 | ** Chris Haversham is a paranoid hypochondriac who somehow convinced himself that he was turning into a ghoul because he was going bald, but has the technical skills to get three pre-War spacecraft up and running. |
| 429 | ** Jack, of the Great Khans, may be [[TheStoner permanently high]] and [[TotallyRadical speak entirely in 'hippy' slang]], but he's also a pharmacology prodigy whose merchandise keeps his entire tribe above water. |
| 430 | ** The King is an [[ElvisImpersonator Elvis impersonator]] [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot who's also a gang leader]], and does a startlingly good job of keeping his men in line while keeping a close eye on his neighbourhood's welfare. Most people who've met him comment on how he's [[MagneticHero 'got that special something'.]] |
| 431 | ** Lily may only be connected to reality by the most slender of threads, but can either sneak past or slaughter pretty much anything that's put in front of her. |
| 432 | ** Cook-Cook is a very dark example, being a pyromaniac, drug addict, sadist, implicit zoophile and explicit serial rapist who also happens to be a legitimately excellent chef (his signature recipe, which you can learn, is one of the most nourishing meals around despite being made from completely everyday ingredients). |
| 433 | ** All of the Think Tank are utterly insane (and, it is made very clear, had plenty of personal issues even before centuries of having their brains slosh around in drug-infused amniotic fluid) but also cutting-edge experts in their specialist fields. |
| 434 | * ButchLesbian: Corporal Betsy from Camp [=McCarran=]. Just OneOfTheBoys, though she's been hitting on every woman in the Camp (including you, if the Courier is a woman) after having been [[spoiler:raped by Cook-Cook. One side-quest is getting her to see a psychologist.]] |
| 435 | * ButForMeItWasTuesday: In the ''Lonesome Road'' DLC, a single ordinary package the Courier delivered prior to the start of the game is revealed to have [[spoiler:accidentally caused the destruction of the Divide, robbed Ulysses of his home, taught him the power certain individuals hold to radically reshape the world, and sparked off some rather dangerous obsessions]]. When Ulysses tells you what that package did, you can respond that the package was so unremarkable to you, you can't even recall it clearly. [[note]]You may also have amnesia from a gunshot wound to the head [[/note]] |
| 436 | * ButThouMust: |
| 437 | ** The courier could have claimed the fateful delivery at the beginning of the game was a flubbed job, but the Mojave Express has a very strict delivery policy and enforces it with freelancer teams sent to hunt down and kill non-co-operative couriers. [[GameplayAndStorySegregation Not that you ever see any.]] |
| 438 | ** If you opt out of working for House, every other ending path requires the player to kill or disable him. He cannot be talked down, and you cannot disable him without pulling him out of his pod, condemning him to a slow death. If you choose to work for House, on the other hand, he requires you to destroy the Brotherhood of Steel at Hidden Valley. In both cases your dialogue options are fairly limited, which can be odd for Speech-centric characters -- even if your Speech skills can't talk everyone out of their established positions, it's unusual within the game that it doesn't even let you try.[[note]]An option to tell House to disregard the Brotherhood is present in the gamefiles and works in game via mods that re-activate the lines.[[/note]] |
| 439 | ** There's no way to get through the Lonesome Road quest without setting off the nuclear missile at the Ashton silo. |
| 440 | * ByNoIMeanYes: The Super Mutants on Black Mountain Radio say that, contrary to popular opinion, they don't hate humans at all and they even broadcast a warning to avoid their security staff -- because they're under orders to kill humans on sight. "And they say we don't care about them!" |
| 441 | [[/folder]] |
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