These are what we call the 'YMMV items.' Things that some people find in this work. We call them 'your mileage might vary' because not everyone sees these things in the same way. This starts discussions in the trope lists, a thing we don't want. Please use the discussion page if you'd like to discuss any of these items.
YMMV: Fallout New Vegas
Alternative Character Interpretation: Depending on your political ideology and ethical outlook, you can view all the factions in positive or negative light.
Yes Man: Cheery doormat who's just a tool to let anyone with the will take over New Vegas, or a sadistic Starscream who's been setting the player up from the start (though the latter interpretation has since been Jossed)?
Mr. House: A well-intentioned benevolent dictator and the best hope for restoring the world to pre-war glory and stability, or a Corrupt Corporate Executive that is totally out of touch with the realities of the wasteland and is only using the people as justification for appointing himself as an autocrat?
NCR: A nation that is dedicated to the ideals of democracy, freedom and individual rights, or a power that is on a slippery slope and is destined to repeat the mistakes of the old United States?
And opposite him, Daniel. A fool who doesn't understand the need for violence even to defend one's self, or a naive but hopeful pacifist trying to shield the tribals from the harshness of the "civilized" world.
Ulysses: A Well-Intentioned Extremist who's hoping to exact sweeping changes in people by destroying the flawed nations and symbols they follow? A vengeful Omnicidal Maniac who just wants to get revenge on all those responsible for destroying the symbols he followed in life? Or is he a Stealth Mentor for the Courier seeking to test his/her character and challenge the symbols that he/she in turn follows? Or perhaps even a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who went off the deep end after the destruction of his adopted home?
Most legionaries: brainwashed fanatics who worship Caesar as a God and look back on the destruction of their former tribes as a positive step which uplifted them, or just putting on a "legionary persona" when talking to anyone but their closest friends (if that), out of fear that if they let it slip that they're not completely in accord with the legion outlook, word will get back to Vulpes and they'll end up on a cross?
Caesar's Legion in general (and by extension Caesar himself): They torture, they murder, they enslave, and they conquer, but traveling merchants will tell you the lands under Caesar's control enjoy greater stability and security than anywhere outside his influence. So, are they brutal Jerk Ass conquerors whose ideals are nothing but an excuse to indulge in sadistic cruelty, or Well-Intentioned Extremists whose harsh methods will unite humanity and create a better, safer, more ordered world in the long run?
If you have the Confirmed Bachelor perk, you can chat up an NCR Major at Mojave Outpost, who will say that he would want to be your "friend", but the mood around the outpost is too conservative for him to want to deal with everyone he works with knowing. This comes across as a snipe at Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which becomes Hilarious in Hindsight following the repeal of DADT.
Dead Money takes the Aesop on why greed is bad Up to Eleven. Naming the Casino Sierra Madre makes it really obvious to anyone who has seen the film.
Though it's possible to actually beat the house, as it were, and turn this into a Broken Aesop.
Anticlimax Boss: The Fiend leaders are at least several times more powerful and durable than the generic mooks, but still fall under this.
Benny, if you opt to fight him in the arena, will tell you beforehand of his knife-fighting prowess from his tribal days. Depending on your level and skill, Benny is a pushover or, at worst, a mild inconvenience. He is in no way a serious threat. Some knife-fighter you turned out to be, Benny.
Legate Lanius, if you're prepared, can become this, as his death is an Instant-Win Condition. Most notably, the YCS/186 can easily destroy him with one sneak critical headshot with the right build.
General Oliver is almost a Zero-Effort Boss if you have the Securitrons, since your own side's weapons are a greater danger to you than he is. Even if you're fighting against him for the Legion, his Elite Mooks are far more of a threat than he is.
Father Elijah from the Dead Money add on is actually pretty easy to kill. His turrets are pretty strong, but its possible if you have 50 unarmed to just smash the generator, making those turrets useless, which will cause him to charge you himself, and that's hardly the only way to stop the turrets. He may be packing a Gaussrifle, but Elijah himself is only wearing a Brotherhood robe and is therefore a huge Glass Cannon, so killing him isn't very hard. The Final Boss was likely this way to make up for the rest of Dead Money.
Salt-Upon-Wounds, the White Legs warchief and 'Final Boss' of Honest Hearts, especially if you sided with Joshua Graham and used his idea of simply crushing the White Legs. Joshua will hold him at gunpoint, then Salt-Upon-Wounds will drop to his knees and start begging for mercy. If you don't intervene, Joshua just kills him right there. To actually fight him, you tell Joshua that he should be able to die on his feet, with honor, whereupon he attacks you. While his stats are objectively pretty good (he has high combat skills, a unique power fist, a few mooks backing him, and can have anywhere from 600-700 hitpoints) this hardly matters since Joshua Graham is on your side. You can literally just sit there and do nothing while Joshua kills him and all his mooks. Chances are they won't even manage to knock him down.
The Think Tank in Old World Blues, if you opt not to befriend them and talk them down, are pretty big pushovers. There are only five of them, and their health and weaponry are equal or inferior to all the things you've been facing as semi-regular enemies the whole DLC.
Assuming, that is, that one does the DLC at the recommended level or higher: Klein is the only one of the Think Tanknote The current Think Tank, that is. Mobius also scales with level. that scales with level, which all semi-regular and regular enemies also do. In other words, they keep pace no matter the level (indeed, they can even get worse), while 4/5 of the Think Tank becomes less and less of a threat the higher the Courier's level.
Klein also makes it clear that without the pacification field there's not much to stop you from easily killing them all. They're scientists, not fighters after all (even with whatever weapons they have).
As in all previous installments, all 'final bosses' (save for Father Elijah mentioned above, though he can be tricked) can be persuaded to abandon their cause.
The Vault 34 Overseer has a lot of health, but doesn't actually attack unless the player gets close, instead letting two turrets do the fighting. A sufficiently powerful ranged weapon can take the Overseer out without him fighting back.
Mr House. If you were orphaned as a kid and left with nothing by your swindler half-brother, then went on to found one of the most successful companies of the pre-War era at age 22 and ended up being a billionaire several times over by age 30...well, you're well in your right to be an arrogant Jerkass. And that's not getting into what he did about the war itself, or what he does during the game.
Not only the regular old versus new shtick, but also hardcore mode versus standard mode is emerging.
Dead Money has also been causing a debate. Both parties agree that the voice acting is amazing and it's much harder than any other sections of the game, but that's all they agree about. Either it is a brilliant, atmospheric, fun, strategic, Survival Horror adventure, or a frustrating, ugly looking, linear path filled with Trial-and-Error Gameplay, Fake Difficulty, and Demonic Spider enemies (the Ghost Trappers and speakers in particular get a lot of hate).
The Boomers. They REALLY like guns, and bombs, and cannons... or anything else that uses gunpowder at all.
Can't forget that one of the customers in Atomic Wrangler is asking to have sex with a robot. note Right. A customer. Not the owner. He was very clear about that. I mean real (metal) robot, not Robot Girl or humanoid-looking things.
Oddly, the Stealth Suit and the Light Switches in Old World Blues appear to have crushes on the Courier.
Lily, a schizophrenic Nightkin grandma wielding a weaponized vertibird propeller, and, apparently, Tabitha and Rhonda, if their post-game narration is any clue.
There's nothing stopping the player from roaming around in a pretty floral bonnet and a set of spiked football pads beating the crap out of people with a golf club.
Or a leather-clad dominatrix with a hockey mask and a chainsaw.
Or (with the latest DLCs) dress up as a rampaging construction worker (complete with hat) "fixing" the mojave with an Arc Welder, a Nail Gun, and/or a sawblade power fist.
The Think Tank. Each one of them is a Mad ScientistBrain in a Jar with serious mental issues. However, their inventions are nothing short of spectacular.
Cazadores, fullstop. They are tough as nails (they'll murder you on lower levels, and can take several hits from your high-end toys), have a very potent poison, and travel in packs as large as eight at some times. They also move too quickly to get a decent shot off outside of VATS, and it's almost impossible to headshot them in VATS mode due to a minor glitch which makes their head impossible to click at times. The icing on the cake, however, has to be their poison. Pre-patch, it killed companions basically on contact thanks to a bug that made it never wear off. They fixed that, but in doing so actually made Cazador poison even more potent than it already was. It wears off, but it takes such a long time that you have to dope your companions with nearly a dozen stimpacks if they've taken more than one sting.
If that weren't enough, Honest Hearts gives us Giant Cazadores, and those bastards come right out of nowhere if your eyes aren't glued to the compass.
Old World Blues offers a chance for revenge. Hate those flying spider monsters? Kill around 10 in the Big MT for +30% damage against their relatives, plus another implant perk for an additional 10%. Between that and the poison immunity granted by your new mechanical heart, hunting them down becomes much more viable.
They do, however, have a glaring weakness that most players will overlook: Absolutely 0 DT and easily crippled wings. Once the player is aware of this, they can begin safely engaging Cazadores in small to medium numbers with nothing more than a 10mm SMG.
Also, for all their erratic movement, they can't dodge splash damage.
What's even worse than giant radscorpions? Robo scorpions of course. They can shoot laser from their tails, ridiculously tough for their size, somewhat resistant to EMP weapons, and when you finally destroy it, it blows up in your face.
Deathclaws actually got EVEN WORSE since the previous game. They're just as fast, but now they're stronger, tougher, and crippling them is that much harder without the Dart Gun. They're like velociraptors on steroids. Then there's the variants in Quarry Junction, which are even more deadly, featuring twice the health and a stronger attack. Worse still are the boss variants, the Alphas and Mothers, who are about twice as strong as the regular ones. Topped off by the ungodly deadly LEGENDARY Deathclaw, which will almost certainly one-shot you on any level and have as much health as the Final Boss, LegateLanius.
Nightkin, which are Super Mutant ninja with Stealth Boys that make them near-invisible. Sure, they may shimmer like water, but just try and spot that when they're moving at any speed faster than a walk. These guys hide behind rocks until you're mere meters away, and they do not decloak until they're literally two feet away in mid-swing. On top of that, they are deceptively fast, recloak almost instantly, and can send you flying (no joke here). Even if you have ED-E, who negates a fair portion of their advantages, they will still catch a non-VATS user by surprise.
With the reintroduction of damage threshold (DT), the Super Mutants are much harder to kill while they use heavier weapons against you.
Legion Assassins and NCR Ranger hit squads if you have no followers with you, otherwise they're closer to Goddamned Bats. They spawn in dozens of locations near fast travel points on the main road, appear in groups of four, chase you relentlessly until they catch you, then declare you are a criminal and kill you where you stand before you have a chance to react. Unless you get the opening shot, only a high-level, well-armored player is going to live through their assault.
Even worse if you take the Wild Wasteland trait, where the rats in the cave have been replaced with bigger, stronger rodents of unusual size.
Speakers and radios in Dead Money. Imagine there are these small devices hidden all around the environment. Imagine that if you stay in their field of range for more than about ten seconds, you die instantly. Imagine most of the speakers are indestructible, and the ones that aren't are hard to find due to (usually) being hidden just out of sight and in the dark. Imagine the radios being ham radios, which you will instinctively ignore, or brown Sierra Madre radios, which blend with the background. Now add on to the fact that in addition to making sure your head doesn't explode, you have to worry about the poisonous gas that's usually paired with this obstacle. I hope you studied the locations of the radios and speakers in advance, or you will spend most of the DLC searching for them.
The Yao Guais are back in Honest Hearts. In Fallout 3 they were tough, but not Deathclaw tough. Honest Hearts will teach you to fear them.
Lonesome Road also gives us Deathclaws. But wait! These aren't Mojave Deathclaws. LR Deathclaws level with the player, making them even more dangerous (though not quite as durable) as the Legendary Deathclaw at the highest levels. They're also directly in your path to the end point of the DLC. Oh, and at certain points, the game just spawns them out of nowhere to make your life hell. In one particular instance, walking into an abandoned RV, which you will certainly do because it is a force of habit, causes one to spawn right on top of the RV. Guess the first thing that Deathclaw decides to do. At least Tunnelers can be attacked head-on with reasonable success. You are not bringing down an LR Deathclaw at anything but range.
Even at lower levels, the common Jackals and Vipers can still spawn with grenade rifles, which can kill you way before you're inside any of your weapons' effective ranges. Even worse in Hardcore mode, as you typically will have to run all the way back to Goodsprings to get 4 of your crippled limbs healed.
Many agree that Yes Man, the constantly smiling Securitron, is by far one of the coolest characters in the game, if only for the fact that he opens up the questline to diverge from the standard endings.
As a character, Veronica is most similar to Kasumi Goto in fight style and personality, she just lacks the Stealth Boy.
Arcade and Joker are snarky, disaffected brothers from other mothers.
Raul as well, mainly for being voiced by Danny Trejo.
The King is very popular, and some even want an ending where he can be crowned the ruler of New Vegas.
Fisto seems to have a very high interest-to-plot-relevance ratio, probably because his related quest is both icky and hilarious.
Joshua Graham has also become very popular among the fans.
Also, Lily. It helps that she's wielding a helicopter blade in melee and occasionally goes berserk and babbles incoherently.
No-Bark Noonan and Fantastic are two highly hilarious side-characters, the former being a raving madman who knows more than he lets on, the latter being a man who knows far less than he lets on. "I know exactly what I'm doing! I just don't know what effect it'll have!"
SunnySmiles also seems to be quite popular, as she has inspired quite a few mods that allow you to recruit her as a companion... With and without her loyal Canine Companion, Cheyenne.
Esoteric Happy Ending: Uh, better hope the courier did something about those Tunnelers making their way from the Divide to the Mojave, or otherwise they'll end up with this no matter what faction they chose.
Even Better Sequel: With several of the first two games' designers working on New Vegas, the part of the fandom that can't stand Fallout 3 thinks this is a major improvement. The part of the fandom that liked Fallout 3 also thinks this is a major improvement.
Old World Blues is large enough it's almost its own entire game, and it's damn great. And hilarious. In many ways, better than the regular product.
Family Unfriendly Aesop: One quest fot the Followers of the Apocalypse has this in spades. You learn of a water shortage problem with an NCR farm. Following the trail, you come upon Westside's local FOA missionary, who helps with their crops. It doesn't take much to reveal that he murdered the first NCR officer to investigate the cause, and he'll try to do you in if you threaten to reveal what he's doing. Furthermore, if you manage to get him to turn himself in/extort him for your silence, Arcade will take issue with this and you'll earn negative reputation among them. In other words, the only way this quest ends positively is if you not only let him get away with murder, but help him steal more water, dooming the NCR farmers in the process or get him to turn himself in for something else while keeping the secret.
Like in Fallout3, killing evil people, regardless of motive and methods counts as good karma.
Fanon: The idea that Yes Man is a closet Starscream has become thoroughly entrenched in the fandom due to a single ambiguous line at the end of the game.
Jossed by J.E. Sawyer in one of his Formspring posts.
Game Breaker: Having Boone early on makes enemy encounters hilarious. Until the game glitches out and makes him run out of ammo and lose his rifle. The only downside is that the Legion will be hostile to you as long as he is with you, no matter if you don't plan on siding with them though (or maybe yes, see Dressing as the Enemy), Boom, Headshot is still the best way to go for easy experience and loot.
Also, traveling a fairly short and safe distance to Broc Flower Cave from the starting town can lead to you getting the Ratslayer, a unique variant of the extremely common varmint rifle (so it's easily repaired) equipped with all the latter's mods (Day/Night scope, suppressor and expanded magazine) and it does more damage than normal. And it also has a x5 Critical Hit chance multiplier.
A mild one, ED-E with the enhanced sensors can make hunting nightkin a breeze.
The And Stay Back! perk along with a powerful shotgun allows you to knock your enemies to the ground, then take your sweet time lining up a perfect headshot. Or seven, you've got more than enough time.
The Gobi Campaign Scout Rifle. Being able to decapitate a Deathclaw from a mile away? Yeah, pretty much the definition of game breaker.
What you can do by punching the enemy with the Ballistic Fist would make Kenshiro cry manly tears.
The Plasma Caster modded with the Plasma Caster HS Electrode basically turns the weapon into the Turbo Plasma Rifle. Add the Meltdown perk, and enjoy seeing your enemies explode in a chain of plasma fire.
The YCS 186 Gauss Rifle. You can get it early provided you know where to look. Will kill most human enemies in a single hit even without critical hit. If properly done (using sneak critical), this will turn even Legate Lanius into an Anticlimax Boss.
Although they've both been mentioned separately, having both Boone and Ed-E with you can make long-range sniping a breeze, especially if you have a suppressed sniper rifle *coughRatslayer*. Call yourself AT, 'cause you're gonna reach out and touch someone!
More on sniping: the Laser Rifle is one of the weakest energy weapons in the game, its only redeeming qualities being low ammo consumption and very good manual accuracy due to lasers actually behaving like lasers in this game. There are 3 easy-to-obtain mods for this weapon that slightly increase the damage but more importantly, give it a long range scope that further magnifies the weapon's tremendous manual accuracy. Combine this with stealth and the Better Criticals perk, and now you have a weapon that can be used to score sneak attack critical hit 1-shots on pretty much 90% of all enemies in the game (with the exception of the toughest ones like Deathclaws) from 100 miles away. Spot a group of deadly cazadores in the distance? No problem, just crouch and proceed to 1-shot all of them from relative safety!
Give Boone the Anti-Materiel Rifle. Have ED-E float around and detect enemies. The only way anything will ever get close to you is if they were right next to you the moment you entered a building.
Shotguns with Slug ammo, combined with the Shotgun Surgeon perk, and Center Of Mass Perk can be horribly devastating. Slugs don't fire multiple small shots, but rather one large shot that can be devastating, since the slug is equal in power to buckshot, just concentrated to one area. The perks negate a good chunk of an enemy's defense, and adds additional damage to all shots to the torso (the easiest part of an enemy's body to hit, nine times out of ten). Add this with a good shotgun, and you're a beast, provided you're armored and have some decent endurance. In Bloody Mess, using this build, a torso shot on an unarmored enemy is... impressively colorful. Although it makes picking out loot from individual remains a bit of a time consuming process, the show is well worth the annoyance. And for extra fun, start with beanbag rounds, which do fatigue damage and can result in knockouts. Now you can just load a slug in, walk up to your unconscious enemy, and finish him.
"This Machine", a unique rifle that can be obtained from an unmarked quest. Very high damage (matching a sniper rifle), high accuracy, high durability, and easy to repair, assuming the player takes the Jury Rigging perk. It's also rather easy to feed; .308 ammo isn't particularly hard to obtain mid-game, likely around the same point the gun is found. If the player is using .308 JSP ammo, the 50% damage boost makes encounters with tough enemies, such as Deathclaws, very easy.
A surprising gamebreaker is the humble cattle prod. While it does pitiful damage against anything, it still stuns nearly every enemy in 2 or 3 hits, leaving them at your mercy if you repeatedly restore the stun effect. You could literally poke them to death. This includes Death Claws, Giant Rad Scorpion Queens, Cazadores, or even Securitrons. If enemies get too close, this is basically the perfect emergency weapon.
The Holorifle from Dead Money, if you can find all the mods, turns into a deadly, accurate, slowly-decaying, ammo efficient killing machine.
The Pulse Gun. Despite being very situational, it makes robots, turrets, and power-armored enemies a breeze. If you're wiping out the Brotherhood, it's a must have.
Sneak attack criticals are absolutely devastating, especially combined with a headshot. That's why weapons like the Ratslayer, which has absolutely garbage stats, can be gamebreakers. For reference just how low the Ratslayer's stats are, the Silenced .22 pistol, the absolute weakest pistol in the entire game, has slightly higher DPS than the Ratslayer. Only three pistols (.22 pistol, 9mm, and Maria, the unique version of the 9mm) do less damage per shot. Despite this, it becomes devastating when used with sneak attack criticals.
From Old World Blues, Rank 2 of the Implant GRX perk could count. Rank 1 just gives you five doses of non-addictive (albeit slightly weakened) Turbo. Take Rank 2, and you get double the amount of doses with each dose being just as strong as the chem. On top of that, it refreshes its supply daily. If that wasn't enough, you could blow all ten shots at once for a stacked duration. Want more? Day Tripper, Chemist, and the Logan's Loophole trait's effects stack (though Logan's Loophole only applies to Rank 1 only). According to the Fallout Wiki, Rank 1 with the trait and perks grants you a duration of 30.4 seconds in real time for each dose, whereas Rank 2 with the perks only gives you 22.8 seconds for each dose. If for some reason you decide to blow all available doses in one go, Rank 1 with trait and perks gives a total of 152 real time seconds (or around 2.5 real time minutes) of Turbo daily. Not impressed? If you don't take the trait, you can get to Rank 2, allowing you a whopping 228 real time seconds (that's nearly four actual minutes!) of Bullet Timeper in-game day. At this point, you don't even need the Fast Times perk... or hell, you don't even need the drug to begin with after getting the perk. And to top it all off, if you haven't even touched the Dead Money questline when you get the perk, it won't be removed from your inventory at all.
Jury Rigging is a pretty big game breaker. You can repair anything with anything even remotely similar to it, so you can fully repair that Hunting Shotgun with a few cheap Single Shotguns and then sell it for tons of caps. It requires 90 repair to unlock, but that is totally worth it for the massive benefits you get.
It can also save you quite a bit of money if you're going after rare equipment. That NCR ranger combat armor on the cover? Costs around 10,000 caps to repair at a vendor. But with jury rigging, all you need to do is find some combat armor and you're good to go.
All the gold bars in the Dead Money DLC. The game made them incredibly heavy so you would be forced to leave them behind to demonstrate the necessity of letting go of greed. Except that with a high sneak skill (plus maybe a dose of Turbo, which is conveniently lying around in the vault itself) and some precise timing, you can sneak off behind Elijah's back with all the gold with the total value of 389,943 caps.
Even if you didn't invest in the sneak skill you can still get the gold. All you have to do is lug all 37 bars over to one of Elijah's force-fields, drop them from your inventory while standing in just the right spot, and (due to a glitch) the gold will fall to the ground on the other side of the force-field mere feet away from the elevator you need to escape through. Then you can kill Elijah and run the long way around to the elevator where your ill-gotten gold will be waiting for you. If you're fast enough you should be able to make it out just by the skin of your teeth.
The compliance regulator from Honest Hearts, does almost no damage, but every time it lands a crit it will stun the target for several second making them easy to pick off with a more powerful weapon. It also has an amazing fire rate so it's easy to spam hits at a distant target and land at least one crit before it reaches you and uses the very easy to find SEC's for ammo. Best part nothing in the game is immune to the stun, this includes all end game/DLC bosses, if you crit it, it will fall over stunned for quite some time.
C4 Explosives can be dropped without attracting attention and can be detonated in hiding, this allows the player to basically murder anyone they want without anyone the wiser.
For the game-within-a-game, Caravan is trivially easy to win once you've built up enough even-numbered cards and face cards. By stacking the deck with 6, 8, 10, Jack, and King cards, you can not only get a solid 26 on every caravan within a few moves each, but can also easily sabotage your opponent.
Getting locked out of The Strip. Virtually all of the main plot missions take place there, and most of the action as well. Fortunately, it's easily fixed by hitting ~ to go to console, entering 'unlock' and clicking on the gate. You can also take the monorail at Camp McCarran; worst case scenario, you'll need to don an NCR disguise first. Finally, you can just snipe one of the Securitrons guarding the entrance and loot the key if you manage to be unseen.
In some circumstances, the lockpick screen becomes completely blank, which makes lockpicking somewhat harder than it's supposed to be.
In one particular savegame, taking RadAway caused a hard crash on the Xbox360, requiring a revert to a previous save. Save early, save often!
Cazadors are almost impossible to head shot because of the fact that in VATS mode, you can't target the head unless it's the first thing highlighted.
The odds of getting the Cazador's head to be highlighted are increased, however, if you VATS target them after crippling a wing.
Another Cazador-related bug. Cazador poison will not wear off companions. Attempting to use a Stimpak on them will kill them, since using a Stimpak on a poisoned companion will "cure" the poison by dealing the full amount of damage at once before applying the Stimpak's healing, and since Cazador poison never wears off companions they will take an infinite amount of damage that can never be healed.
Cazador poison actually will wear off companions eventually, but unless their health is full it's a moot point because the poison lasts so long. If they got stung more than once, it's just your choice whether to kill them now or later. Sometimes they'll heal themselves, but it's generally better to have them wait before heading someplace with Cazadores.
Vault 11 has a bugged turret in the final room which is aligned to the Lucky 38, and by destroying it you fail Mr. House's quests automatically and turn all the Securitrons hostile. So if you did more exploration than plot chasing before coming to New Vegas, you probably won't be able to join his faction at all. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to happen often with the latest patch, so you can probably get away with it.
If you have ED-E with you when you start Dead Money in the 360 version, he becomes hostile upon returning to the Mojave.
If you enter Dead Money while suffering from withdrawal, the debuffs sometimes become permanent.
On the 360, if you're Vilified with the Legion when you first enter The Fort, kill everyone, and let Benny go free, the chip goes with him and the game becomes unwinnable.
The chip is in Caesar's body, if you approach him without being vilified he will tell you that he has the chip, and also even if the chip disappeared you still have the NCR path, so not unwinnable, and you probably are vilified because you helped the NCR.
Also, if you managed to become vilified by the legion between the point where Vulpes Inculta pardons you and the point where you go to The Fort then you are Too Dumb to Live.
Vendors never restocking. This is only fixable by starting a new file, and might not become immediately evident until several hours into the game.
One of the Gun Runners' Arsenal challenges, which requires you to kill Deathclaws with specific weapons, is almost impossible to complete unless you know exactly which Deathclaws actually count. Thanks to an update, no adult Deathclaw in the wild, except for the blind ones, counts unless it's a mother, alpha, or the legendary. You have to kill five, and you can easily have killed all the viable targets before trying to do the challenge. The only option left is the Thorn, and to fight Deathclaws there takes a very long, dangerous quest to unlock the option. At least the Deathclaws in the arena are weaker.
One bug that is annoying enough to make one want to restore an earlier state involves Boone talking to you without prompt after re-recruiting him in the Lucky38. Along as he's with you this makes any movement or gameplay impossible thanks to him interrupting you with an infinite loop of "What is it?"
Some merchants sell multiple copies of a single Caravan playing card. Buying more than one copy at once will make the game freeze.
If the player sneak attacks and kills an enemy when there are other enemies nearby, the other enemy will go into an infinite [CAUTION] loop, where the enemy will notice the other enemy's corpse, go into [CAUTION], not find the player, go to [HIDDEN] mode, notice the other enemy's corpse AGAIN, go into [CAUTION] mode again, repeat ad infinitum.
Several of the general meta game "dump" stats are obviously important for both stat checks and because you can't use items or companions to try to replace the function of those stats.
You lose all of your equipment for the duration of Dead Money. The weapons of choice are mainly an energy weapon with limited ammo, an automatic weapon that requires higher than average strength and explosives. All weapons often ignored by meta gamers.
Noooot really, at least postpatch. The holorifle is like the ultra-useful Drone Cannon B from Mothership Zeta, which players of that will feel at home with. The automatic rifle is a more powerful version of the Light Machine Gun, which is a more than capable weapon by itself for some players, and explosives have received a noticeable boost. Failing that, there's the police pistol that uses .357 magnum ammo but deals a more damage at the cost of accuracy.
Sneaking around requires a high amount of the skill and proficiency in actually sneaking around (walking quietly, not walking into direct line of sight, turning off your light, etc). You can't hoard stealth boys and walk straight past everything.
Your funds, ammo, and consumable items are limited. You can't run off to farm caps. You have to make do with what you have.
Reading messages and postings on terminals gives a lot of major clues about the easiest method to get past obstacles. You can't just keep following the arrow, shooting everything in your path.
Your choices matter far more than in the main game. Elijah will kill you if you mouth off to him even a little, and whether or not Dean and Christine betray you is determined by your choices throughout your time with them, not simply during your final dealings with them as you may be used to.
Companions aren't expendable. If they die, you die due to linked bomb collars. Their contribution in battle is also important due to your limited ammo.
Goddamn Bats: Geckos, coyotes, rats, giant mantises, nightstalkers, small radscorpions/bark scorpions (thanks to their venom, larger radscorpions are Demonic Spiders), etc. Also, Cazadors at higher difficulties. They can't do much damage to a hulking player character wrapped in power armor and carrying a plasma caster, but they move around lightning fast, close in on you in seconds, are almost impossible to hit outside of V.A.T.S., have a bug that prevents from targeting their heads ''in'' V.A.T.S, come in groups, and poison you, forcing you to waste Antivenom and stimpaks.
Goddamn Tunnelers from the Lonesome Road DLC. They have incredible strength, attack in packs, can crawl on the walls and ceilings, can pop out of the ground beneath you, and take a lot of punishment. If you get surrounded, you're screwed. Even by using their weakness of the flaregun, they only panic for a short while and run away from you, forcing you to chase them so you can use the small window of opportunity to kill them. Oh, and they're found in small cramped tunnels with minimal running room. Have fun.
Good Bad Bugs: While attempting to kill or disable Mr. House in one quest, all the Securitrons in his penthouse will just stand there rather than attacking you. Considering that they may have all been upgraded to their Mark II OS, and are now armed with rocket and grenade launchers, this is extraordinarily helpful.
This does not appear to be the case after the first couple patches. The Securitrons will attack the player but will not use the grenades or rockets while inside the Penthouse. Maybe House just doesn't want his place totally trashed.
One developer revealed that Boone's utter lethality was actually out of proportion compared to how he should have been (with a guns skill going straight over 117% at level five). Now that IS a good bad bug.
ED-E's laser weapon may randomly change to an AlienBlaster.
It's actually possible to gain infinite XP by killing Big Sal and repeatedly shooting his corpse.
Unarmed weapons tend to have a habit of turning invisible, which may make it irritating when trying to figure out what weapon you're using, but the fact that your bare fists can launch people into the skybox as if you're Goku makes it amusing, nonetheless.
The same happens to ranged weapons occasionally. MIND BULLETS!
Is the doctor at the Followers Safehouse? If so, then loot the fridges continuously for infinite food.
While under the effects of Turbo, certain fully automatic weapons will expend their magazine and then some when used in VATS, especially during bad framerate.
The Holorifle and the Anti-Materiel Rifle can be repaired past their max conditions using weapon repair kits, thus increasing their condition and value to completely insane amounts.
Once you've completed the "That Lucky Old Sun" quest after setting the power to "full region", keep telling it to Ignacio for infinite XP, stimpaks and Doctor's Bag. Just make sure you have at least one companion to help you carry those bags!
Do your non-magazine guns annoy you by needing every bullet to be individually loaded? Does it upset you that the computers can reload these types of weapons in under a second? Well now you can too! Just carry a different type of ammunition, switch to it when you run dry and switch back instantly. That single bullet you loaded actually contained an entire magazine's worth of bullets, which all teleported to their proper positions immediately.
The Autodoc in The Sink can wreak some real havoc by swapping out Traits. It only works once, but that's all you need. Swap out Skilled to keep the free skill points but lose the XP debuff, or just select it again for another free +5 to everything (you can also do this while leaving Goodsprings, granting a staggering 195 free skill points, 15% of those available in the entire game, or a 130 (10%) without a drawback). Take Logan's Loophole, then swap it out around level 29 (the drawback doesn't apply until level 30).
You can get infinite money by getting 32,678 chips, dropping them, and them cashing them in again and again.
As for those that don't affect gameplay, a programming error makes "Big Iron" play twice as often on Radio New Vegas as other songs.
The Hotkey Ammo Glitch. Find a type of ammo you'd like to use and equip a weapon that uses that type of ammo. After equipping the weapon hold down the button to hotkey an item, move left, highlight the ammo you'd like and hotkey it like normal, release the hotkey button then go equip a different weapon. After backing out of the Pip-Boy menu hit whatever button you've hotkeyed the ammo too and miraculously you can use that ammo despite not having the right weapon equipped. This works for any type of ammo on any type of weapon. Have fun with a flare gun that shoots incendiary grenades, or using the Laser Detonator to fire an endless, rapid stream of mini-nukes, or giving boxing gloves the same attack power as a mini-nuke (only without explosions)! Even better, you can use coinshot with weapons like the MF Hyperbreeder to shoot an endless stream of money. Or use 4/0 buckshot ammo with C4 causing FOUR explosives to appear where you threw one essentially giving you an endless source of very, VERY easy money when you sell them so long as you have at least ONE C4.
Harsher in Hindsight Arizona Killer is the quest in which the player character assassinates President Kimball, of the NCR. Consider the events in Tuscon, Arizona in January of 2011. .
There's a panel in All Roads that has a quite a bit of subtext.
Aside from that, you can actually play a gay/bi character, with the option to have G-Rated Sex.
This is actually enforced by the Confirmed Bachelor/Cherchez La Femme which is just like the Lady Killer/Black Widow perk which is also available... Except that it is effective against people of the same sex rather than the opposite one. Considering how valuable the female counterpart was to the male one in the third game, this can be considered a blessing since males are far more commonly encountered as enemies in the wastes than females.
It could even be regarded as Getting Crap Past the Radar, as this is perhaps the first RPG to confer a measurable benefit to being a male homosexual.
Manny Vargas; he sounds downright jealous of Boone's wife, not just disdainful of her like the others. ** A female with Black Widow can't get relevant quest information out of him, while a male with Confirmed Bachelor can.
Arcade Gannon's gay and can be recruited with a bit of flirting from a male Player Character. He claims he's never gotten a guy due to considering himself a boring man. Totally not because he's related to the Enclave.
There are eight possible companions in the game. Four don't express much interest in the Courier, being a ghoul, a cyber-dog, an Eyebot, and a grandmotherly Super Mutant. Of the rest, Veronica is a lesbian, Arcade is gay, Cass admits to experimenting when drunk, and Boone has a hard-on for killing Legionnaires.
Use Confirmed Bachelor to ask Major Knight at the Mojave Outpost whether he wants to be "friends".
If you play a woman and travel with Cass this can happen.
Though not really with Veronica (there's some flirtatious remarks but that seems to be her personality more than anything) despite her canonically being a lesbian (ask her about "love"). The female PC just doesn't seem to be her type. Lots of players actually want to romance Veronica so this kind of causes some problems.
You can do this with Dr. Dala in Old World Blues, too.
I Thought It Meant: When Giant Bomb did their Quick Look of the Old World Blues DLC and came across the K9000 Cyberdog Gun, they mistook it as a gun that could shoot dogs. Sadly, this is not the case.
Magnificent Bastard: You can very well be one if you go for the Wild Card ending.
Mr. House is quite a Magnificent Bastard too. Just ask the NCR. Instead of letting New Vegas be annexed by the republic, he has been exploiting them both economically and politically for his own gain.
It was Yes Man rather than Benny who masterminded the Courier's ambush outside Goodsprings, and despite the Courier's position as head of an independent Vegas at the climax of the Wild Card ending he/she is still dependent on Yes Man's control of the securitrons and the power plant.
Memetic Badass: Boone, a thousand times over. People have even begun referring to awesome things in other video games as "Boone-tier."
That could be just because he's a walking Infinity+1 Sword though.
Joshua Graham in-universe. Just to hammer home the point, 1st Recon has had several "confirmed kills" against him, and after failing Caesar at Hoover Dam, he was covered in pitch, set alight and thrown into the Grand Canyon. Caesar's slaves seem to revere him as some sort of heroic figure and even Caesar himself has spies patrolling Utah looking for him, suggesting his reputation as an unkillable Badass might not be too inaccurate.
He shows up eventually in one of the DLCs. He really is incredibly tough, with a damage threshold of 50. This basically means any weapon not called the rocket launcher, anti-material rifle, YCS-186, Holorifle, Fatman, or Alien Blaster will only do Scratch Damage.
While horrific, most of the Legion's early actions seem to follow a guideline of the ends justify the means or are designed to punish wastelanders fo their depravity. However a slave at the fort reveals that they endorse rape, sometimes even targeting children and old women. She'll even warn the female player character that some of the soldiers are planning on raping you. Combined with Centurion Aurelius's cannibalism and chilling holotape message where they brag about raping one of the soldiers in Ranger Station Charlie, this pushes many players from seeing them as extremely dark well meaning extremists into complete monsters and hypocrites.
It's hard to say where exactly Elijah crossed it- was it when he got hundreds of people killed over his own pride? Was it when he brutally tortured and scarred Christine? Was it when he enslaved a mentally handicapped Nightkin? Or was it when he kidnapped and murdered dozens of people in an attempt to access the Sierra Madre? The answer is none of the above. It was when he plotted the mass murder of everyone in the Mojave Wasteland using the Cloud, and got damn close to accomplishing this. In fact, he WILL accomplish it if you side with him at the climax of Dead Money, though this results in a Non Standard Game Over.
Vulpes Inculta manages to cross this the very first time you meet him. If not, he's getting damn close to it, though, and when you learn about what he did against the NCR camp at Searchlight and his plans of massacring the civilians at New Vegas, then he's definitely crossed it, big time.
You can probably cross one of the largest in all the Fallout Games. In Lonesome Road, you can chose to launch ICBMs at either one particular or all the factions vying for power in the Mojave.
Caesar passes this in Honest Hearts when he orders the destruction of New Canaan to get back at Joshua Graham. While previous Legion targets at least had some military significance or were at least morally questionable, New Canaan had never fought the Legion and was actively trying to improve the Wasteland, while Casear destroyed purely for personal revenge on one man.
When Lanius passed this is somewhat debatable due to his multiple choice backstory. If what Caesar claims is true it was when he demanded the surviving males of his tribe be exterminated in exchange for his admission into the Legion. However, he definitely passes it when he threatens to rape a female Courier.
Okay, we've upgraded ED-E's laster, armor, multitools, ammo-recharging facilities, and onboard construction equipment. Can we do something to make his engine run quieter?
Dean, I get that the Sierra Madre isn't getting any younger. You can stop reminding me.
I don't think either Dr. Klein OR Dr. Borous are particularly cute, Stealth Suit. Yes, I know my Pip-Boy light is on, shut up!
'"RETRIBUTION!"Screamed by every single Legion member in a ten mile radius anytime you attack one of their soldiers. Every. Single. Time.
Goddammit NCR troopers, will you fucking shut up about wishing for a nuclear winter. It's hot! We get it! Shut up!
So help me god, Boone, if you say you're "still looking" one more time, I will dig your eyes out with a spoon!
Most Wonderful Sound: When you're all alone in the Big MT, it's quite comforting to listen to the Stealth Suit and to know someone's got your back.
The drums that play whenever you level up.
The Mysterious Magnum. Just draw it, shoot someone, and then holster it. Aw yeah.
Ed-E's triumphant theme music that plays whenever he opens fire on an enemy. brutally turned around at the end of Lonesome Road where a slower version of the theme plays as he sacrifices himself to prevent the missiles from firing and killing hundreds.
My Real Daddy: How most of the old-school fans feel about this game — compared to Fallout 3 it acts more as an actual sequel to Fallout 2. Now, if New Vegas is actually better than 3 on its own merits, best not to get into it.
Narm Charm : Benny has some pretty bad voice acting. No matter his alleged emotion, he always comes off as weirdly emotionally bland.
This seems to be a reflection of everyone who works at the Tops, which takes Camp and Narm Charm and turns it into an art form. There's the tap dancing show, for one. Talk to one of the clerks there, and they will ask you how they can make your stay "the Tops." With. A. Straight. Face. Benny's second in command also seems as emotionally bland as Benny is, even after his Klingon Promotion. The Tops, and it's employees all seem to be trying hard to embody the Camp of the days of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Minus Jerry Lewis.
The ending narration for Dead Money is either sad or touching depending upon your actions, and very effective at conveying emotions. That being said, hearing everyone chant "It's letting go" at the end is more funny than poignant.
Nausea Fuel: Try to fight cazadors in first person view, you will see nasty and scary giant wasps attacking you in fast speed, even if you aren´t afraid of bugs you won't forget them.
One of the clients for the Atomic Wrangler wants a male ghoul Cowboy dominatrix. And indeed you can find a ghoul meeting all of the requirements except that she is female. The client you hire her fire expresses sadness that it wasn't a he, but that you can't get everything you want. You can also use her services.
The "Bill of Sale" you find in Boone's companion quest, because it is sickingly official and specific. The line "Payment of an additional five hundred bottle caps will be due pending successful maturation of the fetus" was enough.
No Yay: Happens a lot with the Legion. According to Siri several Legionaries want to rape the Courier if you're female. Lanius himself can potentially threaten to rape you depending on your choice of dialogue.
Also Vault 34, especially if you have no companions. Ghouls behind unaccessible doors? You just know they'll break out eventually after your back is turned... so you end up constantly looking behind you, expecting them to be charging at you at any given moment. In general if you're alone and with the radio turned off, any dark derelict building, vault or cave can quickly make you creep onwards very slowly and carefully. The horror-esque ambient music these areas often have doesn't help.
There are some terminals in Vault 22 mentioning noises coming from inside the air vents. Turns out they are right. And those whispering noises never, ever stop. As it turns out, they are produced by giant mantises; they never jump out of the vents, but still...
Of course, a truly paranoid player will be busy pumping shotgun shells into every patch of flowers he comes across, out of fear of Spore Carriers.
Vault 11. Everyone inside is long dead... the IED's they left behind aren't.
Those damn mines in Lonesome Road!
Player Punch: The Lonesome Road DLC delivers a couple of these. Most notable is a deliberately engineered one where as you journey through the Divide with ED-E, you learn more and more about the Eyebot's past, and can even interact with it. Then, at the end, it can potentially sacrifice itself to prevent missiles from being launched.
Another DLC, Honest Hearts, delivers a fantastic one at it's start. You've just arrived in Zion with a group of caravaneers and are looking forward to a nice peaceful caravan trip to deliver supplies. Suddenly, White Legs. Your entire group is shot to bits before you can even blink.
The "A Tragedy Has Befallen Mankind" note that is given to you automatically upon killing Mr. House. Some players will experience a My God, What Have I Done?. Some may want to reload a save afterward. Others may find themselves more sure of their choice than before. Especially if they reach the end of the obituary.
There are a disturbing amount of people who believe Caesar's Legion should win.
Ships That Pass In The Night: For some reason on the Kink Meme Julie Farkas/Veronica has gained a large following despite they're barely interacting.
So Bad, It's Good: Tabitha's radio show, which is described as "Less for outcasts and more for weirdos".
Stop Helping Me!: Played straight and spoofed with the Stealth Suit Mk II. The suit's AI will remind you, quite often, that your Pip-Boy light is on if you use it. Spoofed when it warns you of incoming hostiles then retracts it as a joke.
It will also inject you with Med-X at every sight of a moderately threatening enemy. Not only will this waste Med-X you were saving for serious encounters, but it can also get you addicted to it.
Squick: Siri reveals that women in Legion territory are constantly raped, though children and old women are usually left alone… Usually. She also warns you that some of the soldiers are planning to ‘Try you out.’ And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, JE Sawyer confirmed that all women in Legion territory are used for forced breeding until their bodies can’t take any more.
That One Attack: Characters using ranged weapons like Guns and EnergyWeapons will actually have a really easy time beating Lanius, due to the fact that he is only armed with a BFS and it is possible to take him out with one sneak critical from the YCS/186. However, melee characters have to go up against him up close, and up close he may randomly use an attack that sends the player flying 50 feet and stuns them for several seconds, more than enough time for him to run up to you and beat you to death while you are helpless. If he uses that attack and you don't block it, it's pretty much a one hit kill.
Lakelurks' armor-piercing sonic shriek will rip anything from a player to a Veteran Ranger apart in seconds, especially since they're nearly always found in groups.
Enemy satchel charges in the Lonesome Road DLC. In addition to being hard to see thanks to their brown packaging blending into the road, they have a ridiculously short fuse and do massive damage, more than the bottlecap mine. With any other mine, the train of thought goes "Beep, beep, oh shit mine gotta find it!", followed by a another second to do the disarming. With satchel charges, it's "Beep, beep, oh shit—*BOOM!*". If you don't know exactly where it is when it starts beeping, it'll go off before you find it. Even knowing this, actually disarming it fast enough is still somewhat difficult.
You thought the Bloatflies were nothing but weak cannon fodder? The Legendary Bloatfly would like to tell you just how wrong you are. To wit: the thing can fly above melee range at high speed, kill you almost instantly with its plasma projectiles, and has 2000 hit points. The Final Boss has 920 and the Legendary Deathclaw has 1000 hit points.
For storyline bosses, Legate Lanius is this for many players. Especially if you are underleveled.
From the DLC, Ulysses, should you choose to fight him. He's tough enough on his own, having a 10 in all of his SPECIAL stats and over 1000 hitpoints, as well as having one of the game's strongest melee weapons and a stronger machine gun. But he also dispatches an army of Enclave eyebots to dwindle your health and are difficult to target without VATS and you have to deal with a flood of Marked Men who come in behind you to gun you down.
Of course, with a properly built character and the YCS/186, both of them can easily become anticlimax bosses. Not so with the Legendary Bloatfly.
Any decent sniper rifle can deal with the pests in Crazy Crazy Crazy. For that matter, any decent mid-to-high level weapon will do.
There's a segment in Dead Money where you have to activate a bell tower. After you do, you get a Zerg Rush of about forty Ghost People. By this point you should be very low on health and ammo, so fighting your way back through them is very frustrating indeed.
Even more fun if you didn't realize there was the Police Pistol and burned through ALL your ammo on the way up. Cue trying to fight off the Ghost People with a melee weapon.
Dead Money IN GENERAL qualifies as this.
Lonesome Road wasn't out long before many players began tearing their hair out due to The Courier's Mile. To elaborate, the area is small, about the size of Quarry Junction. You just nuked it, so it's teeming with radiation (at least +10 rads). One side is filled with Marked Men, who regenerate health at an absurd rate thanks to the radiation. The other side is filled with Deathclaws, and the radiation has made them stronger, too. Add on to that the fact that DLC Deathclaws and the Marked Men level with the player, making them even stronger on top of that (unless you managed to get there at a low level). Get spotted by even one Deathclaw, they Zerg Rush you. They can take two shots to the face from the YCS unless you get a sneak critical, and you'll only get one of those. It's a ridiculously difficult battle.
Tear Jerker: The tale of "The Survivalist" in Honest Hearts. You find various log entries of some wilderness nut who survived the Great War scattered throughout the valley.
Chief Hanlon if you turn him in.
Also the child in Matthews Animal Husbandry Farm whose parents turned into feral ghouls, forcing him to shoot them. Eventually in his lonely paranoia he burned down the house and himself with it to protect himself from the farm animals he believed wanted to eat him.
Another example would be the people who lived in Vault 3; it was one of the very few vaults in which the people were genuinely living good and happy lives with very few problems. As soon as they opened the vault doors due to a problem with their water system, they were all butchered by the evil Fiends who took over and started using the Vault as their base.
Unfortunate Implications: Used intentionally at the ROBCO building with the "Who can you tell" brochure. To paraphrase: "Sure you can tell your wife. But since women have to tell stories she will blab no matter how much you tell her not to." This is to show that the pre-war Fallout Verse never really left the 50s behind.
If a female Courier asks Swank for work he'll make a sleezy pass at her, basically offering to make her his groupie. And the Courier's dialouge options force her to feel flattered by it.
Viewer Gender Confusion: In an early Xbox Magazine article Tabitha was said to be an insane cross-dressing male. In actuality, she's female, but Super Mutants lack secondary sexual characteristics and thus males and females look exactly the same at first glance.
Most of the companions (from either the regular or DLC) count:
Veronica can become one. If you finish her companion quest, I Could Make You Care, by persuading her to leave she will attempt to join the Followers of the Apocalypse, which results in the Brotherhood destroying a small outpost and its inhabitants. She not only blames herself for this, but is so traumatized by what has happened, she refuses to enter the Brotherhood bunker with you anymore.
Boone. After everything that he has been though, it is no surprise that he became a Cold Sniper.
Raul's background story. Basically ever since the Great War, everyone that he cared about or loved died a horrible death with him being unable to do anything about it.
Cass' father left her at a young age. Then in her adulthood, the caravan company that she worked very hard to build up got wiped out just because she was caught in a conspiracy outside of her control. She is now broke and alone, sitting at a bar all day long. Until you come along.
Lily was living a peaceful in a vault as a kindly grandmother before being taken by the Unity and transformed into a Nightkin. She still has memories of her grandchildren, which most likely died a long time ago. Even sadder when you encounter her for the first time and she confuses you for her probably long-dead grandson, Jimmy.
Dog is a violent glutton, but doesn't appear intellectually capable of actual malice. He's also in constant pain and has God verbally abusing him every waking moment, unless he mutilates himself enough to make the voices stop.
Randal Clark from Honest Hearts pretty much takes the cake for what he's forced to go through. He survives The End of the World as We Know It, but only because he was out alone on a hiking trip at the time, while his wife and son stayed at home. He knew something was wrong when the sky changed colours and a USGS team*
left without packing up their equipment. He managed to get back to his home in Salt Lake City just in time to witness it getting flattened by thirteen nuclear warheads, and ended up having to Mercy Kill an old couple who went blind from looking directly at the explosions. That pretty much sets the tone for the next forty years of his life, most of which was spent living in isolation and with the regret of not having died with his family. On a number of occasions, he contemplates committing suicide, especially after he failed to save the Mexican refugees he had been helping, as well as when his second "wife" and unborn child die during a breeched birth. He never went through with it and went on to help a group of runaway children — who had escaped from a "School" run by a "Principal" — learn to survive on their own. Years after he died, said group of children eventually became the Sorrows tribe, and started revering the man who helped them as "The Father in the Cave".
The Stealth Suit in Old World Blues is incredibly lonely due to being a stealth suit and never being seen. That's right, an inanimate suit of armor is a Woobie. When wearing the armor the on board computer will chime in asking if The Courier likes her, declaring The Courier as her best friend, pointing out she thinks she's the most unnoticed thing, telling The Courier to take a stimpack because she doesn't want them to die, etc.
Muggy's entire existence literally revolves around his creepy obsession with coffee mugs, and he's painfully aware of it and how much of a joke it makes him. About half his dialogue is him bitterly lamenting his torment while clearly on the verge of tears.
