History DethroningMoment / Fallout

War. War never changes. However, the survivors of [[VideoGame/{{Fallout}} the wasteland]] are bound to make a few mistakes that prove that [[DarthWiki/DethroningMomentOfSuck their game was rigged from the start]]. These are the moments when we can feel exactly the same.

* Tropers/DrZulu2011: One of the game's biggest criticism was its ending where it forces you to make a choice between making a HeroicSacrifice or sending Sarah Lyons. While they did answer to the backlash with the Broken Steel DLC, where you can sent Fawkes, the Super Mutant immune to radiations or Charon who, as a ghoul, is cured by radiation. That's good and all that jazz... except that, in the epilogue, Creator/RonPerlman chatises you for not following your father's destiny. God forbids that I play smart, something that previous Fallout games not only shows to be done, but is more rewarding than picking the obvious choice. And it's not like going into the purification chamber killed you in the new version anyway. It retcons your death and have wake up in the Brotherhood's headquarters regardless of your choice.

* Tropers/{{cricri3007}}: The "East Chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel", which is just a way to say "a slightly nicer Enclave". It may be more in line with the attitude of the West chapters, but not with the East one introduced in ''VideoGame/Fallout3'', who had abandoned his initial mission to help people. To top it off, Owyn and Sarah Lyons are dead while the Lone Wanderer is not even mentioned. Congratulations, Bethesda! You made one of the very few good factions into what they were fighting and made the entire third game [[ShootTheShaggyDog completely pointless]]! Thus ruining any enjoyment I would have of replaying it on top of making sure I would not buy Fallout 4 for a long time.

* Tropers/{{cricri3007}}: The "East Chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel", which is just a way to say "a slightly nicer Enclave". It may be more in line with the attitude of the West chapters, but not with the East one introduced in ''{{VideoGame/Fallout3}}'', who had abandoned his initial mission to help people. To top it off, Owyn and Sarah Lyons are dead while the Lone Wanderer is not even mentioned. Congratulations, Bethesda! You made one of the very few good factions into what they were fighting and made the entire third game [[ShootTheShaggyDog completely pointless]]! Thus ruining any enjoyment I would have of replaying it on top of making sure I would not buy Fallout 4 for a long time.

* Tropers/DrZulu2011: One of the game's biggest criticism was its ending where it forces you to make a choice between making a HeroicSacrifice or sending Sarah Lyons. While they did answer to the backlash with the Broken Steel DLC, where you can sent Fawkes, the Super Mutant immune to radiations or Charon who, as a ghoul, is cured by radiation. That's good and all that jazz... except that, in the epilogue, Creator/RobPerlman chatises you for not following your father's destiny. God forbids that I play smart, something that previous Fallout games not only shows to be done, but is more rewarding than picking the obvious choice. And it's not like going into the purification chamber killed you in the new version anyway. It retcons your death and have wake up in the Brotherhood's headquarters regardless of your choice.

** Tropers/{{cricri3007}}: The "East Chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel", which is just a way to say "a slightly nicer Enclave". It may be more in line with the attitude of the West chapters, but not with the East one introduced in ''{{VideoGame/Fallout3}}'', who had abandoned his initial mission to help people. To top it off, Owyn and Sarah Lyons are dead while the Lone Wanderer is not even mentioned. Congratulations, Bethesda! You made one of the very few good factions into what they were fighting and made the entire third game [[ShootTheShaggyDog completely pointless]]! Thus ruining any enjoyment I would have of replaying it on top of making sure I would not buy Fallout 4 for a long time.
** Tropers/{{Crazyrabbits}}: The "Kid in a Fridge" sidequest is so bad that it's been speculated by multiple reviewers that the whole thing was a [[SpringtimeForHitler deliberate joke]] on the part of Todd Howard's team just to see what they could get away with. While walking around University Point, you come across a kid named Billy who's stuck in a refrigerator. Upon opening it, you discover that Billy is a Ghoul, and has been ''locked inside the fridge for 200 years''. [[FridgeLogic How Billy stayed in there for so long without anyone opening the fridge (as it's sitting right beside a main road), how he's a Ghoul when he was in a lead-lined refrigerator (he shouldn't have been affected by the radiation) and why he didn't go crazy from being trapped in a confined space for centuries is never addressed.]] After this, you discover that not only are his parents still alive, but they've ''[[ContrivedCoincidence also]]'' become Ghouls, and are living in the exact same house just a short distance from where Billy was found. Again, why his parents apparently never searched the area around thoroughly for all those years is never brought. And then you get another ContrivedCoincidence when a member of Gunners immediately tries to kidnap Billy for slave labor, and one of the options is to convince him to leave, which apparently causes Billy's family to believe that they'll be permanently safe. "Kid in a Fridge" is typically held up as an example of ''4'''s subpar writing, and looking at the ridiculous contrivances in this mission, it's not hard to see why.
** Tropers/{{Tinandel_1}}: For me, it was the most bizzare (and vaguely sociopathic) thing about this game that set me off. New Vegas spoiled us rotten with giving us lots of meaningful, impactful choices both in dialog and in action that would influence the world around us. I, like most gamers, strongly disliked all the railroading of ''Fallout 4'' on my first playthrough but tolerated it. Then, for fun, I fired up a new game a couple of weeks later and decided to try out being a complete monster. The very first convenient target for my anger was Preston and his band of survivors in Concord. And I promptly discovered...! .... That they are all immortal. You can lay into them as much as you like, and they'll react and take damage accordingly. But reduce any of their HP to 0 and they just fall down, pant for a couple of seconds, and then stand back up and patiently resume waiting for the player to solve all their problems for them. And again, this is all well before they join the player's settlement, so it's not like it's Ally Immortality for convenience's sake or anything. You can't do ANYTHING to them except talk to them and accept their quest; they can be ignored, and you can cancel out of the conversation with them. But if you do indeed talk to them, then you don't even have the choice to refuse their request. Literally the only possible interaction you can have with the first significant group of characters in the game after getting out of the prologue, is to just do whatever they tell you to. For me, it really hammered home more than anything else just how little agency the game gives you and how little anything the player does actually matters - in this supposedly 'open world' game.
** Tropers/{{Benbeasted}}: The fact that the wasteland goes on after the ending. [[spoiler: No matter what you choose, you have to blow up the tower for extremely short-sighted reasons to force a nuclear explosion and the "war never changes" line.]] After which, all that happens is the same tired fetch quests. Nothing fun and faction-specific such as, say, building a safehouse specifically for third generation synths to prosper. The absolute worst was the immediate disappointment following the ending. Though long, New Vegas had modular endings that showed the lasting effects you had on the Mojave and the people who lived there. Places were razed or prospered, people were disgraced or honored, and everything you did mattered. Nothing at all for Fallout 4. Nothing about whether or not Piper's sister ends up following in her footsteps, nothing about Cait dying if you leave her quest unfinished, nothing about Strong finding the milk of human kindness. The game just finishes and you fuck around the wastes doing fuck all.
** Riley1sCool: ''VideoGame/Fallout4''. Where to find my worst moment. Oh, god, this was so hard to find, but I have to count Kellogg's battle as this. As somebody who had played ''New Vegas'' with a high Speech and Energy Weapons skill, I was shocked to find that Charisma in ''4'' was positively useless in most situations. And while I understand that ''VideoGame/Fallout2'' had a major boss who couldn't be talked down, that was different. Kellogg? An AntiVillain who, if spared, could have been a good plot element, and could have further tied this game in to the Mojave. Instead, I was forced to kill him, and, as someone who was intending to play for the Railroad, I quickly caught on to the massive amount of killing this game would force me into. I simply sighed, quit, and deleted this buggy game.
** Tropers/{{SuperFeatherYoshi}}: Oh boy, ''VideoGame/Fallout4''. I can talk about so much: Bethesda's inability to keep even its own lore straight, the removal of RP elements from an RPG. But instead, I'm talking about what I felt was the biggest flaw - the factions. Fallout 4 has ''no'' likable factions. The Minutemen are generic good guys who are somehow even less interesting than the [=BoS=] in VideoGame/Fallout3, the [=BoS=] is a bunch of self-righteous, militaristic zealots, the Railroad has no goal beyond "saving synths" and absolutely no plan for the Commonwealth as a whole, and the Institute is so ridiculously, unnecessarily evil to the point of being comedic: They were planning to commit multiple homicides just to test some pumpkin seeds, they wiped out an entire settlement for some pre-war research data that they could have bought for a few hundred caps, and they created the Commonwealth's entire super mutant population by dumping their FEV experiment subjects onto the surface for seemingly no reason. While the factions of ''New Vegas'' are all seriously flawed, they are also all unique and interesting in their own way. Fallout 4 simply has no interesting and sympathetic faction, and I think that summarizes the problems with the game as a whole.
** Tropers/{{DanielKay}}: With Bethesda employees claiming they are fans of the works of Lovecraft it's pulled into question if they even read Pickman's Model with how the nod to it was implemented in ''VideoGame/Fallout4''. In the original story Pickman is described as an extreme realist painter who uses no abstraction or stylization in his works and, aside his morbid motives and some mannerisms, appears largely normal. In the game Pickman's art is not only nothing more than demonic, low detail, distorted scribbling but he himself [[spoiler: is a murderer who uses human blood to paint]]. While it is only meant as an homage for the game being set in Boston it still shows very little regard for the source material.

* {{Tropers/SDRim_6}}: The Tenpenny Tower quest from ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}''. The quest revolves around a pre-war fancy hotel that a group of ghouls (mutated people that are immortal and look like zombies) want to get in while the owner Alistair Tenpenny refuses them entry. Throughout the entire quest it paints the ghouls as the downtrodden good guys who just want a home while it paints everyone in the tower as racist assholes. But that isn't the real moment of suck. The real moment is taking the peaceful resolution to the quest and letting both the ghouls and the humans live together through negotiating. However, when you return a few days later, all of the humans are dead including the ones who were indifferent to, or even liked ghouls. Okay, grey and grey morality, I guess I can kill their leader who committed mass murder... The game begs to differ. When you kill their leader Roy Phillips you take a hit to your karma therefore making it bad that you killed a mass murderer. It's just one of those moments where someone tries to shove black and white morality in a place that has clear grey and grey, black and grey, or even black and black (depending on how you view the situation) morality. It's safe to say I'm not the only one who hated this moment.
* ''VideoGame/Fallout4'':