YMMV / Fallout 3

• Accidental Aesop: By using the G.E.C.K. to reactivate Project Purity instead of using it to terraform the region as in Fallout 2, "It's better to use hard work to change things over time than to change them entirely at once."
• Accidental Innuendo: "We're old pals... the best of buddies and we know each other inside and out; literally." The one saying this is Harold about Bob, the tree mutation jutting out of the side of his head that has completely grown over him.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The appearance of Mr. Burke in the Lone Wanderer's drug-induced hallucination can be taken to mean a variety of things depending on the Wanderer's actions, specifically whether you destroyed Megaton or not.
  • Is Ashur really a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to try and use the Pitt to make a better future for its people, or is he just as evil as his Raider minions and trying to rationalize his actions by claiming that they're Necessarily Evil? Script notes in the G.E.C.K. imply he really does feel bad about what he's doing, but also that he's proud of what he's doing in the name of progress.
  • Vance: an altruistic man who uses old legends to motivate cannibals to reform and gives them new lives free from persecution, or a delusional nutcase who brainwashes people to forcibly conscript them into his "Family"?
  • The Lyons Chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel gets this from a lot of fans given the traditionalist fans support of the Outcasts.
  • We don't learn much about Desmond Lockheart's goals, beside he is chasing his old nemesis Calvert and is looking for data in Calvert's lab. While he is technically the good guy in Point Lookout storyline (he doesn't turn against you if you side with him during the quest, while Calvert does if you betray Desmond), it's never clear whereas he is merely an incredibly rude Good Is Not Nice character, or a Villain of Another Story: if he is still alive after you kill Calvert, he states he'll then go after other rivals of him, with no other details. Are those "rivals" as bad as Calvert, or are they actual good people?
  • Does Charon's contract actually allow him to rebel against the Lone Wanderer if he’s attacked and refuse to activate Project Purity (if Broken Steel is not installed) or is he actually able to somewhat resist his brainwashing when he’s pushed past his limits?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • To the surprise of many gamers, Lincoln's Repeater is not fictional - it's based on an actual, custom-made Henry repeating rifle given to Abraham Lincoln as a gift in the hopes that he would adopt the design as standard-issue for the US Army. That said it likely would not have fired modern ammunition without some serious custom work.
  • Point Lookout is a real place. Calvert is a fictional member of a real family who own a manor in the area. Also, there really was a Civil War POW camp there, and the lighthouse is another actual point of interest.
  • Griffon and his Aqua Cura look at first like a classic example of a Snake Oil Salesman with a Fallout flavour (selling radioactive water as a miracle cure), but selling radioactive items as medicine was a real-life practice from the first half of 20th century.
  • The Soil Stradivarius from the "Agatha's Song" sidequest is a real artifact, and finding it in the Eastern USA in the future is plausible, since the actual violin belongs to Itzhak Perlman, a musician living in New York.
  • While finding documents from US history (like the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independance) in Washington DC's National Archives makes sense, discovering a copy of the Magna Carta (a document from medieval English history, bearing King John of England's signature) may seem strange. However, in real life the National Archives really have a copy of the document (a copy made in 1297, permanently loaned since 2007).
  • The Mobile Base used by the Enclave in Broken Steel is actually inspired by/is a heavily modified version of the real-life Crawler transporter (or more accurately a pair of said transporters) built and used by NASA as mobile launch pads for the Space Shuttles during the 80's through 2011, when the Space Shuttle program was unfortunately cancelled.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • You can convince President Eden to kill himself with just two mid-level Speech checks. The argument you make isn't even particularly impressive and basically amounts to pointing out that since he was built by humans, his decisions can't be trusted and he should destroy himself and the Enclave. And if your Science skill is high enough, you don't even have to attempt those. Furthermore, Eden's self-destruction code is in Autumn's office, not exactly well hidden either.
  • Colonel Autumn, despite being the Final Boss, can be killed with one clean critical to the head, and the two bodyguards nearby are just the same Enclave troopers you've been gunning down all game. You can even talk your way to victory if your Speech skill is high enough. No bloodshed needed, and convincing him doesn't really feel like a success anyway due to it being a generally a simple conversation.^note You may need to load the save before it a few times as you only have a 60% chance at convincing him due to how the Speech skill works.
  • Ashur in The Pitt has excellent armor, but isn't that much tougher than a normal Mook. Ironically he can't survive as much damage as his unarmored rival Wernher, due to the later having Companion-level health.
  • Sibley in Operation: Anchorage has only slightly more health than a normal Power Armor wearing minigun wielding mook. The only real problem in fighting him is that he's supported by a squad of elite mooks, and those don't exactly pose a problem either if your level is high enough.
  • In the simulation itself, General Jingwei. Instead of an intense boss battle, you can pass a difficult Speech check to make him stand down, at which point he commits Seppuku.
  • Enclave Squad Sigma from Broken Steel are hit with this trope very hard. They don't even have any unique armor, weapons, or even stats. Sure, they're still an imposing squad of elite soldiers, but a high-level, well-equipped player could wipe them all out without breaking a sweat.
  • Button Gwinnett from the sidequest Stealing Independence, who is really a laughably weak Protectron that can be taken down by any weapon above 10mm pistol level, or, with a special perk, resetting his parameters back into an unprogrammed state and commanded to shutdown.
• Awesome Music:
  • The music playing in the main menu and while it loads. Works even better when doubled with The Ink Spots' I Don't Wanna Set The World On Fire in the opening sequence.
  • So cool that the London Philharmonic Orchestra included it in their album of The Greatest Video Game Music.
  • It seems Obsidian agreed, as they used a western arrangement for Fallout: New Vegas.
  • And seven years later, it's still considered cool enough to serve as Fallout 4's menu music.
  • Even ignoring the obnoxiously catchy golden oldies on GNR, the game still has some amazing ambiance for when you don't feel like listening to the radio while wandering around. Explore 7 in particular is one of the best tunes in the game.
  • To make things even more awesome, the aforementioned Ink Spots' song, was the song Black Isle wanted to use for the intro cinematic for the first Fallout - but they were unable to secure the rights. Instead, they settled for the Ink Spots' Maybe.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Moira's incredibly chipper demeanor and enthusiasm with her research makes her Adorkable to some people. Others find her irritating for those exact reasons.
  • Ashur and Wernher from The Pitt. Due to the Grey-and-Gray Morality of the DLC, the fandom is noticeably split between which one should be considered the real hero and villain of the story, while some consider both men to be bad people and differ on who is the least evil option.
  • Sarah Lyons is either an entertaining Action Girl with an ok Defrosting the Ice Queen arc or a dull, undeveloped character who can feel too condescending towards the Lone Wanderer before he proves his stuff. Either way, she does have a lot of fan art and fanfics about her.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The Roach King. Literally in the middle of nowhere, he sits on a throne made of random junk while wielding a mini-gun, surrounded by his "army" of Rad Roaches. Since he and by extension his roaches attack you on sight ^note  Though since much stronger enemies spawn in that area, he may be dead when you find him. , there is no way of figuring out anything about him.
  • The last DLC added, Mothership Zeta, has your character abducted by aliens and roaming around on a flying saucer up in orbit, blasting The Greys and rescuing a bunch of earlier abductees from various historical periods (kept in cryo-stasis). Broken Steel extended the original story, and the other three DLC built onto the history and geography of the Fallout universe. This one, depending on your outlook, was either pointless goofy fun, or a Fanon Discontinuity.
• Broken Base: While Fallout 3's was widely praised when it first released in 2008, it wasn't without scathing criticism — largely from veterans of the first two games. As the years came by, and when Obsidian's New Vegas came out in 2010, this further fueled the flames between both old-school fans and newcomers of the series.
  • Being produced by a separate company to the original games, and, unlike the earlier pure-RPG titles, was an action RPG. A subset of veteran Fallout fans felt that the "sequel" wasn't a sequel due to how wildly different it was, and called it out for a number of continuity errors and "dumbed-down" mechanical elements. Supporters of the game countered by claiming that their criticisms were a case of They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
  • Some players are fond of the game's green Color Wash, considering it to be one of its most memorable features, and a fitting reference to the Technicolor Science idea that nuclear power and radiation equals green. Others find it ugly, blame it for contributing to the repetitive feel of the game world, and claim that looking at it for too long gives them headaches and nausea.
  • The "Power of the Atom" quest. To one group it's the game's signature scene, where the player makes their first real moral choice to either save the city from the fallen, undetonated nuclear bomb in the middle of it or use it to destroy the entire town. To others the choice is seriously imbalanced, as the evil option goes all the way into Joker-esque cartoonish supervillainy that's evil for the sake of being evil. The fact that James only gives you a small talk afterwards also means there's very little consequence for the player committing mass murder.
  • The "Tenpenny Tower" quest is one of the most polarizing quests in the game, second only to "Power of the Atom", primarily because of the Take a Third Option option the player can take, and the outcome of doing so. On one hand, some love that the game subverts the standard "the third option is the best" choice, since convincing Tenpenny to let the ghouls live in the tower results in Roy Phillips killing all the humans inside (save potentially Burke), and is seen by fans as an interesting moral debate about what truly would seem the right outcome in the situation with that in mind. It being one of the few quests in the game that has multiple outcomes also makes people praise it for allowing the player to determine the fate of the tower, something the game doesn't do quite often for sidequests. Others really hate it, because it comes across as an unnecessary and dark twist that does nothing but undermine what the player did, and feels cheap that you can try to get a peaceful outcome, only for the game to just undo it with no real analysis or involvement from the player. Detractors also criticize the whole "moral greyness" that is seemingly presented with it, because Roy is such an evil person, that siding with him at all (3 non-feral ghouls vs all the people inside the tower), is hardly a nuanced choice despite what the game seems to present. And that's not getting into the fact, that if you kill Roy even after the quest is done, it's treated as a bad thing to do, and gives you bad Karma in doing so.
  • The Pitt DLC. Some like the DLC's darker story and find the Grey-and-Grey Morality to be more interesting and compelling than the Black-and-White Morality of the base game's Main Quest. Others meanwhile feel that the DLC's two conclusions (either side with the slavers so they can continue researching a cure and building The Pitt into a city, but at the cost of more slaves being brought in to suffer and die in The Pitt. Or, side with the slaves and free them, but at the cost of kidnapping a child, killing her loving parents and giving her to people who are going to be less likely to extract a cure from her.) are both so horrible that it slips into Too Bleak, Stopped Caring territory.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • There are few things in life more satisfying than killing slavers (especially Leroy Walker and Eulogy Jones) with Abraham Lincoln's own rifle while wearing Abraham Lincoln's own hat.
  • Seeing Project Purity fully operational in Broken Steel can be a satisfying experience all on its own (assuming you didn't poison it with FEV). After all the hardships James, Catherine, Dr. Li, and The Lone Wanderer endured, their collective dream is realized, the tidal basin is purified, the water is clean and free for all, The Capital Wasteland is saved.
  • Destroying the Enclave's Mobile Crawler base with their own reprogrammed satellite at the end of Broken Steel and finally putting an end to them once and for all
• Character Tiers: Hire-able followers definitely come in tiers:
  • With Broken Steel, Dogmeat, Fawkes, and RL-3 are subject to a glitch that turns them into bullet sponges.^note They gain HP every time the player levels up: Dogmeat and Fawkes have 30,000 HP when the player hits level 30 with RL-3 not far behind. Charon and Cross are fairly tough compared to other followers.^note Charon is good at Sneak while Cross is above average with all weapons. Butch, Clover, and Jericho are fairly frail but remain usable as pack mules.
  • Without Broken Steel, Dogmeat is the weakest follower, Fawkes remains high-tier (albeit with much less health), and RL-3 is mediocre.
• Cliché Storm: The Aliens in Mothership Zeta. They are little green men who ride around in a death ray using flying saucer and abduct humans for anal probing and other such things. Note that this is entirely intentional.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Contested Sequel: Although the game was critically and commercially acclaimed as well as building a new fanbase, some Vocal Minority fans of the Black Isle games were put off by the changes made by Bethesda. Points of debate include the shift in gameplay from turn-based to real-time (among numerous other changes, though this particular one was planned for Van Buren), the quality and/or sparseness of the writing, both in the main quest and in secondary quests and locations, some recycling of key plot elements from previous games, and several things that were carried over from previous games, including the two major factions, being shoehorned into a setting that perceived to be contradicting the previous canon.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Radscorpions in general due to their lack of a weak point. At least the Mirelurks have a head to snipe for a potential One-Hit KO. The Albino Radscorpions turn this up to eleven, being almost on par with Super Mutant Behemoths for sheer toughness and lethality^{their stats}1500 hit points, poison strike that does 100 damage and then an additional 100 over 4 seconds, heals in sunlight, faster than others.. They also seem to follow the Cliff Racer school of being able to see and attack you before you see them.
  • Super Mutant Overlords have enough health to rival a Behemoth, and often come packing Tri-Beam Lasers that are specifically programmed: They do a bonus +40 damage per beam, with it's tightspread guaranteeing at least 120 damage per hit. And when we say "guaranteeing", we mean it, because this damage ignores ALL damage resistance, meaning even if you're wearing the toughest armor, it's still doing a ton of damage to you, because it's normal damage is applied too. Oh, and this unresistable bonus damage is only applied to the player exclusively, other enemies facing the Overlord's wrath are not affected by this bonus. It's sole purpose is to screw over the player, and the player alone. They may also randomly spawn in groups of lesser super mutants or, worse, spawn multiple Overlords at one time...
  • Feral Ghouls Reavers, added by the DLC, are massive damage sponges who also sport a powerful ranged attack (unique for feral ghouls).
  • Enemies with missile launchers (at long distance) and flamers (at short distance). Missile launchers because they do large, area-of-effect damage and tend to cripple your limbs easily, flamers because they do large amounts of damage and block your view with a large gout of flame.
  • The Enclave Hellfire Troopers, who have more health than any other human enemies in the game, carry either a hard hitting, very accurate plasma rifle or an extremely high damage Heavy Incinerator, and wear the best armor in the game. Thankfully, they are a pretty rare encounter, and when you encounter a large number of them, you get the Tesla Cannon, which can make short work of them.
  • The Point Lookout tribals. Despite being half-clothed and using relatively 'crude' implements like axes and hunting rifles, they're tougher than Super Mutants - tougher even than the Enclave's trained soldiers and their 23rd-century combat tech. It's jarring. The Swampfolk are just as bad. What's worse is that the Point Lookout exclusive weapons (Lever-Action Rifle, Axe, Double-barrel Shotguns) wielded by these two groups have the same type of programmed unresistable bonus damage as the above Super Mutant Overlord, but the stand out is the Double-barrel Shotguns, because it applies that +35 damage for each of the 9 pellets. Meaning the shotgun can do an absurd maximum of 315 damage, and that's not counting the normal damage this bonus is applied on top of; more than enough outright One-Hit Kill the player if they're unlucky enough to have all 9 pellets hit them, and aren't wearing power armor and have high health.
  • Shielded aliens in Mothership Zeta are among the tankiest enemies in the game, and if they come packing an Alien Disintegrator they can really mess you up. To wit, at level 25 they have 250 hit points and 80% damage resistance from the aforementioned shield, meaning 80% of all damage is negated. What this means in practice is that you have to deal 1,250+ points of damage to actually kill them. This makes them the third most durable mobs in the game, after Albino Radscorpions and Super Mutant Behemoths; but unlike those two, they're rather small targets, carry guns (very powerful ones), and work in squads.
  • Fire Ant Soldiers absolutely count too. They're very low to the ground so they're hard to see (and hard to shoot even if you do see them), plus their fire-breathing attack is so powerful it can hit you from quite far away, it hurts like hell and does continuous burn damage, and positively COVERS the screen in flame effects, making it impossible to actually fight back effectively. Your only option is to back up as much as possible, which makes your range worse as you attempt to pick away at their health with whatever weapons you have to hand... and did we mention their health is actually pretty decent for what should be a generic goon enemy? They have a total HP of 150, while (for comparison) a Radroach has 5 and a Mole Rat has 40. Oh, and you're flooded with them when you do anything in Grayditch. Have fun!
• Designated Villain:
  • The Brotherhood Outcasts aren't the nicest folks around, but you can work with them to help them out now and then and their patrols are neutral to you and fight against enemies like Raiders, Slavers, Mutants, etc. Yet their rank and file troopers are designated as "evil", meaning they leave fingers for you to collect if you have the Lawbringer perk.
  • A major reason why the Enclave in this game have a large Draco in Leather Pants status in the fandom is partially due to this issue. While they do some evil things in game, and anyone familiar with their roles in prior games wouldn't question them being antagonists, the part of the Enclave Colonel Autumn leads has almost the same goal as the "good guy" Brotherhood of Steel and your characters father: Purify the waters, and try to restore peace/civilization to the wasteland. Colonel Autumn is shown being horrified by the idea that President Eden would want to use a modified strand of the FEV to poison the water to kill all wastelanders with traces of radiation, meaning he isn't even try to kill everyone (at least from what is presented) like the Enclave from the previous game wanted to do. Yet he's treated by the game as evil and as the base games Big Bad despite all these factors. Worse, the player is able to help President Eden by using the FEV on the purifier, itself a comically evil thing to do, yet Colonel Autumn, the man with a goal that is more or less almost the same as the good guys, is labeled the villain, which some players felt was silly and the game making him a bad guy just to have a human bad guy.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • The last story mission is designed for low-level players as the devs assumed that players would just breeze through the entire game, playing only the story missions and leveling up accordingly. As such the player character has absolutely no part in the final battle. Sarah Lyons and her Lyon's Pride mop up anyone Liberty Prime didn't already kill, Colonel Autumn can be talked out of fighting and, if you don't want to keep Save Scumming, he and his two goons aren't all that tough as Autumn doesn't have any armor nor heavy firepower while his guards are just rank and file soldiers. And then the ending: either kill yourself and get the "Good" ending or send Lyons and get the "Bad" ending and if you want to send Fawkes, your radiation immune Super Mutant buddy who's life you saved (and who, mind you, has already done pretty much the exact same thing with no problems earlier in the game, when he went and retrieved the G.E.C.K. for you), to do it he gives some hokey "it's your destiny" crap to push it onto you or Sarah. The other possible radiation-immune companions, Sergeant RL-3, who is a robot, and Charon, who is a ghoul and is therefore actively healed by being exposed to radiation, also refuse, something that is especially egregious in the latter case as Charon's whole main character trait is that he has been brainwashed into always unhesitatingly obeying the person who holds his contract. Broken Steel makes the Purifier ending less annoying but not by much.
  • Broken Steel's ending isn't much better as the Enclave Squad Sigma aren't as "elite" as they are hyped up to be and the ending boils down to being pointlessly evil or pointlessly good by selecting who gets blown up.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Alistair Tenpenny seems to have a bit of this treatment going on as well; while he's perhaps not quite the Sociopathic freak his minion Mr. Burke is, he still shoots people from the top of a skyscraper for fun, he's still a complete bigot, and the fact that killing him nets good Karma (one of the few occasions where this happens) suggests that even if he's now just a slightly senile old man (which is how he's generally viewed in this treatment), he's been responsible for some pretty nasty stuff in his life.
  • Some people who played the game thought Colonel Autumn was a super nice guy, even though he's an asshole who only betrayed Eden because he wanted absolute control over the water supply, and Eden was going to poison it. Some even wanted him as a companion. That said, part of the reason why this perception exists is because playing a role in the death of the Lone Wanderer's father and the killing of Janice Kaplinski aside, Autumn dosen't do anything overtly evil and could be read as legitimately horrified when he learns of Eden's plans for the water. The Enclave under Autumn are implied to carry out genetic screenings of the population in the Capital Wasteland with those not adhering to proper genetic standards being executed en masse with flamethrowers, but this is only stumbled upon if the player reads terminal entries and mostly Offscreen Villainy. The fact that there is enough wiggle room even with these terminals to argue that these atrocities were carried out by Eden over Autumn due to the game making it vague as to who ordered the genetic screenings in the first place, combined with the perception that the mandated genetic screenings feel more in character with Eden than with Autumn doesn't help matters.
  • Ashur and Wernher, depending on which side of the Broken Base you fall on. Both sides point out equally valid points why the other one could be considered the real villain of the story, yet the other side will counter that's precisely why they are the hero!
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • LIBERTY PRIME will save America! (Better late than never.)
  • Fawkes is the most popular Fallout 3 companion. His being an honorable super mutant may have something to do with it. (Or possibly the fact that he's an eight-foot-tall bright yellow walking tank.)
  • Charon comes close second as Fallout 3's most popular companion. Despite being a ghoul, he has quite a lot of fans, especially fangirls.
  • The Tunnel Snakes are an extremely minor group of a few teenage greaser vault-dwellers that get wiped out before the tutorial ends. But their lameness and bravado caught on, as did their livening up of one of the more boring parts of the game. Requests or mods to make the Tunnel Snakes a major faction crop up with some frequency. Also, they rule.
    • Which might also explain why Butch, despite being your childhood bully and arguably one of the weakest companions in the game, has managed to garner a small but strong fanbase. The fact that the game gives him a more developed story arc than some of the other potential companions (thanks to being a part of your own character's origin story) certainly helps a lot too.
• Fanfic Fuel: The sequel to 3 takes place almost ten years after the events of the game, and we only get a precious few details about what exactly happened immediately after the events of the game, the fate and current whereabouts of many characters (most importantly, that of the Lone Wanderer) or what's going on in the Capital Wasteland right now, beyond the strong implication that the Eastern Brotherhood of Steel now control the region as a sort of technocratic/neo-feudal Ordensstaat. Naturally, fan-fiction writers have found the murky circumstances an absolute goldmine for stories and speculation.
• Franchise Original Sin: For better or for worse, Fallout 3 set a lot of precedents for the 3D Fallouts that later games would run too far with.
  • One of the most significant complaints about Fallout 76 was its complete lack of NPCs to converse with until well after release, leaving only Apocalyptic Logs to flesh out the backstory, when the series was previously known for its vast array of NPCs with a lot of dialogue. This was heralded by Fallout 3, which offered significantly less dialogue than prior games and was a source of criticism for that game as well. It didn't raise nearly as many eyebrows as 76 because "significantly less dialogue than Fallout 2" is still a lot of dialogue, and the game offers a large number of characters and a large number of conversations to have with them.
  • Fallout 3 significantly retooled the gameplay from the isometric turn-based gameplay of the first two games to an active-time first-person game with a noticeably greater focus on action and shooting. This also got a fair amount of complaints from old-school fans, but it was still broadly accepted because the game was still an RPG with many potential builds, just one that drew more from what was now its sister series under Bethesda in The Elder Scrolls, and Fallout: New Vegas helped bring the 3D-style of Fallout closer to the classic games with more fleshed-out roleplaying aspects and even innovating on it with the survival-focused "Hardcore" mode. However, Fallout 4 considerably reworked the leveling and stat system to focus almost entirely on combat, gutting a lot of the RPG mechanics by downplaying the importance of stats and turning skills into perks, while also featuring a weaker conversation system, which killed many of the story aspects, and removing the karma system, which gave fewer opportunities for the player to define the protagonist outside of what the story required. When Fallout 76 effectively removed story entirely, it left the game with little more than the combat and base-building mechanics with a small handful of meaningless RPG elements, along with the removal of VATS making it evident how lackluster the actual combat of the 3D Fallouts can be.
  • By far the most common complaints about 76 from a gameplay standpoint revolved around the sheer variety of bugs, but Bethesda games in general have always been notorious for them, and the 3D Fallouts are no exception - even New Vegas by a different developer entirely was infamously near-unplayable at launch and, even with the full suite of patches, still has several bugs that are all but guaranteed to trigger. People were more forgiving of the earlier games because of the series' robust modding community being able to step in and fix the bugs Bethesda couldn't or wouldn't fix themselves. 76, on the other hand, is an online-only game, which exacerbates the problems in several ways: one, the fans can't mod the game to fix the bugs; two, the sheer variety of the bugs, including ones from other games on its engine that already had fixes available for years (e.g. several of Fallout 3's bugs were fixed out of the gate for New Vegas two years later, while bugs that had been in Skyrim were still showing up in Fallout 76, eight years later); and three, its status as an always-online, games-as-a-service experience that gets updated more frequently than the other Fallout games opens up new and unique avenues for something to go wrong in the coding.
  • One of the more common gripes about the game was the lack of noticeable advancement in the setting — despite being set on the other side of the country from the 2D games and several decades in the future, the Capital Wasteland feels far less developed in terms of civilization, with things like the prominence of pre-war buildings that are still covered in rubble even when in frequent use, continuing to use caps in lieu of an actual post-war currency, and Super Mutants still being a common threat despite them having more or less been taken care of in the first game. This was largely accepted because Fallout 3 was a reintroduction to the series a decade after its last main-line game; the reaction likely would have been even worse if the first new Fallout game in ten years didn't feel post-apocalyptic enough and lacked any iconic elements. New Vegas split the difference, by being set in an area that was newly war-torn due to the ongoing conflict between the NCR and Caesar's Legion, and having the eponymous New Vegas set up to serve as a contrast and an example of re-emerging civilization. In contrast, Fallout 4 was released after the series had reestablished itself for a new generation, but was largely seen as having doubled down on these issues to the point that it doesn't make any sense, such as clearly-successful businesses refusing to clean up rubble or skeletons that have been there since before the business in question existed,^note even with the game's settlement-building mechanics, outside of very specific instances it's impossible for you to remove skeletons or rubble from one of these buildable settlements without a mod and the fanbase proved significantly less forgiving. Like many of these, it culminated in Fallout 76, which forced things like the Enclave, Super Mutants, the Brotherhood of Steel, and caps as a widely-accepted currency just 25 years after the Great War, well before many of these should even exist, much less have expanded to the East Coast, just to have "iconic" elements that, by this point, even fans who hadn't played the earlier games could realize didn't fit.
  • Fallout 3 was where the issue of your character having a defined backstory that really influenced the plot began; whereas other games had a backstory for your character that amounted to "you are a vault dweller/tribesman/courier" and where you came from or who your character was before the story started doesn't influence much of anything other than your initial goal (respectively finding a water chip for Vault 13, finding a GECK for Arroyo, and retrieving the Platinum Chip to complete your delivery job), Fallout 3's tutorial details several parts of your character's life in Vault 101, from the moment they're born to some point after they reach 19 years old, before the story is kicked off properly when their dad suddenly leaves. However, the game was only somewhat pushy about keeping on the track of finding him, and it was still perfectly possible to put off completing the main quest without it feeling unnatural, since your character has no initial idea of where he actually went and can be played as potentially not caring all that much or figuring that he can take care of himself. Fallout 4, in contrast, more decisively defines your character's background and their feelings on their missing baby, which gets in the way of allowing players to roleplay as anything other than a concerned parent, and the game pushes much harder for you to do the main quest - as just one example, whereas Fallout 3 lets you have conversations with characters related to its main quest without ever bringing up your missing father, Fallout 4 practically forces you to ask every relevant character you meet if they've seen your missing son, often before they've even given you their name - on top of the simple fact that it's a much more emotionally-urgent task for a parent to search for their missing baby while having no idea where that baby is than a legal adult to search for their missing father while having a good idea of which way he went, which creates a major source of disconnect between the player and their character because it doesn't make any sense to do sidequests over searching for your missing son.
  • This video argues as much when comparing the Fallout 4 quest "When Freedom Calls" and the Fallout 3 quest "Following In His Footsteps", early-game quests which both climax with the player getting A Taste of Power to take on a strong enemy. Fallout 3 handled it better for several reasons: the setpiece in question takes you deep into the heart of the Capital Wasteland, meaning you invariably have to spend time doing sidequests, gathering supplies and leveling up to just be able to survive the regular encounters in that area of the game, and its taste of power is a weapon that is highly limited in potential uses outside of that setpiece due to the need to pay for repairs to keep it in working condition and rare, powerful ammo that is highly wasteful on anything smaller than one of the four remaining Super Mutant Behemoths. Fallout 4, meanwhile, puts this setpiece in a place that takes at most ten minutes to reach from leaving the starting Vault, meaning you're still dealing with near-harmless insects and low-tier Raiders before and after it, and its taste of power is a suit of power armor which only needs relatively common fusion cores rather than special training to run and a minigun with a thousand bullets in a common caliber, which combine to completely trivialize everything the game can throw at you from that point unless you make a conscious effort not to use them.
  • On that subject, Fallout 4 isn't the first game, even specifically among the 3D Fallouts, to let you get power armor far earlier than expected; Fallout 3's first DLC, "Operation Anchorage", lets you start it basically from the moment you leave Vault 101, and its reward is power armor training and a free suit of it to wear for the rest of the game. Fallout 3 had several things going for it here that Fallout 4 lacks, however: you have to buy the DLC in question and then play through its main quest before you get the reward, which means it's still a couple hours between leaving the tutorial area and getting power armor, and the armor itself is less broken on principle, acting as a replacement suit of armor that simply gives you a minor Strength boost and noticeably higher defense; the only truly broken part of the suit you get from the DLC is its sky-high durability, which wasn't even intended. Fallout 4, in turn, gives you this early armor in the base game, does so within the first half-hour, and treats power armor as an exoskeleton worn over your regular armor that is broken on principle - it boosts your Strength further than it did in 3, makes you immune to falling damage and nearly impervious to weapons fire and radiation, and is easily kept in useable condition with nothing more than easily-acquired fusion cores to power it and random scrap to repair its constituent parts.
• Genre Turning Point: The game was hugely influential for the seventh generation of consoles for many reasons - its incredibly large and detailed open world, its adaption of traditional RPG mechanics into a first-person perspective with VATS, and its numerous quests with open-ended design coloured perceptions of what Wide-Open Sandbox games could be like, and so on. While its sequel New Vegas is more appreciated for being major improvements to the standard that 3 set, especially when it comes to quest design and RPG elements, as well as having a more dynamic story, Fallout 3 is still appreciated for its own merits as being a fun game and for its revolutionary qualities (in particular, being a large influence on some of the most lauded games of the seventh-generation, like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Far Cry 3, and Assassin's Creed series).
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Talon Company mercs or Regulators, depending on whether the player has good or evil karma. Both constantly hound you throughout the game and have an obnoxious habit of ambushing you as you're stepping outside from somewhere or fast travelling around. One plus side of getting constantly ambushed by Talon mercs, though, is they provide a steady supply of Combat Armor and spare sets of good weapons (the Assault Rifle, Laser Rifle and Combat Shotgun) to perform repairs with.
  • Wild dogs. They can give low-level players one hell of a hard time thanks to being everywhere, hunting in packs, and if your Agility is low, are much faster than you. A pack of them can easily chew through players in seconds, which is compounded by the fact that they'll likely see you long before you see them unless you pay close attention to the compass or abuse VATS to look over long distances.
• Good Bad Bugs: Again, several.
  • The repair shop merchant in Point Lookout has continually increasing repair skill. He is eventually the merchant capable of repairing everything to pristine condition.
  • The developers mistakenly placed the simulation version of the winterized T-51b power armor as the reward after completing Operation: Anchorage, which results in it becoming almost totally indestructible since it has nearly ten million item HP (i.e., it doesn't ever have to be repaired).
  • In vanilla Fallout 3, Dogmeat, Fawkes, and Sergeant RL-3 are fixed-level characters, due to being creatures rather than human NPCs. The Broken Steel DLC upgrades them to allow them to level up with the player, in order to stay competitive against the super-powerful new enemies introduced in the expansion. The Good Bad Bug is that their health and damage increase ten times more than what the designers intended... making them pretty much indestructible killing machines (For example, Dogmeat has 2,500 health at player level one and 15,000 health at player level thirty! For comparison, a Super Mutant Behemoth, by far the toughest monster in the game, has 2,000 health). Note that this only occurs if Broken Steel is installed before you actually meet and recruit those characters... otherwise they receive no upgrade, and get curbstomped by the new Demonic Spiders.
  • The inventory system has a small bug where, if there are two or more of the same equip with different conditions and the more damaged equip is below the less damaged equip, moving the more damaged equip will instead move the less damaged equip. The same bug applies to equipment shops, only now you can buy the item that is less damaged for the price of the more heavily damaged one, then sell it back for it's real price. Repeat the process as many times as you want and you will have quite literally robbed the shop blind of all it's stock and money.
  • A Black Comedy version, Mister Lopez in Rivet City is contemplating suicide. If the player agrees to help him, he's flung backwards off the flight deck with the implication you push him. However, he's flung directly away from the player, not specifically off the deck, so if you talk to him from the side, this results in him getting thrown backwards on the balcony, somehow dead from nothing.^note Unless that "nothing" is having his skull cracked from falling onto the floor...
  • The game applies perk-based skill bonuses upon selecting them, rather than after confirmation. During the level up screen, you can select a perk that gives skill bonuses, then go back to the skill distribution and see the game has added them already. But if you go select another perk and return to the skill screen, the added points remain. Repeat for more points.
  • If you equip the Chinese stealth armor, you can wear many hats at once, and the effects stack.
  • The otherwise Demonic Spider-level Super Mutant Behemoths are easily confounded by terrain they can't pass through, so all the player has to do is hide in some kind of tight space and slowly chip away at one as it runs around in circles.
  • After entering the vault in the National Guard Armory, there is a second vault which houses the Experimental MIRV Launcher. There are two ways to open the door: EITHER an unmarked quest to find five items scattered across the Wasteland, OR exploit a glitch and get straight in.
  • The "Ghoul Ecology" perk (earned by reading a book in Point Lookout) is supposed to add a flat +5 damage against ghouls. An error in coding results in the perk adding said bonus to every single attack against every enemy of the game.
  • Plasma and laser weapons are capable of turning enemies into a pile of goop or ash, while leaving their inventory able to be looted in the same way as if killed normally. This pile (somewhat annoyingly for frequently visited locations) never ever disappears. However, when the enemies respawn after 72 in-game hours, the piles are still linked to their inventory. Meaning it is perfectly possible to remotely reverse-pickpocket a grenade into a Super Mutants inventory from any distance using the pile from their previous death.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Some of the results of your actions have not turned out quite as perfectly as you may have thought, as revealed in Fallout 4:
    • The Children of Atom are quite friendly, right? In 4, they attack you on sight and you can't reason with them. The group related to the main conflicts in Far Harbor can potentially be as unfortunate as, more often than not, Tektus has to be either chased out of Far Harbor or be subject to a Kill and Replace courtesy of Acadia, leaving the Church's governance moot regardless, if the Sole Survivor wants a peaceful resolution between the factions.
    • By the time of Fallout 4, the chivalric white knight image of the D.C. Brotherhood of Steel begins to falter as the moral complexities of protecting and assimilating human settlements that don't always want protection begin to chip at the organization's image.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A pro-Chinese radio broadcast in the Washington D.C. area isn't as unrealistic as people would think.
  • Given that the Children of Atom cult becomes a maniacal murderous presence in the Commonwealth wasteland, killing the preacher is suddenly more justifiable.
  • The Japanese version of the game censored the name of the Fat Man, renaming it the "Nuka Launcher"; Nuka-World would eventually introduce an actual Nuka-Cola branded version of the Fat Man, complete with the modified nukes to match.
  • According to Moira Brown's research notes, molerats could be tamed and turned into pets, if they were defanged, declawed, and lobotomized. Fallout: New Vegas includes the small mining town of Sloan, whose inhabitants keep a(n unharmed) molerat as a pet.
    • Even better, Fallout 76 proves that, not only can Mole Rats be tamed, they can also be domesticated on a mass scale, only 25 years after the war, as proven by the Molemen, with them still not harmed. Although it's possible their reliable method(s) got lost to time.
  • Speaking of Fallout: New Vegas, there's a protectron Sex Bot that shares the same name as the unique variant of the pneumatic Power Fist named "Fisto!".
• Informed Wrongness: In the ending, a Lone Wanderer who is not willing to sacrifice their life to activate Project Purity will be treated as a coward in the narrative. This is despite the presence of multiple companions who are immune to the radiation that kills you in the intended ending, which makes this more of a Stupid Sacrifice than anything.
• Iron Woobie: Gob. He seems to keep a stiff upper lip, (well, if he had lips) but the fact that his normal way of saying goodbye is crying "Don't hit me!" shows that Moriarty's done a number on him.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Freddie Gomez proves to be this, if you read James's medical files. He is another bully in Vault 101. However, he also suffers from Vault Depressive Syndrome, meaning that behind a 'Bully's Mask' is a kid who has trouble getting out of bed most days, has very low self esteem, and is often mocked as 'Freddie the Freak', by the other residents. In fact, the only reason he is a Tunnel Snake, is because he can feel good about himself at all. During 'Trouble on the Homefront', you can even see him weeping, because the only friendly resident, Paul Hannon, died due to untreated wounds from the Radroaches. You never see him get any better, since James refuses to use Chlorpromazine to 'string him out'.
  • Butch DeLoria is the Lone Wanderer's childhood bully, but his mother is strongly implied to be an alcoholic who spends so much money on alcohol, leaving Butch with little to eat. With that taken into consideration, it can be reasonably inferred that his harassing the Lone Wanderer is just him trying to act tough.
  • Scribe Bigsley in Broken Steel is a smug, snarky, arrogant jerk who yells at his subordinates and shows you nothing but disdain until you offer to help make his workload easier. However, he's stuck working around the clock in a dimly-lit room with no windows, has little support from the Brotherhood because their resources are still focused on the Enclave war, and has to oversee the distribution of water to the wasteland with limited manpower and limited money to hire more, and he's on the receiving end of the water requests from said cities because by the time you wake up, they've reportedly begun to get greedy about it. His terminal entries and some dialogue paths have him explain he isn't ungrateful or ignorant of all the good you've done and the value of the purifier to the civilian populace, but he's just so tired and overworked that manners are failing him. And unlike many NPCs who move around, Bigsley never leaves his office, and you'll find him asleep at his desk at times.
  • The adults of Andale are murderous cannibals, but that's only because their town has been completely isolated for centuries, with the nearby land being infertile due to radiation, forcing them to rely on passerby and generations of inbreeding in order to stay alive.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Vance is the leader of the Family, a group of raiders who have earned themselves the reputation of "vampires" across the Capital Wasteland. Vance, far from being the barbaric psychopath he's made out to be, is actually an extraordinarily callous man whose tenacity has earned a thriving refuge for an entire Family of Choice comprised of people afflicted with uncontrollable bloodthirst, utterly ruthless when it comes to protecting his flock and absolutely willing to kill to provide for his and their needs. Vance is nevertheless an exceptionally reasonable man with a strict code of honor who took in a young teenager named Ian West who accidentally killed his parents, teaching him to manage his bloodlust in the same way the rest of the Family does. Vance can even be convinced to strike a deal with the community Arefu which previously he has repeatedly raided, vowing to protect the residents so long as they offer him and his family a non-lethal blood tribute. Vance's charisma and tenacity ensures the security of one of the most grounded and happiest organizations in the entire game, even against the pressures and prejudice of the Crapsack World that is the Capital Wasteland.
  • Operation: Anchorage DLC: The simulated General Constantine Chase is an idealized version the real General Chase created to shape future soldiers to be patriotic and determined to protect the American homeland from the Chinese. Programmed to be a bombastic commander and skilled strategist, the simulated General sends paratroopers to stealthily knock out enemy artillery before creating a three pronged attack that cripples the Red Army headquarters and allows the enemy General Jingwei to be cornered and eliminated. Also given the real Chase's ruthlessness, the simulated Chase has prisoners of war executed in front of recruits to harden their hearts and make them merciless towards the enemy.
  • The Pitt DLC: Ishmael Ashur is the ruthless and pragmatic lord of the Pitt and runs a slave state to power the only steel mill and arm his armies of raiders. Once of the Brotherhood of Steel who took part in the Scourging of Pittsburg, an abandoned Ashur sought to rebuild the city and restore its old glory by uniting both the common people and the surviving raiders under his command. Ashur would later marry a scientist working on a cure for the trog virus that mutates newborns into monsters and find the solution in his own immune newborn daughter. When his backstabbing former lieutenant Wernher returns to incite a slave revolt, Ashur immediately recognizes the Lone Wanderer as his undercover agent and tries to turn them to his cause by revealing the cure would someday be ready and swear his honest intent to free the people of the Pitt when the population could naturally grow and prosper.
  • Point Lookout DLC: Desmond Lockheart is a centuries old ghoul who once played the Great Game of spies and espionage in the old world before the nuclear apocalypse. Eloquent but foul mouthed, Desmond gradually exposed himself to doses of radiation to secure immortality to continue his ancient feud with the villainous Professor Calvert. Tracking Calvert to Point Lookout, Desmond takes over the Calvert Mansion both as a jab and to find information all the while defending himself against hordes of Calvert's brainwashed tribals. Taking advantage of a touring Lone Wanderer's sudden arrival, Desmond has them infiltrate the tribals to find the source of Calvert's control over them and creates a jamming device to block out Calvert's mind controlling signals. While the Lone Wanderer can side with Calvert, Desmond will call them out on their gullibility and ultimately prove the only worthwhile option.
• Memetic Badass: Liberty Prime in general.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Tunnel Snakes Rule!
  • The Gary clones in Vault 108 saying "Gary" as their only word no matter what state they're in.
• Misaimed Fandom: Despite being a parody of jingoistic 1950's American Misplaced Nationalism, Liberty Prime's quotes are rather popular among some conservative/alt-right circles.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Anytime you gain Good Karma, it has a very delightful tone.
• One-Scene Wonder: Liberty Prime, while visible from the the first time you enter the Citadel, is only active for one quest in the main game, right at the end. But his appearance is one of the most memorable things in the game, if not the entire series.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: The game is hated by some of the fans of the first two games because it was created by Bethesda Softworks and not Black Isle Studios. The spinoff Fallout: New Vegas, developed by Black Isle successor Obsidian Entertainment, had a more positive reception.
• Salvaged Story: The new ending provided by the DLC pack Broken Steel, replacing the wildly unpopular original ending while also letting you send a radiation-immune companion to activate Project Purity if you so choose.
• Squick: You can drink from toilets. Aside from that disgust factor, many of the toilets, and for that matter the drinking fountains and sinks you can also drink from, haven't been used in two hundred years. For drinking water that's been sitting stagnant in the pipes for two centuries, you're fortunate that a few rads is all you catch from it. Just to drive it home, drinking from a toilet heals very little while giving a fairly large amount of radiation. Not to mention all of that could have been avoided by just lifting the float in the rear tank and drinking the endless supply of tap water.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The Mothership Zeta expansion manages to be a more faithful remake of Prey (2006) than the reboot that Bethesda themselves published in 2017.
  • To Bethesda's run on the Terminator games from the 1980s to 1990s. Ironically, the Broken Steel add-on for this game would be released within the same month as Terminator Salvation and its video game tie-in.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Many a player ends Sticky's quest by exploding his skull with a power fist then nuking his corpse. Also it's all but explicitly said that the kids from Little Lamplight are unknowingly cannibals and the player can make some nasty cracks towards them to make feel like crap.
• That One Attack: Loads, but probably the most feared is a Deathclaw's charging strike. Starts from a fair distance away, IMMEDIATELY closes the distance between you and it, and can knock off a third to half your health in a single shot, if not outright one-shot you to begin with. It's all but impossible to dodge and trying to run away will simply see them doing it again and again until one of you dies unless you somehow find a way to get away from it quickly, like jumping off a small cliff. Thankfully, this is why the Dart Gun exists as with its legs crippled, it can't charge at you. The problem is that you have to find the schematics and then the parts to craft it first...
• That One Boss: General Jingwei in Operation: Anchorage. He has a massive amount of health and an oversight in programming causes the American Powered Armor troops to turn hostile to the player without provocation. It's generally recommended to attempt the fairly hard Speech check to convince him that he's lost, making him kill himself. On the other hand, a quick VATS shot can knock his sword out of his hands so you can pick it up, leaving him with nothing to attack you with but his fists.
• That One Level: The Deathclaw Sanctuary is full of nothing but, you guessed it, Deathclaws. Luckily, it's completely optional.
• That One Sidequest: Finding all of the Vault Boy Bobbleheads. There are 20 in all and the game gives absolutely no clue or hint where to find most. Some are located in the far corners of the map in well hidden bunkers or isolated rooms, some are tucked away in places swarming with deadly enemies and some are found behind locked doors in HOUSES OWNED BY NPCS (which counts as trespassing, something unlikely to be done by good characters). Even worse, the Energy Weapons and Medicine bobbleheads are located in Raven Rock and Vault 101 respectively, making them Permanently Missable without so much as a notification if the player doesn't grab them as soon as they are given the chance (though Trouble On The Homefront gives the player a second shot at the Medicine bobblehead,) meaning the player can still get screwed after many hours of hard work. Getting the achievement for finding half of these damn things isn't so hard, but anyone shooting for all 20 is gonna need either a guide or a hell of a lot of luck and patience on their side. At least the reward (massive stat boosts per Bobblehead found) is well worth the trouble.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The fact that there's no option to directly side with the Enclave can be something of a let down to pro-Enclave players or evil characters. You can follow Eden's orders to poison the water supply in the main game, and the Broken Steel DLC gives you the opportunity to wipe out the Brotherhood of Steel, but those are arguably less pro-Enclave and more Omnicidal Neutral.
• Ugly Cute: Take Animal Friend, and the normally vicious mole rats will trundle harmlessly along the Wasteland. Sometimes they sit up to sniff the air, then drop back down to yawn and shake themselves.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The Enclave. In contrast to their depiction in Fallout 2, where they were genocidal racists, here they're toned back to Eagleland fascists. President Eden want to wipe out the wasteland inhabitants due to their mutations, but his Dragon-in-Chief Colonel Autumn wants to take control of the Purifier and activate it to use a source of fresh water to win the loyalty of the wasteland inhabitants. True, the Enclave including Autumn are a bunch of Jerkasses who kill anyone who defies them, terminals at their outposts imply they're experimenting on the local populace, and they want to wipe out the Brotherhood of Steel. On the other hand, Talon Company, super mutants, raiders, slavers, and all sorts of mutated animals, are out there making sure that just surviving the day is a challenge for many people, so against them the Enclave's goals and misdeeds can make them seem like the lesser evil. For some, a totalitarian government engaging in human experimentation may be a worthwhile price to pay if the upside is peace, order, and clean water.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • You're apparently supposed to feel some pity for the dire state Vault 101 is in during Trouble on the Homefront, which is a shame since the game makes it very difficult to feel anything but contempt for the people of the Vault. Most of them treat you with unfair hostility and scorn, acting as if everything is your fault when it was your father leaving the Vault and Overseer Alphonse overreacting to it that caused everything (if you escaped the Vault without killing anyone, their hostility is even less justified). Only a handful of the populace treat you decently (the fact that Butch is one of the decent people speaks volumes) and even if you save all their asses without shedding a single drop of blood they still kick you out and continue to blame you for what had happened.
  • Most of the slaves in the Pitt are seriously rude towards the Lone Wanderer, especially Midea, who always seems to be insulting your intelligence with every scolding sentence she utters over everything. And you're supposed to be saving them, too!
• Win Back the Crowd: While the game did create a Broken Base, the Fallout franchise was pretty much dead after the closure of Black Isle and the poor commercial and critical reception of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. Bethesda's purchase of the series and the release of Fallout 3 turned a Cult Classic franchise into Triple-A material and one of their flagship properties, and reinvigorated the fanbase for years to come.

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