Archive Panic: On the one hand, the series is good at keeping everything contained within the games, with there being no novels and very little in the way of other supplemental material like comics. On the other, the series' 7 (canon) games total several hundred hours of content, with DLC packs adding 100+ more. Playing just one is a large undertaking, and completionist runs of all of the games and their DLC can take over 800 hours collectively. Makes sense for a series that's been running since 1997.
Fallout 4 somehow (hint: her now-late husband was Zenimax's CEO) got Lynda Carter to record her own songs for the game - and all are worth a listen to (or a few dozen!).
Liberty Prime. Either he's the most awesome Large Ham giant robot ever and a standout set-piece that makes the march to the pre-Broken Steel final encounter insanely memorable, or he's emblematic of everything accused of being wrong with the Bethesda-era Fallouts by removing all the challenge of the final push while gleefully missing the point of the original games' message by being a propaganda spewing, Nuke-tossing middle finger to the anti-establishment and anti-nuke themes. Those who have a more neutral opinion accept Liberty Prime as being a bald-faced parody of such characters, but have complained that the rebuilt version of him in Fallout 4 being almost entirely unironic to be completely groan-worthy as he brings the final push against the Institute to a grinding halt to salute a war memorial.
The Brotherhood of Steel ever since Bethesda took over the franchise. They're either overly hyped and promoted at the expense of more interesting groups and factions despite not being that big of a Faction and actually on the decline in the Black Isle games, or they are badass knights wielding Power Armor that is given an interesting narrative and conflict in each game, with each incarnation of the Brotherhood as portrayed in the Bethesda games being treated with enough variation to be interesting on their own right.
There is not generally much overlap between fans of the Interplay/Obsidian games and fans of the Bethesda games (though exceptions certainly exist), and the disagreements between the two groups can get rather… vehement. It even spills over to TV Tropes — much of this page's edit history can be summed up as a permanent low-intensity Edit War between Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas fans and Fallout 3 and 4 fans. Best advice is to only say positive things about all of the games (aside from Brotherhood of Steel, of course) and flee if/when the arguments increase in pitch and fervor.
There is even a splinter group of Fallout 1 fans that dislikes Fallout 2 because they felt it introduced "too many silly elements" to the universe.
Due to the announcement that Fallout 76 would not be released on Steam, this was taken with huge backlash. Many people were angry that they would have to download a new client, and others said it was a way of restricting mods. Others are supporting this decision, which has caused even further arguments. Checking the discussions on Fallout 4's steam discussion page, its a battlefield.
Whether the Enclave should return in future games, especially as a faction the player could work with. One group of players feel that there are still a lot of stories that could be told with the Enclave, especially with the hints of Enclave remnants in Chicago, while another group of players find reintroducing the Enclave an insult to the satirical and anti-militarist themes of the franchise.
Common Knowledge: It is popularly assumed that because of how nasty they already were and how the Enclave were already in control of things by the time the bombs fell, that pre-war US fired the first shot in an effort to destroy the entire world to fulfill the Enclave's genocidal goals, while blaming China for doing so. In reality, while the US was already a Enclave-controlled Fascist government willing to experiment both on its own citizens and Chinese-Americans, it is deliberately left ambiguous who fired the nukes in the first place and Josh Sawyer himself has stated that it matters less that nukes were fired and what does matter was the authoritarianism and militarism on all sides, combined with the nukes existing in the first place, that caused the end of the world. In-universe Enclave actually did not move towards shifting their goal to one of global genocide until the 2100s. Ultimately the TV series reveals that Vault-Tec themselves masterminded the start of the war in response to possible peace talks between the US and China, through the means they did so remain unknown.
Obsidian decided to go above and beyond in New Vegas. Not only is there no dart gun, which was effective against Deathclaws in Fallout 3, but they now come in packs and have titanic damage thresholds, meaning most (as in, everything smaller than the anti-materiel rifle) will only do Scratch Damage. Thankfully, they now can't spawn randomly, so you'll know where they are.
Yao Guai are the not-quite-Demonic cousin of Deathclaws. They're easier to kill and do less damage, but unless you're high level they are still dangerous, especially in packs.
Broken Steel adds in Super Mutant Overlords. You won't encounter them until you're a pretty high level, but they're equipped with powerful weapons and are ridiculously tough. To make matters worse, they have an unblockable damage bonus of around 20-40 HP per shot depending on the weapon. Even wearing power armor and toting a rocket launcher, your ass may well be handed to you.
Overlords are nothing compared to the Albino Radscorpions, which have almost as much HP as a Super Mutant Behemoth! Their only saving grace is their lack of a long-range attack, so you can get out of dodge by climbing on top of something they can't reach you from. That said, considering their durability and damage potential, running the hell away is a good idea, too.
Damn those swampfolk/tribals and that magical unresistable damage bonus!
Those stealth suited aliens. Hell, you feel pretty stupid by shooting a mini nuke to a 3 foot tall guy and watching him shoot right back at you with his alien rifle just after.
Any Fallout 3 player trying to do "Those!" at any level below 10 or so will find the fire-breathing ants a hell of a challenge. Sometimes it's an easier and smarter idea to just kill one ant on the street and just do the quest later in the game, so that their levels stay somewhat low while you have a wider arsenal to gun them down with. Or just stand on the ledge outside of town and snipe them.
The Enclave patrolmen in Fallout 2 were the bane of players everywhere. They are pretty much immune to electric damage and heavily resistant to nearly every other kind of damage due to their power armor, not to mention they have extremely high health and can effortlessly kill you in one turn even without a critical hit. Because of them, going anywhere near the coast until you've reached near endgame levels was instant Death Wish. Unlike most Demonic Spiders however, it's pretty easy to tell where they are and which places to avoid (anywhere near the coast pretty much).
Any kind of robotic enemy will be a huge pain in the ass as well. Did you remember to invest some skill points in energy weapons, despite usually never coming across one until at least the halfway point? You better, because energy weapons and explosives are the only way to deal reliable amounts of damage. New Vegas mitigates this somewhat by offering armour piercing rounds and pulse slugs to give small gun users a fighting chance.
New Vegas introduces Cazadores, which are giant mutant wasps with nasty venom that drains your health very quickly long after you've killed one. Pray you don't encounter a swarm of the bastards.
The same game also introduces Nightstalkers (and both animals were created by Dr. Borous at the Big Empty - which is surely just an unfortunate coincidence that they both are so infuriatingly dangerous, right? ...No, it isn't). Nightstalkers inject poison (albeit somewhat less potent than Cazadores), deal sizable melee damage, can sometimes bypass Damage Threshold, and will attack in packs. Even worse, Lily's first quest has you fighting invisible Nightstalkers.
4 continues the series' trend of showing how much insects will still hate youafter the apocalypse with the Bloodbugs — more specifically, the Infected and Red Widow variants. Being that they're literally giant mosquitoes, the damn things are spindly as hell (making it hard to actually hit them), fly around the player incredibly fast, deal dismayingly high amounts of damage, have a hell of a lot more health than their normal brethren, and swarm in numbers. They also deal high amounts of poison damage to the player and can even spit your own bloodback at you — causing hefty amounts of Interface Screw and making it even harder to actually fight them.
In previous games, Radscorpions were usually difficult enemies, but not really worthy of being called Demonic Spiders, either (the Albino Radscorpions from Broken Steel and Giant Radscorpions from New Vegas notwithstanding). The Radscorpions of the Commonwealth? They beg to differ. Not only are they deceptively fast, Radscorpions are now positively huge (the average size of a Radscorpion is now that of the Giant Radscorpions from New Vegas!), can deliver unnervingly high amounts of poison damage, are Made of Iron, and can even burrow underground so as to avoid your attacks or strike out at you to catch you off guard & unawares. And finding DeathskullRadscorpions makes things particularly..."interesting."
Fallout Sheltersomehow makes Radroaches (yes,Radroaches) into these. As their power levels scale with the age of your Vault, they can eventually easily kill your dwellers, spread like wildfire, and overrun your vault unless you have top-tier equipment and good dweller placement.
Also Charon. He is a ghoul with missing skin and hair but somehow still got tons of fangirls. It may be related to the whole "total obedience to whomever holds his contract" thing.
In Fallout 1, Dogmeat. So much so that he reappeared in a special encounter in the sequel and had an Identical Grandson in Fallout 3. There's also another Dogmeat in 4 - and he's somehow even more adorable.
Don't forget Marcus from 2, as he's pretty much the reason why Fawkes is so well liked.
No-Bark Noonan and Mr. Fantastic are also both well-beloved, in part since they're pretty much the exact opposite of each other — Noonan is a hilariously crazy settler that surprisingly knows a hell of a lot more than he logically should, and Fantastic is a hilariously incompetent scientist that surprisingly knows a hell of a lot less than he logically should.
The Brotherhood of Steel, for consistently having the best toys (aside from the Enclave). It certainly doesn't hurt as well that their signature Powered Armor is the face of the first and third games, and they're the ones who bring Liberty Prime to life. This even reached Breakout Character status with two spinoff games being made about them.
Curie has also gotten tons of love from the fandom, with many appreciating her Adorkable/The Pollyanna personality and endearingly eager For Science! mentality.
Harold, the ghoulesque mutant. While he shared some Foreshadowing and backstory about the Big Bad, visiting him isn't mandatory to the plot, but people found him humorous enough to become the only character to show up in every main game until Fallout 3, where mobility became a issue.
Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Accidentally calling the Vault Boy "Pip Boy" or "Fallout Boy". The former is the name of the device the player wears on their wrist, and the latter is a band.
Fanfic Fuel: A common sub-genre of Fallout fanfiction asks the question of what happened in the parts of the US not seen in the games — What helps is that no game so far has taken place away from the East or West Coasts (except for Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel, but see below for those), allowing for a lot of interpretation as to the fate of the midlands of the US.
For a more specific example there's the death of the Lyons family and the East Coast Brotherhood's return to a more "traditionalist" mindset under Elder Maxson, which has led to downright juicy speculation on what's happened to the Capital Wasteland in the decade between 3 and 4.
And, of course, like any good RPG series, there's the big question: "What happened to your character after the story ended?"
With every game so far being set in the former United States, this leads to the natural question; what happened to the rest of the world?
Fanon Discontinuity: Hardcore fans generally refuse to acknowledge the existence of the ("good for what it is") Tactical RPGFallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel or the console hack-and-slash Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. Bethesda have adopted a similar policy, declaring TacticsBroad Strokes canon and Brotherhood of SteelCanon Discontinuity.
Friendly Fandoms: Ever since Bethesda acquired the series, Fallout fans have overlapped with those of fellow Bethesda's own RPG series The Elder Scrolls.
Gateway Series: Fallout has helped introduce younger generations to old pop, country, and jazz music. The Ink Spots in particular owe much of their modern-day fame to these games.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The FPS series (3, New Vegas, and 4) and Fallout 76 have a very healthy fanbase in Japan, despite Japan's own Nuclear Weapons Taboo, though it does help that the Fallout series pulls very few punches when it comes to displaying the downsides of unrestricted nuclear warfare.
Sometimes in Fallout 1, the aftermath of the slaughter of the Ghouls at Necropolis will sometimes leave the dead bodies standing upright in the first frame of their "explosive death", as if they're mindless flesh statues. It's very creepy when you're wandering around looting them.
With Broken Steel installed, Three Dog will talk about the Enclave's defeat at the Jefferson Memorialeven if you haven't gotten that far in-story.
It's possible for Enclave Radio to glitch out after Raven Rock is destroyed - it will stay on the air, but will now consist solely of an endless loop of President Eden saying "...stand now, at the precipice...". It actually comes across as really creepy instead of the annoyance that one would expect it to be.
Similar to the Fallout 1 example, New Vegas has a room in Gommorah with a dead hooker in it that you visit for a quest. Sometimes when you enter she'll be standing and acting as a living NPC, even trying to seduce you, while you examine her for rigor mortis.
In 4, Dogmeat will still be able to fetch items held in locked containers. This means that the Sole Survivor can simply return to Vault 111 with Dogmeat, go to the Overseer's office and ask him to fetch, and he'll bring you back the Cryolator. With him even adorably carrying it in his mouth while he follows you around and wags his tail. [ Note - this has since been patched out of the game ]
2 had a bug with the suicide bomber quest in NCR where the Chosen One could continuously repair the generator for a constant stream of XP and scouting and first aid skill books, allowing easy level grinding and a good source of money.
A character in combat armor around the Boneyard Library (Fallout 1) wears a pin reading "I'm Christopher and you're meat". Chris Avellone joined production for Fallout 2, and has become the name (aside from maybe Todd Howard after Bethesda took over, and even then that's a big "maybe") most associated with the franchise.
There's a movement in Californianote There are many factors, but one of them has a lot to do with taxes that wants to break away from America and become its own country. Cue analogies to the NCR. Made funnier when ABC7 news posted a picture of the California flag reading "New California Republic."
I Am Not Shazam: The Vault Boy is not called PipBoy. Even the developers of Fallout Tactics fell into that. Vault Boy is the blond, wavy haired man in the blue jumpsuit, and PipBoy is the redhead pixie in the yellow and orange spacesuit, visible on the PipBoy itself in the first two games, in case you were wondering. And his name is notFall Out Boy either, despite his face being prominent in all Fallout games.
I Knew It!: One of the most popular theories in the fandom is that Vault-Tec is the one responsible for the Great War that laid waste to humanity, not China or the U.S.. This was commonly believed not only because of the company’s evil practices & experiments, but also because it wouldn’t make sense for Vault-Tec to exist if there was never going to be a nuclear war. A company whose primary business was building elaborate fallout shelters would need a nuclear war to happen to justify its own existence. The show confirms this theory.
Mainstream Obscurity: Prior to Bethesda's acquisition of the series, it was very much this: Fallout 1 had lifetime sales of 600,000, Fallout 2, slightly less. Compare the three Bethesda-era games which all sold over 10 million copies, and Fallout 4 sold more than 20 million. With the increase in popularity of the series however, the original two titles got far more attention and are often included on lists of greatest RPGs of all time.
Misaimed Fandom: Though Caesar's Legion burns down towns regularly (inhabitants included) and the Enclave was more or less written as "Futuristic Nazis", both have large fan followings among the Fallout community, partly because many see them as noble in their end goals or having the potential to become something legitimately morally grey if more decent leaders were at the helm.
Misaimed "Realism": Many of the games allow you to chow down on food to recover health, food encompassing anything from freshly-prepared meals, raw meat just scavenged from a wasteland critter's corpse, or what was in stock in a grocery store before the bombs fell 200 years ago. Unless you're playing the survival-focused Hardcore or Survival modes from New Vegas and 4, however, any possible negative effects of eating raw or spoiled food are abstracted as the food giving you a minor, easily-ignored amount of radiation.
Misblamed: In the Bethesda-era games, expect Todd Howard (and, to a lesser extent, Emil Pagliarulo) to get the bulk of the fandom's bile when complaints are raised about a certain game. While Howard is the face for Bethesda Softworks and Pagliarulo is the most vocal member of BGS' writing team, the Bethesda-era Fallouts are still video games made by at least a hundred different people, and both Howard and Pagliarulo are only two people out of the entire production staff.
Narm Charm: Fallout as a whole is really good at this. Considering how the series is practically made of Bathos and it's telling dark, post-apocalyptic stories that're all set after a nuclear war destroyed a world inhabited by a (supposedly) cheery Leave It to Beaver-style 1950s U.S.A., it's been doing this for quite a while and is excellent at making something silly come across as serious.
A good example of this trope in action is with Caesar's Legion from New Vegas. The Legion deliberately stylizes itself after the Roman Empire (albeit with a more tribal and Mad Max-influenced aesthetic), and at first comes across as cartoonishly villainous to an almost comedic degree. Virtually all of them are Card Carrying Villains who can't stop talking about their love of both rape and brutal cultural assimilationFor the Evulz, and look utterly absurd in the bizarre lorica uniforms they usually wear (most of which come from Pre-War football padding). However, they're also surprisingly competent, have genuinely intelligent leaders with grandiose ideas for the future, and the game also takes enough time to show how nightmarishly hellish it is to live under their control (like with the slave Siri at the Fort). All of this combined together makes the Legion come across as a legitimately terrifying force of destruction and chaos instead of the joke faction they would normally be seen as.
Sailor Earth: Want to make an original character who also grew up in a Vault? Easy, just make up a number between 001 and 999 and add the word "Vault" in front of it! Canonically, there are only 122 numbered vaults, but there are still plenty of those that have nothing more known about them than whatever experiment they were meant to host, and the non-canon Fallout Shelter lets you name your vault anything with three digits.
Scrappy Mechanic: Each Fallout game unfortunately suffers from this to a certain degree. The most notable examples of this are probably Fallout 1's timer and 4's cut-down dialogue.
Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Surprisingly, somewhere in the middle, though ultimately leaning towards the idealistic end of the spectrum. It seems at first glance to be strictly on the cynical side. After all, the game drills you constantly with the fact that war never changes, and the world is very much a rotten place to live in the time and place the games take place in. However, the games also heavily emphasize that Hope Springs Eternal. Humanity lifts itself by its bootstraps to rebuild, and individuals rise up to meet the challenge to make the world a better place. In fact, idealism vs. cynicism might very well be the defining theme of the entire series, since the protagonists can be played as either Complete Monsters or valiant heroes that bring progress to the wastes and nurture good in all they meet.
Spiritual Licensee: The games made during Bethesda's run (Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4) could easily double as RPG spin-offs of the Mad Max and Terminator series. Fittingly enough, some of Bethesda's earliest video games were based on the latter franchise. In fact, Fallout 4 actually plays like a combination of Fallout, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? and Buck Rogers.
. The real-life example was abandoned for reasons that become immediately obvious to those who use the in-game version without adequate skill and plenty of Rad-Away.