History Videogame / Fallout3

It's 2277, and Vault 101 is an okay place to live. It's an underground paradise that saved humanity from [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt the Great War]] two centuries ago, and has been home to everyone within it for generations. Your life is okay, too. Your father (Creator/LiamNeeson) is the head doctor and an all-around NiceGuy, and your mother... [[MissingMom well, she was probably nice too.]] You grew up more or less normally, despite the antics of resident bully [[GreaserDelinquents Butch DeLoria]] and his gang, [[GangOfBullies the Tunnel Snakes]]. Your best friend [[GirlNextDoor Amata]] made that easier, even if her father, the Vault's Overseer, is a bit of an [[PapaWolf over-protective]] {{jerk|ass}}. Still, you're lucky to have grown up here, with the [[CrapsackWorld Wasteland]] far behind the thick Vault door... if it even ''exists.'' Nobody knows for sure, because in Vault 101, [[ClosedCircle no one ever enters, and no one ever leaves.]]

* KickTheSonOfABitch: Normally, townicide is a huge KickTheDog moment for the player, but if the town is question happens to be the [[MadeASlave slaver den]] of [[WretchedHive Paradise Falls]]...

** One serious screw-up is Lincoln's Repeater, a unique [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_rifle Henry lever-action rifle]] chambered for .44 Magnum ammunition (same as the aforementioned SniperPistol uses). One little problem: a Henry repeater of that era would be blown apart by modern .44 Magnum bullets.

It's 2277, and Vault 101 is an okay place to live. It's an underground paradise that saved humanity from [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt the Great War]] two centuries ago, and has been home to everyone within it for generations. Your life is okay, too. Your father is the head doctor and an all-around NiceGuy, and your mother... [[MissingMom well, she was probably nice too.]] You grew up more or less normally, despite the antics of resident bully [[GreaserDelinquents Butch DeLoria]] and his gang, [[GangOfBullies the Tunnel Snakes]]. Your best friend [[GirlNextDoor Amata]] made that easier, even if her father, the Vault's Overseer, is a bit of an [[PapaWolf over-protective]] {{jerk|ass}}. Still, you're lucky to have grown up here, with the [[CrapsackWorld Wasteland]] far behind the thick Vault door... if it even ''exists.'' Nobody knows for sure, because in Vault 101, [[ClosedCircle no one ever enters, and no one ever leaves.]]

* ThrowawayCountry: In ''Mothership Zeta'', you can use the DeathRay to zap part of [[CanadaEh Canada]].

** If you've reached Good karma, the Talon Company Mercs will go after your head, calling you a "holier-than-thou white-knight". It matters little for some people though, since it also means more things to kill. That turns into more XP, ammo, armor, and weapons, as well as [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential more things]] to shoot at. (And if you have Reily's ranger armor as your main armor, the Talions represent an endless source of combat armor to repair.)

** If you've reached Good karma, the Talon Company Mercs will go after your head, calling you a "holier-than-thou white-knight". It matters little for some people though, since it also means more things to kill. That turns into more XP, ammo, armor, and weapons, as well as [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential more things]] to shoot at.

** The Talon Company (an organization of ruthless mercenaries who get paid to ensure the Wastelands remain a chaotic, lawless, and disorganized place and [[ForTheEvulz take great joy]] [[AxCrazy in their work]]) became the "Compagnie Talon" in the French version of the game. Thing is, in French, the word "talon" refers to the foot's heel; the talons of an eagle would be called "serres" or, at the very least, "griffes". Given their nature, the translation of a "{{Heel}}" Company is also rather fitting.

** The Vault 101 Security guards you have to gun down during "Escape!" (unless you let them be killed by Radroaches). Even the ''game'' considers them this during this quest, changing their karma level to Evil so you won't be penalized for killing them in self-defense.

** Flak and Shrapnel share a bed and run a store together in Rivet City, and [[spoiler:one of the slavers at Paradise Falls]] describes Flak as an "old queen". If you [[spoiler: enslave Flak]], Shrapnel will start wandering the wastes to look for him due to a scripting error that requires them to stay close to each other, though some like the bug because it adds CharacterDevelopment and a {{Tearjerker}} into the game.

* MegaCorp: The Capital Wasteland houses the former headquarters of a corporation that is guarded by robotic sentries with shoot to kill orders, ran trial tests that resulted in several deaths, and is more concerned with stock loss than the death or dismemberment of its employees. No, they are not a military contractor or a pharmaceutical company. They make ''soft drinks''. It's [[spoiler:''Nuka-Cola''.]] The glowing blue stuff on the floor is their newest soft drink which has the radioactive Strontium-20 as an additive to give it its stylish glow and the testing for it led to the death of everyone trying out the first batch.

* MysteriousProtector: The Mysterious Stranger, a [[TrenchcoatBrigade trenchcoat-and-fedora-clad]] man who shows up in VATS occasionally to kill a target for you. He's so mysterious that he'll pop up in places like a fortified Enclave bunker, a computer simulation, or even outer space.
* MysteryMeat: You might come across "[[http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Strange_meat Strange Meat]]". You might ''not'', however, want to eat that. [[spoiler:[[ImAHumanitarian It's human flesh.]]]]

** Averted in the original game, to the anger of the fans -- [[spoiler:none of your radiation-immune teammates will enter the radiation-flooded problem area, not even the one who did a similar action just a few quests earlier, instead coming up with excuses about it being your destiny]]. That was fixed in the expansion pack, but the voice-over still implies you're a coward for not choosing to die. Pragmatism is dead in the wasteland.
** If you ask Sarah, a Brotherhood of Steel paladin, to make the sacrifice, she snaps "[[MenAreTheExpendableGender What happened to chivalry?]]" (Oddly, if you are a woman, she still says this.) Err, chivalry, as in the idea that a KnightInShiningArmor is meant to protect others? Her snappy attitude probably comes from the dialogue option asking her to make the sacrifice instead of yourself being incredibly rude, and to her credit she does ultimately do it.

** No one thought the Enclave would still be active 35 years after the destruction of their primary HQ in Fallout 2. It makes it all the more shocking when their power armored troops fly in on vertibirds and seize control of Project Purity.

** New DLC enemies such as [[BigCreepyCrawlies Albino Radscorpions]], Feral Ghoul Reavers, and Super Mutant Overlords have massive pools of hit points. At later levels they won't be individual threats, but they still take forever to kill. [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard Just for you though]], as most DLC foes can deal extra points of damage that isn't reduced by your Damage Resistance[[note]]some guns have 15 extra points per shot while double-barrel shotguns have a whopping 35 '''per pellet'''[[/note]] and many travel in groups with others of their type (such as Point Lookout's Tribals and Swampfolk) or weaker variants (such as Super Mutant Overlords and Feral Ghoul Reavers). Hope you brought a lot of Stimpaks and Med-X.

* ShortRangeLongRangeWeapon: All the guns in the game have an ArbitraryWeaponRange, but it can be especially noticeable with the sniper rifle. Sniper-type players are known to fail to make long-distance shots that are quite possible in other games, never mind RealLife. The bullet simply disappears before it reaches its target. However, just because you see the bullet disappear doesn't mean it won't hit it's target (assuming that it is indeed within the maximum range). It doesn't matter how far away you are from the target, the game WILL notify you if you score a critical hit.

* StylisticSuck: Jingwei, a Chinese general, is depicted in General Chase's Anchorage simulation as [[InterchangeableAsianCultures committing sepuku when talked down]] (although he ''did'' really have his sword styled as a katana) and speaking Chinese in a fake and almost incomprehensible accent. It's unclear if it was Bethesda doing a poor job on his voicing, or if Chase didn't bother to make the simulation accurate at all (considering it's implied that the whole thing might be a fabricated retelling of Operation Anchorage.)

** Roy Phillips, pre-War cop turned post-War ghoul, needs your help to get into Tenpenny Tower. Do it peacefully and he'll murder everyone inside with his pack of feral ghouls because he was going to anyway. Kill him afterwards and you'll get a karma hit (unless its a sneak attack) because Three-Dog portrays him as a "victim" of a group cruel racists.

** Downplayed. If a weapon is the same caliber as a given round, it can fire it, (e.g. .32 rounds work in both the .32 revolver and the hunting rifle). This is not ''quite'' how it works in RealLife, but it's a trifle more realistic than 'one size fits all' bullets.
** One serious screw-up is Lincoln's Repeater, a unique [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_rifle Henry lever-action rifle]] chambered for .44 Magnum ammunition (same as the aforementioned SniperPistol uses). One little problem: a Henry repeater of that era would be blown apart by modern .44 bullets.
** The Alien blaster along with the Firelince variant use "alien power cells". Come ''Mothership Zeta'' the Captain's Sidearm, a pristine Alien Blaster, uses "alien power ''modules''" along with the other weapons found aboard. So both use universal ammo but not the ''same'' universal ammo...

** Impartial Mediation: +30 to Speech skill at neutral karma, but remaining at neutral is tedious. Speech challenges can be exploited for a 100% chance of success, either through save scumming or maxing out the speech stat.

** Puppies!: If Dogmeat(or Dogmeat's Puppy) dies, Dogmeat's Puppy appears outside Vault 101 after a few days. Only available in Broken Steel, which causes Dogmeat('s Puppy) to have ridiculously high HP so he'll likely never die anyway. Useful only for the follower exploits.

** No Weaknesses: All [=SPECIAL=] stats below five increase to five: not bad in the unlikely case that you haven't used bobbleheads or Intensive Training to make it irrelevant, but made moot with the Almost Perfect perk (available just a few levels later) which raises all [=SPECIAL=] to at least nine.

** Nerves of Steel: This is simply glitched. It's supposed to increase AP regeneration, but only by a rate of one per ''minute'', while AP can usually regenerate from empty to full in half that. Even if it did work, useless since by the time you can get it, you probably have Grim Reaper's Sprint which fully restores AP when you kill something in V.A.T.S.
** Nuclear Anomaly: At twenty HP or less, you lose all your radiation, your health rises to twenty HP exactly, and you create a small nuclear blasts where you're standing. Although it's an amusing gimmick, anything that could drive you to under twenty HP at level thirty is probably going to be dealing '''more''' than twenty damage per hit, the blast re-irradiates you, damages your clothing, often cripples your limbs, damages any friendly NPC in its radius, and occasionally it glitches up and fails to provide the healing; causing you to kill yourself.

*** Disarming the bomb is presented as a difficult task (25 explosive skill, not necessarily something every player has by this stage of the game) while making it explode is a simple matter of plugging in a "fusion pulse generator" (as mentioned above). In reality ''disarming'' a nuclear bomb is pretty simple. For a nuclear bomb to work you need ''very'' precise electronically-controlled conventional explosions all working to compress a fissile core. If these explosions are out of sync the conventional explosives will just demolish the bomb. Disarming one would simply be a case of ripping out a bunch of wires (some modern nuclear bombs are designed to go off if you try to tamper with them). Restoring it to functionality would similarly require making sure the electronics and conventional explosives all work ''juuuuust'' right (there's a reason the Manhattan Project was such a difficult endeavor).
** Vault 87's entrance is flesh-meltingly radioactive, capping at 4000 rads/second (for comparison you drop dead at 1000 rads) because it suffered a direct hit from a nuclear weapon 200 years ago. In reality anything ''that'' radioactive wouldn't stay radioactive for 200 years. That's what radioactivity ''means''. As a rule of thumb, the more radioactive an isotope is, the shorter its half-life will be (the amount of time it takes to lose half of its radioactivity).

* DifficultButAwesome: Killing a super mutant behemoth with a single head shot from The Terrible Shotgun. Doing it is amazing to see, doing it is extremely difficult as it requires you to have Better Criticals, 100 in your Small Guns skill, the gun in pristine condition, be sneaking, and hit ''all nine pellets'' in it's face ''outside'' of V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec's '''''Assisted Targeting System''')'' so each of the pellets get the critical damage bonus. Whiff that one shot and you'll have a pissed off giant trying to find you/finding you to beat your face in with a fire hydrant.

** A player with Good Karma can eventually get the the Lawbringer Perk and work with the Regulators. If you bring them the finger of an Evil aligned person, you get a small fee of 5 to 10 caps and a small Karma boost. Given that you will constantly run into "evil" Talon Merc squads and raiders while exploring, this pays much better than it’s Evil counterpart. IT also you get a {{Badass Longcoat}} for your troubles.

* KatanasAreJustBetter: Downplayed. The katana in the game is well above average melee weapon, but it's outclassed by the [[FlamingSword Shishkebob]] and the [[ChainsawGood Ripper]]. It's only advantage over them is its relative ease of upkeep in terms of repairs.