YMMV / Fallout: New Vegas

• Adorkable:
  • Arcade, especially when a male Courier uses the Confirmed Bachelor perk, or when he tries (and fails) to play dumb and cover up his involvement with the Enclave.
  • Follows-Chalk's excitability, naivete, and curiosity are pretty endearing.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Every faction and every person of note is written specifically so players can ponder their ends, means and motivations.
  • 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 who's totally out of touch with the realities of the wasteland and only using the people as justification for appointing himself as an autocrat?
  • NCR: A nation dedicated to the ideals of democracy, freedom, and individual rights, or a power on a slippery slope that's destined to repeat the mistakes of the old United States? Or both?
  • Joshua Graham: A man seeking a way to make up for past misdeeds by helping the Dead Horses, or just channeling his thirst for blood in a more benevolent direction and thereby corrupting a peaceful people?
  • Opposite Graham, Daniel: A fool who doesn't understand the need for violence even to defend one's self, or a naïve but hopeful pacifist trying to shield the tribals from the harshness of the "civilized" world. From another angle, his attempts to convince the Sorrows to flee rather than fight can be seen as the work of a man who has seen his own tribe destroyed by militancy, but on the other hand his idealized view of the Sorrows as innocent Noble Savages who must be protected from the evils of the outside world smacks heavily of Condescending Compassion. His attempts to hide the death of Waking Cloud's husband from her stand out in particular.
  • Ulysses: A Well-Intentioned Extremist hoping to exact sweeping changes in people by destroying the flawed nations and symbols they follow? A vengeful Omnicidal Maniac who only wants 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 their character and challenge the symbols that they in turn follow? Or perhaps even a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who went off the deep end after the destruction of his adopted home? Or is he a complete loon making a ton of unsubstantiated claims that follow no internal logic? The fact that you can talk him down at the end of the DLC doesn't help.
  • 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 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 relatively safer, more ordered world in the long run? Then there's Caesar's brain tumor. Something like that doesn't come about overnight. Who knows how long Caesar's mental processes have been affected by it... and in turn, who's to say he isn't some measure of insane for it, and if he is, how far back does it go? Could Caesar's rise to power be a result of a brain tumor affecting his neurological processes and he isn't in full control of his faculties?
  • Per the creators: The additional Legion locations would have had more traveling non-Legion residents of Legion territories. The Fort and Cottonwood Cove made sense as heavy military outposts where the vast majority of the population consisted of soldiers and slaves. The other locations would have had more "civilians". It's not accurate to think of them as citizens of the Legion (the Legion is purely military), but as non-tribal people who live in areas under Legion control.
  • The Brotherhood of Steel: A bunch of fundamentalist hypocrites with Skewed Priorities that'll inevitably result in their downfall, and whose destruction is better for the Mojave in general than their continued existence (made worse by the fact that, without an NCR ending in which a truce is formed between them, they'll harass travelers if they're left alive), or a group of Well-Intentioned Extremists whose ideology is perfectly rational, considering that the last time humanity had such widespread access to technology, it ended in atomic war?
  • The Great Khans: A clan of woobies who have well-justified grievances against the NCR and, as such, are morally in the right, or just a group of bandits hiding behind flimsy justification to excuse their raider tendencies?
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • 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 while sneaking. Spoofed when it warns you of incoming hostiles, then retracts it as a joke. It'll 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. This is offset slightly by the fact that people find the suit absolutely adorable though of course a mod exists that turns off this behavior and her dialog.
  • The Mysterious Stranger and Miss Fortune perks often fall into this - their thing is that they randomly show up, take a few deadly shots at the opponent, and then vanish. Trouble is, they're pretty buggy, and the game takes control from you and focuses the camera on them while they're doing their thing. This can lead to, say, the Stranger appearing behind a forcefield or on the other side of a wall, or targeting an enemy that's already dead, at which he then stares gormlessly at you for about ten seconds in slow motion while the enemies he didn't kill rip your arms and legs off.
• Anvilicious:
  • If you have the Confirmed Bachelor perk, you can chat up an NCR Major at Mojave Outpost, who'll say that he'd want to be your "friend", but the mood around the outpost is too conservative for him to wanna 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 (the first move to which was made just two months after release).
  • Throughout the game, the moral of "let go of the past before obsession gets you killed" is very obvious. It's even heavier in the DLCs, where every one of them revolves around a character or characters who can't move on from something in their past, and the idea is hammered in almost every conversation you have. The moral reaches its peak unsubtlety in Dead Money, where "letting go" and "begin again" are the Arc Words.
• Anti-Climax 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, he turns out to be a pushover.
  • 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.
  • If you have the dlcs installed, Legate Lanius becomes this since you will have a bunch of Infinity+1 weapons, plus Lanius only scales up to level 30, so you will potentially have a 20 level advantage.
  • Father Elijah from the Dead Money add on is actually pretty easy to kill. His turrets are pretty strong, but it's 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 Gauss rifle, 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. Made even easier if you reprogram the turrets and turn them against Elijah instead, then just sit back and let them do all the work.
  • 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 allowed 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 to 700 hitpoints), this hardly matters since Joshua Graham is on your side. In fact, the only way to not make this an anti-climax boss is to consider speech checks a boss fight, since you need very high speech to convince Graham to spare the warchief for the good ending. The only way to fight Salt-Upon-Wounds without Joshua’s help is to evacuate Zion and then refuse Joshua when he offers to help you escort the Sorrows out of Zion.
  • 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, if one does the DLC at the recommended level or higher. Klein is the only one of the Think Tank^note The current Think Tank, that is. Mobius also scales with level. that scales with level, which all semi-regular and regular enemies also do. 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. This seems to be invoked, as the ending you get after killing them says they were on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle.
  • Ulysses at the end of Lonesome Road. Since he's convinced that the confrontation between him and the Courier will be suitably grandiose and climactic, he has his back turned towards the door you'll come through and will be a fair distance away, leaving himself open to sneak attacks. Toss in the DLC being gracious with chems to boost damage and weapons like the anti-materiel rifle and brush gun that snipers love, and this four-DLC Myth Arc can be brought to a close with one well-placed bullet he never sees coming.
  • The Vault 34 Overseer has a lot of health for a Feral Ghoul, 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.
• Awesome Ego:
  • 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.
  • Caesar as well: regardless of your actual opinion of him, the man managed to rise from being a lowly missionary of the most pacifistic and put-upon faction in the game, to taking over a tribe, to taking over a series of tribes, forcibly erasing their history and uniting them and any others underneath a single banner, carving out a feared empire that holds complete dominion over a sizable chunk of the country, and setting himself up as some kind of deified god-king. By the time you meet him, Caesar's clearly let this power go to his head, but the respect isn't altogether unwarranted.
  • Father Elijah is another, in a more They Called Me Mad! manner. His grandiose vision of cleansing the Mojave, most obvious in the conversations at the end of Dead Money, are no mere rant. Once the head of the Brotherhood of Steel, he is a prime example of what happens when a Badass Bookworm goes off the rails. Piles of microfusion cells trace the paths he tore through the wastes after his exile, racking up a rap sheet ranging from out-teching the Think Tank in three seconds flat (literally) to a stint in the Divide.
• Awesome Music:
  • What might as well be the main theme of the game, Blue Moon.
  • The Credits Theme.
  • It's just not Vegas without a little Rat Pack.
  • And on the Country side, "Big Iron" is utterly badass.
  • Whenever you hear the track Serenity, it always has an exceptionally calming effect.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Ulysses. Some people like him, due to him being a Foil to the Courier and manipulating not only the events of the DLCs but also the main game as well. However some don't care for him, finding his speechifying pretentious and heavy-handed, and his parallels to the Courier and involvement in so many storylines is contrived. This division is not helped by Ulysses decrying NCR as a Type 2 Eagleland, when many fans view them as a Type 1.
  • Some love Lanius for being an in-universe Shrouded in Myth Memetic Badass with an awesome design and great build-up of his reputation and ferocity, creating the most feared warrior in the Legion and a symbol of their power that the player must slay to break the Legion. Others dislike the fact his limited role in the story, and the implication there are or have been multiple Laniuses, means that the Final Boss is just a stronger-than-normal Legion member who hasn't been given enough screen time to establish a presence and connection to the story and chararcters, making the confrontation lack any impact. The latter is exacerbated by the fact most of the information provided on Lanius isn't given in the main questlines, so it's possible to reach the final battle having never even heard his name before.
• Breather Level: If you are playing the DLCs in the official order, Honest Hearts is definitely this compared to the first Dead Money and the third Old World Blues. The recommended levels for DM and OWB are 20 and 15 respectively, and while Honest Hearts has no official recommended level, most players agree it's doable around level 10. The contrast between Dead Money and Honest Hearts is particularly jarring: Dead Money stripped you of items, forced you to scavenge for decent armor and weapons, pitted you against jittery Ghost People and invincible holograms, and made the exploration a nigh-literal pain in the neck with the unremovable bomb collar. Honest Hearts allows you to bring your own items (up to a weight limit), doesn't restrain your exploration in any way, and contains much more manageable enemies. (And if you're playing hardcore, there's plenty of food and water, so it won't be a problem even if you didn't bring anything.)
• Broken Base:
  • Who is to blame for the game's unfinished content and numerous glitches? Defenders of Obsidian point out that Bethesda's engine from Fallout 3 had a lot of bugs, and Obsidian had less than two years to make New Vegas while Bethesda spent four making Fallout 3, so Obsidian was doing the best they could with the tight time limit and buggy engine Bethesda gave them. Defenders of Bethesda point out that Obsidian has a history of over-designing their games and then being forced to scale back plans, they signed the contract and knew the restrictions they'd be working within, and they had the benefit of being able to reuse many of Fallout 3's assets, so it isn't Bethesda's fault that Obsidian was too ambitious in their plans and couldn't finish in the agreed-upon time limit. Then of course there's fans who think Both Sides Have a Point.
  • The DLCs. Some like them for the new environments and shifts in gameplay and aesthetic they bring that make each of them feel unique, appreciate the the moral choices they challenge the player with, and enjoy the Myth Arc they set up where each of the four builds up to a showdown with Ulysses at the end of Lonesome Road. Others dislike them for the same gameplay changes being unappealing, the Anvilicious writing that hammers in the morals and themes, and the cases of Writer on Board where NPCs start ascribing motives and backstory to the Player Character that the player may not agree with. As for the Myth Arc, Ulysses is a Base-Breaking Character, so how much you like him will directly impact how much you like the storyline that builds him up.
    • Dead Money in particular is divisive for being much harder than most other parts of the game thanks to shifting to Survival Horror. You're given scarce supplies, environmental hazards constitute much of the difficulty, the enemies are tough, and the environment is difficult to navigate due to a confusing layout and the Cloud making everything red-brown and hard to see. On the other hand, some players likes the extra challenge.
    • Even beyond the Survival Horror nature of the game, others balk at how much of the gameplay revolves entirely around dialogue trees, and choices. While some may see this as a nice Call-Back to the original games, others believe that it was merely a necessary evil at the time, and now clashes with the more immersive world the 3D games offer.
    • Lonesome Road is especially hit hard by the Writer on Board accusations, as it gives the Courier some extra backstory. Does it enrich the Courier as a character and does it make their interactions with Ulysses more meaningful? Or is it a forced Ass Pull that takes away agency from the player, especially how the only NPC who references it also refuses any attempt to defend yourself from it?
  • The song "Johnny Guitar." A worthwhile addition to the game's soundtrack, or a horrible song that should have been removed from the game? Fans take the debate very seriously. There are several mods out there that either remove "Johnny Guitar" from the radio stations entirely, or add a radio station that only plays "Johnny Guitar.
  • One of the aspects that divides the fandom the most is to discuss which is the best ending or the closest thing to a "Golden Ending", between the NCR, House and a good karma Wild Card, (The Legion is usually discarded, although even it is has its fans) with each side giving arguments for each faction. There is another group of fans who believe that there is no such thing as a "Best Ending" and hoping to get one is missing the point, and there is a last sector that believes that the "Best Ending" is achieved by helping the Mojave with side missions, instead of for the victory of the NCR, House or the Courier at the Hoover Dam.
  • Brotherhood and the discussion of whether then should be seen as examples of Asshole Victim, some players think that they are, especially after playing Veronica's mission, to the point where destroying the Bunker is seen as the right decision. Others think that they do not go that far, and that the murdered the followers was only an isolated action.
• Cargo Ship:
  • 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 ^noteYes, one of the customers. Not the owner of the Atomic Wrangler himself. He's very quick to point that out. in Atomic Wrangler is asking to have sex with FISTO, a robot.
  • Oddly, the Stealth Suit and the Light Switches in Old World Blues appear to have crushes on the Courier. Hell, the switches even act like catfighting girlfriends. In some humorous cases, some players absolutely adore the Stealth Suit back.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • After chasing him from Goodsprings to Primm to Novac to The Strip and potentially to Fortification Hill, it is so satisfying to finally be able to kill Benny. Bonus points if you use Maria (the gun he shot you in the head with) to do it.
  • For anyone who has torn their hair out from fighting Cazadores (which would be everyone), good news, the game gives you the option to kill their in-universe creator Dr. Borous. The fact that he preformed cruel experiments on his own loyal dog Gabe, will probably make it all the sweeter.
    • For that matter, while Dr. 8 and to a lesser extent Dr. Dala are nice and harmless enough, Dr. Klein and Dr. 0 make the option to kill the Think Tank all the more tempting what with the former being endless condescending and the latter having made an insane robot that is fully aware of how insane it is just to spite someone he doesn't like.
  • If you found Ulysses grating, finally getting to shut him up after his non-stop droning and whining can be really satisfying, regardless of if you do it by pointing out flaws in his logic or by blowing his brains out.
  • Killing some of the nastier characters in the game such as Vulpes Inculta, Cook-Cook or the Omerta bosses can be super satisfying, especially when the Good Karma sound effect plays upon doing so. In particular raiding the Legion's Fortress and killing Caesar after all the atrocities he and the Legion have committed is so cathartic that even Craig Boone will show a little bit of smug happiness when talking about it with you if you brought him with.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Common Knowledge:
  • It's commonly touted in many discussions regarding this game that the Legion completely shuns technology and mainly uses melee weapons. The reality is more complex: while the official combat doctrine prioritizes melee weapons and unarmed combat, the legionaries encountered in game are armed with all sorts of firearms^note Though not seen using them in-game, the Legion is evidently interested in energy guns, as part of the quest Birds of a Feather involves them trying to buy some from the Van Graffs. High-ranking officials and frumentarii are seen using high-end technology like power fists, handheld chainsaws, and autodocs out of sight of the rank-and-file soldiers.
  • A minor one, but it's often assumed that Securitrons charge you 2000 caps to enter the Strip, so most players decide to take alternative routes to enter, even if they have that much money. In reality, it's a one-time credit check; you just need to have that many caps on hand and the entrance itself is free.
  • Many people assume the Courier gained amnesia after being shot in the head at the start of the game. In truth, the Courier is never stated to have amnesia. Dialogue options exist that reference potential details from their past, and amnesia is never referenced in the story as happening. The confusion seems to come from a combination of the Lonesome Road DLC stating that the Courier delivered a package that caused the destruction of the town but doesn't seem to remember doing so, and the fact that the Courier can ask questions that suggest unfamiliarity with the factions or events that took place, but the former is intentional because the Courier not knowing what happened to Hopeville as a result of delivering a package is why Ulysses is vindictive towards them, and the later is solely for the player to be able to learn about the setting. Chris Avelone himself even clarified that the Courier doesn't have amnesia, and that the ability to ask questions about the factions or information was for newcomers.
  • Because a Ranger appears on the cover, many people assume that this is the Courier's canonical appearance, to the point of using it to represent the Courier in memes and fan-comics, or even using it as "proof" that the RNC is the canon ending. In fact the character on the cover was intended to be just a random Ranger and not the courier, although eventually this interpretation gained so much popularity that in the dlcs, you can get ranger equipment that is not affiliated with any faction. This is an extension of the fact that each Fallout game has a set of power armor on the cover, and the one made for this game is the Ranger set.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: You can only have one human and one non-human companion in your party at the same time, so players usually stick with ED-E and Boone over others unless they are specifically looking for a companion with a different role. The reason why is that ED-E is a mobile carrying sack with decent damage on the side, boosts your Perception to the point you'll never be surprised by an ambush barring the game outright spawning enemies on top of you, and functions as a workbench with the DLCs installed, while Boone can snipe enemies from huge distances away, marks targets when you aim, and provides solid midrange support otherwise. As well, both companions can be recruited in Primm and Novac respectively, which are very early in the main quest. While the other companions are far from ineffective (and can often be more valuable than either ED-E or Boone depending on your build), most runs will end up picking these two companions up eventually.
• Contested Sequel: A more positive example. Either the game is as good, a little worse, or better than Fallout 3.
• Creator's Pet: Ulysses. All four DLCs build up the confrontation with him, with characters shilling him as your Evil Counterpart, a courier who has travelled the same journey as you and is just as badass for it, he has the best stats and equipment of any human character in the game to back it up, and Chris Avellone has acknowledged he's his Author Avatar that represents his views on the Fallout universe. Fan opinion however is more split, with many finding Ulysses too incoherent and pretentious in terms of backstory, motivation, and especially his speech patterns, and he was an unfulfilling payoff to four DLCs of build-up to your showdown with him. His concrete actions also aren't worthy of the hype that others give him, as he mostly performs incidental acts that would have occurred he had been there or not. And one of the creators has admitted to using him as a mouthpiece for things he personally doesn't like about the Fallout setting.
• Creepy Awesome:
  • Vulpes Inculta. Probably the main reason he has a large fanbase. He's introduced standing amongst an ashen town of crucified Powder Gangers.
  • Ulysses as well. His dark philosophy, gravelly voice and vicious plan make him quite the formidable foe.
  • Dog/God, but especially God. He's creepy and unsettling but has a lot of interesting things to say.
  • Joshua Graham: Nice Guy with Good Karma, a Bandage Mummy... And a Blood Knight that hasn't forgotten this brutality from his days in the Legion.
• Critical Dissonance: The game scored an eight out of ten from most game journalists: basically a slightly above-average ranking, significantly lower than Fallout 3's scores. However, many fans consider New Vegas and 3 roughly equal, and favor one or the other mostly due to personal preferences (with fans of the older Fallout games generally leaning in favor of New Vegas).
  • Ironically, to fans who remember both of the originals - the differences between Fallout 3 and New Vegas, aren't all that different than the differences between the first and second games. Seeing Fallout 3 as a reintroduction of the franchise to newer players (released a decade after Fallout 2) by sharing many similarities with the first game, while New Vegas is seen as a spiritual sequel to Fallout 2.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • In the final game, Cook-Cook was the worst of the worst. Cut content included dialog option with him, turning him into a fast-talking Large Ham verging into Black Comedy Rape territory. Now he's funny.
  • The entire quest surrounding FISTO. The idea of a sexbot is pretty squicky, and then it's just crossing the line again and again. From Mick & Ralph (who are used to dealing with all sorts of strange things) being freaked out by the idea, to FISTO requesting you to "assume the position," and James Garret's reaction of finally getting his... eh, customer's sexbot. The quest takes even deeper Refuge in Audacity when you consider that FISTO is a Protectron that makes drilling noises should you choose to "test" its functions. The player is left to their own thoughts to realize just how a robot named FISTO could be used as a sexbot.
• Delusion Conclusion: Given that the game begins with the Courier getting shot in the head, some players have interpreted the "Wild Wasteland" trait as hallucinations caused by the ensuing brain damage. Others believe that the events of "Dead Money" and "Old World Blues" are also hallucinations... and some go even further and theorize that the entire game is just nothing more than a wish-fulfillment fantasy experienced by the Courier as they lay dying.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Cazadores. They're as tough as nails, 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 that 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 stimpaks 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. Thankfully, Old World Blues adds a perk that makes you immune to poison, negating at least some of the damage they do. They still hit like trains and are insanely difficult to hit without VATS, although you can get a permanent +40% damage boost against them, which should ease your troubles with them in the future.
  • Deathclaws actually got 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. Then there are 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 Legendary Deathclaw, which will almost certainly one-shot you on any level and have as much health as Lanius.
  • You think Mojave Deathclaws are bad? Divide Deathclaws are worse, being a pretty-much One-Hit Kill if they get into close range. The fact that you usually encounter them in tighter spaces than Quarry Junction and the abandoned railyard makes them worse. Then you get into Irradiated Divide Deathclaws in the Courier's Mile, and hell has a new entrance ticket with your name on it.
  • Nightkin, blue-skinned Super Mutants 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 don't decloak until they're literally two feet away in mid-swing. On top of that, they're 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 can still catch a non-VATS user by surprise.
  • With the reintroduction of damage threshold (DT), the Super Mutants are much harder to kill when 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 will live through their assault. Plus, they target NPCs from hostile factions as well, which means that a pack of Legion Assassins can and will cut down quest-essential NCR characters and merchants if you lead them into the wrong areas.
  • Hmmm... the Ratslayer? Located in an easy-to-find cave, no enemies except... Giant Rats? They sound like easy pickings... 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.
  • 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. Also, explosions throw you to the ground for a short time, which makes you waste precious seconds for the time to get back on your feet while they continue to attack. Even worse in Hardcore mode, as you'll typically have to limp all the way back to a doctor (each of them live far from the Jackals' territory) to get 4 of your crippled limbs healed.
  • 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'll likely 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. Hope you studied the locations of the radios and speakers in advance, or you'll spend most of the DLC searching for them.
  • The Yao Guai are back in Honest Hearts. In Fallout 3, they were tough, but not Deathclaw tough. Honest Hearts will teach you to fear them.
  • Some of the White Legs in Honest Hearts can pack some pretty strong guns, including 12.7mm SMGs, Brush Guns, and Anti-Materiel Rifles.
  • Robo scorpions from Old World Blues. They shoot lasers from their tails, are ridiculously tough for their size, are somewhat resistant to EMP weapons, and when you finally destroy them, they blow up in your face.
  • 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.
• Designated Hero:
  • The Brotherhood of Steel is considered a good-aligned faction, to the point where killing them provides Bad Karma. However, they've previously gone to war with NCR, may slap a bomb collar on the player's neck to force obedience until they prove themselves trustworthy, and in many of their endings, they end up patrolling the Mojave harassing travellers and confiscating advanced technology they have by force. There's also the rogue group of Paladins in Veronica's quest who massacre of several Followers of the Apocalypse out of paranoia Veronica might have told them some "Brotherhood secrets".
  • The official karma level of some characters also can definitely come off as this trope in action. For example, characters like the glory-seeking jackass Hildern who not only constantly steals credit from other people but also knowingly sends you into the dangerous Vault 22 without any warning, has good karma. It becomes insultingly stupid when you learn that other, far more moral characters like Colonel Hsu, Hildern's assistant Angela Williams, Jason Bright, and the King only have neutral karma. Perhaps most ridiculous of all, LEGATE LANIUS has neutral karma!
• Designated Villain: The Garret Twins. In-game, they're referred to as psychopaths and Julie Farkas even bunches them in with the Van Graffs (other characters like Ralph describe them in milder terms). However, aside from ordering the death of a backstabbing bounty hunter, none of their actions come across as remotely evil. They're certainly pragmatic and are only convinced to work with the Followers because it means upgrading their distilleries, but they treat their employees well, even the prostitutes, are forthright in their dealings, attempt to call in their debts in a non-lethal fashion, and are second only to the Tops in terms of all-around decency as a casino. They also refuse to work with the Courier if their reputation with Freeside is bad, and they make a point to be furious if the player kills any of the people who owe them debts, making it strange the game treats them as bad as many of the other groups in the Strip and Freeside area.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Caesar's Legion. They endorse rape, slavery, torture, decimation, and cultural assimilation, they pillage and raid innocent settlements for supplies and slaves, and their ending mentions that most towns in the Mojave either flee the region or are exterminated when they seize Hoover Dam. Yet there are many fans who defend them and explain their actions in various ways.
    • A major aspect of this is Caesar himself. While he is well-spoken and highly intelligent, he's also a brutal and violent warlord, is blatantly self-serving and hypocritical in his teachings, and the Legion is a hollow, inaccurate recreation of the Roman Empire that is unsustainable in the long term and will collapse without his leadership, especially since he's made sure that no one but him will have the kind of education he had that allowed him to create the Legion in the first place. Yet his fans take his big talk at face value and consider Caesar to be a Visionary Villain who is Necessarily Evil in the name of uniting the wasteland under the banner of the Nova Roma he will found.
  • Mr. House is often seen in a much rosier light than the game actually depicts him, largely thanks to his surface-level charm and a clear, apparent vision, which ignores his cruelty, hypocrisy, and duplicity. There are two notable examples of this:
    • Fans attempt to justify his attempts to exterminate the Mojave Brotherhood by arguing that since the Brotherhood are described as harassing travelers and seizing technology in two endings, this makes House's attitude one of ruthless-but-correct pragmatism. The latter reasoning when it comes to House's technology is only made clear in a Word of God statement, and this ignores not only that House does not demand the extermination of genuine raider groups like the Great Khans or Fiends, or similarly dangerous organizations like the Boomers or Black Mountain's mutants, but that he lays out his reasons for why he wants the Brotherhood dead very simply and clearly: he hates them, personally, finds them ridiculous and stupid, and doesn't want to rule a world where they're still around. He spends far more time ranting about their aesthetics and how dumb they are than about any danger they might pose or anything they've done to wrong him.
    • Another example is the fact that he will straight-up exterminate Kings in Freeside, one of the nicest factions in the game, in all but one of his endings^note which involves the Kings launching attacks on NCR soldiers and innocent citizens in the area, mind you just because they either signed a peace treaty with the NCR or were simply in his way of expanding territory, justifying the former as the Kings colluding with a foreign invader.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Consensus on Dead Money is that it has one of the strongest story setups for DLCs in the Bethesda line-up, with interesting characters, a great backstory that the player is encouraged to explore, and how well it sets up the other DLCs since it's the first one, and the one players are recommended to complete first. From a gameplay perspective, however, some see it as either bad, or incredibly hard in ways that are more frustrating than fun, and the Survival Horror-esque setup does not work well with the core gameplay of New Vegas. In particular, the choice to strip the player of all their gear, and make the DLC reliant on melee weapons resulted in a lot of tedious and frustrating moments due to how gun-focused the game is.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • 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!"
  • The Enclave Remnants (particularly Frontier Doctor Doc Henry, Crazy Survivalist and Defector from Decadence "Cannibal" Johnson, and A Father to His Men Kreger) are so popular that they singlehandedly rehabilitated the Enclave's image among wide swathes of the fandom.
  • The Kings as a whole and their Nice Guy leader in particular, being an entire faction of Elvis impersonators^note specifically, the young, slender, and handsome version, as well as being the nicest faction in the entire Mojave. The fact that they base their ideology around the idea that every man can be a king, something Elvis Presley himself would likely approve of, only makes them even more endearing to the players.
  • Sunny Smiles (and her dog, Cheyenne, by extension), found in Goodsprings, is beloved by large portions of the fanbase. This is in no small part because she's remarkably friendly, helps teach the Courier how to survive in the Mojave Wasteland, rather easy on the eyes, and always encountered early on in the game due to her being literally in the town the Courier wakes up from after getting shot in the head (creating a sense of familiarity with her). Many fans were disappointed that she wasn't a companion or even a romance option. She was intended as a potential companion, but they didn't have enough development time to implement it, similarly to Ulysses, Muggy and Yes-Man, who were also intended as companions.
  • Ada Straus from Novac isn't tied to any major factions or quests but is memorable for being a hilariously incompetent Back-Alley Doctor.
  • Elder MacNamara for being a refreshingly unaggressive and pragmatic Brotherhood of Steel leader.
  • Potential romantic partners Sarah Weintraub and Red Lucy are decently colourful.
  • Fisto the Sexbot is well remembered among the fans, due to how gross and hilarious his side quest is.
  • Julie Farkas's combination of Delinquent Hair and a kind, caring personality make her a common source of fan art despite her Minor Major Character status.
  • Minor Khan quest givers and Obliviously Evil, Benevolent Boss drug cooks Jack and Diane have some fans despite how Unintentionally Unsympathetic their faction as a whole is.
  • Private Kowalski, a character with no quests or real purpose beyond explaining the events of Boulder City, is a surprisingly popular character in the community, almost entirely because of the fact he will become upset if you shoot the Boulder City memorial, meaning he will follow the player everywhere to chew you out for a Kick the Dog. This resulted in him being fairly popular among challenge runs, such as beating the game while he follows you.
  • Randall Dean Clark is widely considered to have one, if not THE, best stories in all of not only New Vegas but the entire franchise, being heartbreaking, heartwarming, and badass all at once. Pretty impressive for a character who is dead long before the game even starts, and whose entire story is told to you in text.
• Esoteric Happy Ending:
  • Yes, the threat could be overplayed by an Unreliable Expositor, and yes, it could be dealt with by a prepared force, but if Ulysses wasn't lying and if the Courier's machinations left the Mojave without anyone able to deal with it, then it's only a matter of time before the area gets overrun with Tunnelers, rendering everyone's efforts moot.
  • One of the endings for the Great Khans is to convince them to leave the Mojave, leading to them to settle in Wyoming and carving out a powerful new territory. This is portrayed as a positive and happy ending for them after how much they've endured, but the fact they are taking over land that is, in all likelihood, already settled by people is never referenced or acknowledged, despite being one of the things that made them hate the NCR, making it hard to feel like it is a good ending for them when you consider the Khans behavior. Even being charitable and assuming they don't force anyone to join them, the fact they are not at all implied to have change their behavior leaves it hard to think they are going to be better off or treat anyone they find well.
• Even Better Sequel: Fallout 3 created approximately two "bases" in the fanbase: fans of the first two games that thought the third game had weaker writing and gameplay, and those that liked the third game just fine regardless of whether they played the first two or not. New Vegas appeased the first base thanks to many of the designers from the first two game working on it and bringing back the wealth of familiar setting and player choices, even though most of the choices ultimately mean nothing more than a vague ending slide.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • A defining characteristic of the Legion faction. They may be vicious monsters, but they have some of the most stylish designs and weaponry in the game. Caesar and Lanius are standouts, each a threat on their own, backed by a cool Praetorian Guard. It makes them a popular player choice when it comes to factions.
    • The developers seem to agree about Lanius, given that his in-game class is "Legionary Badass".
  • Vulpes Inculta. You first meet the man just after he has finished his memorably brutal and frightening ransacking of Nipton as an example of the Legion's might, and his blasé attitude and Creepy Monotone perfectly sets the tone for the character. Then the next time you see him (provided you didn't fight and kill him in Nipton) he approaches you on The Strip to extend an invitation to meet Caesar, dressed in a civilian suit and his voice more smooth than creepy.
  • Dog/God, if they go down the evil route. Sure, the Nightkin is creepy and threatening, but he'll remain just as badass as he was as your companion.
  • Ulysses, the Evil Counterpart to the Courier. He has a cool duster, a creepy gas mask, and fights with an American flagpole. He also has Warrior Poet tendencies and a plan that raises the stakes of the entire conflict.
• Fandom Heresy: It is frowned upon by both shippers and non-shippers that the male Courier and Veronica are seen as a couple, since they consider that the fact that Veronica is lesbian (and not bisexual) is something that should be respected even in shipping, and in fan-fics.
• Fan Nickname: Some people who hate the Legion refer to them as "cosplayers," in reference to the fact that they're just dressing up as Roman Legionnaires, or "furries" over them wearing fur pelts and heads.
• Fanon:
  • The fandom generally believes that the Gobi Campaign Scout Rifle is the rifle Boone used to kill his wife, and that the Sniper's Nest where you find it is where he shot her from. It's not, as indicated by a note in McCarran that establishes why the Sniper's Nest exists.
  • Looking online at a lot of fan-made maps of the western US will show that a plurality of fans take the Great Khans' best ending (where they just leave the Mojave for Wyoming and team up with the Followers of the Apocalypse to "carve a mighty empire out of the ruins of the Northwest") as canon.
  • The Outer Worlds is accepted by a lot of fans to be a Distant Finale of Mr. House's ending where he keeps control of New Vegas and his plans for a hyper-capitalist space colony are realised.
  • There's a lot of fanmade artworks depicting the Courier dressed like a Veteran NCR Ranger. While this outfit and headgear can be found and worn in the game, the only ingame depiction of the player character shows someone of the chosen gender wearing a Vault 21 jumpsuit during some slides of the Modular Epilogue^note there's also the title artwork of Lonesome Road, featuring a man wearing a cowboy hat and a sleeved variant of the Mr. House-aligned duster◊. Reasons for an Elite Mook (from a faction which can turn hostile to you depending of choices) being mistaken for the player character include protagonist confusion (the Veteran NCR Ranger being the sole person featured on the game's box art), practicality (the bulky armor and the face-concealing helmet means a Courier drawn wearing this can be any gender and ethnicity), and the mere badassness of the outfit.^note This seems to have eventually transpired in other official Fallout media: in the miniature tabletop strategy game Fallout Wasteland Warfare, the Courier's miniature wear a familiar armored duster and gasmask combo.
  • Given the Courier's Mysterious Past that depends entirely on dialogue and the similar gameplay design, some fans like to believe that the Courior is the Lone Wanderer from Fallout 3. There was even a mod that made that made it possible to play both games and travel from the Capital to the Mojave Wasteland.
• Fountain of Memes:
  • Name a line from Benny, and chances are it's a meme somewhere. "Truth is, the game was rigged from the start", "What in the goddamn?", "Nice charlies!", his unspectacular death, his face... And that's not even getting into the mods that make things even sillier, most infamously the Benny's Face Embiggener.
  • More so with Joshua Graham, whose nearly every single line is quotable.
  I don't enjoy killing, but when done righteously, it's just a chore, like any other.
  I survived because the fire inside burned brighter than the fire around me.
  Make the first shot count. You won’t get a second.
  We can’t expect God to do all the work.
• Franchise Original Sin: The Karma Meter is clearly only in the game because Fallout was the Trope Codifier for it, as it only affects a handful of perks (the most notable of which either require, or reset you to, neutral karma), relationship with Cass (a single companion out of eight), and whether the ending describes you as a prick or not. This was largely welcomed by the fanbase because it moved the game away from Fallout 3's tendency towards Black-and-White Morality, where most of the "evil" options were driven by nothing more than an almost-cartoonish lust for violence, and more towards the intriguingly gray area of the factions, where the main question is less between "good" and "evil" and more between a representative government that allows more personal freedom but isn't guaranteed to be able to protect that freedom even when it wants or needs to, a dictatorship that will ensure stability but uses extreme methods to do so and can't be certain to last once the head honcho is gone, or more than one way to say "screw that" to both of those; that's also to say nothing of the fact that every major settlement and faction individually tracks your reputation among them rather than all of them working off of your karma, so for example getting yourself shunned from Primm because you accidentally killed some idiot who wouldn't get out of your way during a shootout with the Powder Gangers doesn't mean the Boomers at Nellis AFB or the NCR soldiers at Camp McCarran treat you like an untrustworthy asshole as soon as they meet you, long after the Powder Gangers or Primm have stopped being relevant. Where this became a problem was when Fallout 4 went further and removed karma entirely; the devs were no longer obligated to provide opportunities for good or bad karma, and thus any way for the player to act out and be a jerk to people in a way that they respond to, which got rid of a lot of other roleplay aspects and lead to that game's memetically railroaded conversations, where nine times out of ten when someone asks you to do something, your only options other than asking for more info boil down to "agree", "make a sarcastic quip they take as an agreement", or "put it off until you're ready to agree".
• Game-Breaker: Described in the series' own page.
• Gameplay Derailment: Some of the perks in DLCs which carry over into Dead Money once obtained become this. Implant GRX has been mentioned above, but Mad Bomber takes the cake, allowing you to turn unwanted ammo and easily scavenged parts into makeshift (and disproportionately powerful) bombs. This perk, ideally coupled with some explosive skill/perk placement, can turn an otherwise tense and difficult DLC into a hilarious curbstomp with blowing up Ghost People and hard-to-find radios and speakers with ease. The Auto-Inject Stimpaks from Lonesome Road also help significantly and are made from stims you can buy from the Madre Vending Machines and sensor modules (which are everywhere). The perk "Them's Good Eating'" gives you a large number of healing items for free, eliminating the problem of health almost entirely (they don't count as food in Hardcore Mode though).
• Genius Bonus:
  • According to Jane, Mr. House's favorite snow globe is the one depicting the Nevada Test Site. Howard Hughes (Mr. House's inspiration) absolutely despised the Nevada Test Site, so much so that he tried to bribe Presidents Johnson and Nixon into closing it down.
  • In Real Life, Nipton was built up economically by the California lottery;^note Nevada didn't have a lottery, and Nipton was right next to the border between Nevada and California, so it got a lot of visitors from Nevada wanting to try their luck. in the Fallout universe, Vulpes killed Nipton with a lottery.
  • The book chute from Old World Blues refers to itself as Unit 232.7. 232.7° C, when converted into Fahrenheit, is 451°.
  • The H&H Tools factory belonged to the House family (though Mr. House didn't inherit it). It is based on a real life firm, Hughes Tool Company, which belonged to Howard Hughes' family, as another subtle connection between Mr. House and his model Howard Hughes.
• 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.
  • Bear traps in Dead Money. Prolific in many areas, hard to spot, don't do enough damage to kill you but are likely to cripple your legs, forcing you to waste a stimpak healing the damage.
• 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 attack 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 was fixed in a later patch; the Securitrons will now fight, but still won't use their heavy weapons.
  • A glitch on the PS3 version renders the Mick & Ralph's crier unable to spawn. Shouldn't have spoken up about having stuff they aren't even allowed to sell.
  • 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).
  • ED-E's laser weapon may randomly change to an Alien Blaster.
  • It's possible to gain infinite XP by killing Big Sal and repeatedly shooting his corpse.
  • Before patch 1.2.0.310, various kitchens and ovens had shaped human flesh inside them due to a mix-up by area designers, suggesting that said inhabitants were cannibals. This has since been fixed.
  • 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.
  • While the doctor's at the Followers safehouse, the fridges can be looted repeatedly for infinite food.
  • Fixer is only supposed to temporarily remove withdrawal effects, but due to a programming error it permanently removes all addictions except Ultrajet addiction.
  • 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. This can actually manifest in the Holorifle becoming literally unbreakable if fully modded and repaired. Considering that a fully modded holorifle is one of the most lethal energy weapons in the game, this pushes it into Game-Breaker status.
  • 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 Bags. Just make sure you have at least one companion to help you carry those bags!
  • Switching ammunition types drastically cuts reload time for weapons that load bullet-by-bullet; when switching, only one bullet is loaded, but it fills the whole magazine.
  • The Auto-Doc in The Sink can wreak some real havoc by swapping out Traits. 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 130 (10%) without a drawback). Or 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 then cashing them in again and again.
  • 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 equip a different weapon. After backing out of the Pip-Boy menu, hit whatever button you've hotkeyed the ammo to and 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 easy money when you sell them so long as you have at least one C4.
  • In the quest "Climb Ev'ry Mountain", the player is tasked with tracking down an assassin who's been targeting refugees; you get positive karma for persuading him to stop killing without violence. However, the murderer is (rightfully) at Evil Karma, which isn't changed if you convince him to stop; therefore, you can get good karma for getting him to stop killing nonviolently, then another shot of good karma if you choose to shoot him in the back as he's walking away.
  • The fully functional missing laser pistol that you're tasked with retrieving for a couple of Brotherhood of Steel students is classed as a quest item, meaning that literally nothing and nobody in the entire game can remove it from your inventory until you voluntarily give it back to complete the quest. It can even be taken into Dead Money; you'll lose any of the ammo you brought, but more can be found easily enough.
  • If you kill the Enclave Remnants after completing "For Auld Lang Syne" (which requires a few bricks of C4 and a Detonator, as the door needed to reach them permanently locks upon completion of the quest), the game will act as though they're still alive during the Battle of Hoover Dam, resulting in a hilarious scene where their bodies are airdropped out of a Vertibird right in the middle of The War Sequence when they're supposed to show up and assist the player. Even outside of that, if you kill Orion Moreno because you want them to side with the NCR, there is a common bug where his body is not marked as dead, causing him to show up during the finale as a corpse, which some (including the developers) found funny and cited that the others must have hauled his body with them out of annoyance.
  • If you are playing in Hardcore Mode, upon entering DLCs, your hunger, thirst and exhaustion are all set to zero. However, due to a glitch, the exhaustion will remain at zero, and this will carry on beyond the DLC.
  • When you blow someone's head off, sometimes the game will fail to apply the physics to the resulting gibs that would normally be sent flying all over the place. As a result, you are left with the bloody pieces of a person's head, carefully arranged into the proper shape and floating in the air in the position where it was shot. Even better, this can also happen with an attack that blows the enemy's entire body into bloody chunks, leaving behind a grotesque mannequin made of body parts.
  • If Raul is rescued before dealing with Tabitha in "Crazy, Crazy, Crazy", she's scripted to confront the Courier and attempt to kill them. However, she's not given a flag to stop pursuing the Courier if they somehow get away without at least starting the encounter. This means that, if Raul is dismissed, the Courier doesn't have ED-E or Rex (or dismisses them), and uses a Stealth Boy to get around her without engaging her at all, she will walk the breadth off the Mojave until she catches up to you, regardless of where you are, like a Terminator. Among other things, this can result in her getting ventilated by the Securitrons at the Strip's gate for trespassing without doing a credit check, getting fragged by the Boomers' artillery if she attempts to enter their territory, or simply appearing on the horizon and start charging at you in the middle of the desert, in-game weeks after the rescue, babbling like a madwoman. Even better, if she finally gets her encounter and is successfully avoided again without her getting killed, she'll walk the entire way back to Black Mountain if she doesn't run into the Courier on the way.
  • The Courier will eat the NCR emergency radio if they've spammed enough aid items before using it.
  • A physics glitch makes the top half of a skeleton in a bathtub in the Bison Steve Hotel fly across the room if you grab the chems that are littered around it, which is always good for a laugh.
  • Examining the Freeside thugs in the "G.I. Blues" quest will say they are "merely pretending to be dead" even if they've been decapitated.
  • In the quest "How Little We Know", you have the option of examining a dead Gomorrah hooker. However, she will sometimes mistakenly spawn alive, but interacting with her still gives you the option to "Examine The Body".
  • You can obtain two of Benny's unique pistol Maria. First pickpocket it off him in New Vegas, let him escape, and he will have another one in his inventory when he is Caesar's prisoner.
  • After recruiting Fisto and returning to the Atomic Wrangler, speaking to it and declining its services will give the Courier 10 caps. This can be done as many times as desired. While only a small amount, it is a very convenient source of caps to gamble in the casino. The reason for this bug is that the answer he gives for declining his services is the same as the one he gives when the PC asks for a refund.
  • While Vulpes Inculta is hidden in the Nipton Town Hall and only emerges when you get close enough, the Legionaries assisting him are waiting in a straight line in front of the entrance. If you stealthily kill everyone (say, by attaching a silencer to your starting Varmint Rifle and plinking at their heads), Vulpes Inculta will attempt to deliver his spiel completely unbothered by all his men being dead.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Arizona Killer is the quest in which the player character assassinates President Kimball of the NCR for the Legion. Consider the events in Tucson, Arizona in January of 2011.
  • There's a marauding army who've taken over significant chunks of a war-torn desert inhabited by feuding tribes in hopes of building a theocratic totalitarian state, claiming to bring order and stability in a region that had little of either. They follow a regressionist ideology that seeks to recreate a society based on an idealized past and seek to exterminate any group or demographics that do not follow it. Their highly educated leader carries a title that's been officially abolished, but still holds significant strength in the minds of his followers. They employ crucifixion and other terror tactics to instill fear and obedience in their territories and deter opposition, and their society is very much a No Woman's Land. They've reinstated slavery (especially sex slavery) and genocided groups that oppose their violent assimilation. They're currently (as of September 2014) fighting a stalemated battle for a dam and are marching towards the regional capital. And last of all, this faction mints coins of gold and silver and use them as their official currency. And it's not Caesar's Legion. By December 2016, however, they've been successfully pushed back from the dam by the combined air and ground assault of several different factions cooperating together, and by the end of 2017 their main bases of operations have been eliminated, leaving them in disarray. Eureka!
  • It used to be relatively common fanon to say that, considering how the companion endings within the game's Golden Ending for Veronica and Arcade were rather bittersweet, that they would travel east and join Lyons's Brotherhood of Steel, which seemed to be a more altruistic organization that both Arcade and Veronica would be happy with joining. Unfortunately, Fallout 4 revealed that in the six years since New Vegas, the East Coast Brotherhood have become Principles Zealots once more and have adopted Fantastic Racism to the point that they're getting dangerously close to becoming another Enclave. Seems Veronica and Arcade really don't have access to a happier ending...
  • The entire plot of the Omertas launching a terror campaign in Vegas if the player failed to uncover it as non-Caesar allegiance didn't bode well with 2017 Vegas Shooting.
  • The mental deterioration of the Think Tank over the years is less amusing when Dr. Klein's voice actor, Jim Ward, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 2021.
  • The sad state of Primm in the game gained unfortunate truth to life after the COVID pandemic, which devastated real-life Primm's economy.
  • Pretty much any ending to the game's first quest-chain that culminates in Benny's death, especially by killing him alone in his suite or subjecting him to crucifixion for Caesar after his voice actor, Matthew Perry died by drowning in his home jacuzzi in 2023.
  • An ending where the Courier assists Mr.House in securing control of Vegas may feel much more ominous given the implications that Mr. House was, at the very least, in on Vault-Tec's plans to destroy the world as revealed in the Amazon series.
  • Similarily, anyone who wound up doing a playthrough that favored the NCR will be disappointed to learn of their seemingly definitive demise in the Amazon series in the interim. Likewise for players who chose Independent or House (which has, as mentioned above, a much more bitter taste to it given the new implications surrounding his character), the devastated New Vegas puts paid to any notion of the city surviving as the NCR faltered.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: In the Independent ending, if one saved the town of Goodsprings, it is mentioned that the city grew economically with the arrival of travelers and merchants passing through. Doubles as Karmic Jackpot, since they saved the Courier that made it possible. In real life, the game's prominent featuring of Goodsprings actually helped the city become a busier tourist center, complete with the real-life Prospector (really the Pioneer) Saloon redecorating with Fallout memorabilia.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One response you can give to Old Ben is "Courier? I was a courier. Then I took a bullet to the head." Note that this came out before The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
  • Dead Money is this now that Catalina Island's Avalon Casino (an old 1920s Arc Deco building whose architecture and aesthetics is very similar to the Sierra Madre's) has decided that they're installing holograms to lure younger guests to the casino. They probably don't shoot lasers. Probably.^note It should be noted that the Catalina Casino isn't an actual casino and is only called that because "casino" is Italian for "gathering place".
  • Admittedly a case of Black Comedy, but visiting the Boomers and seeing the destroyed Brotherhood patrol is funnier after playing through one of the endings to Fallout 4 (the Minutemen ending where they wipe out the Brotherhood). Appears the Brotherhood has artillery bombardments as a common weakness!
  • If The Courier creates Roxie in Old World Blues and unlocks her ending slide, it reveals she eventually wanders to the Mojave and goes into heat. She meets Rex if he's alive, and they construct a litter of cyberpups. Amusingly, the ending slide calls them "Boston Terrifiers", despite both cyberdogs being pureblood German Shepherds. The Dogmeat that the Sole Survivor meets in Fallout 4 is inexplicably a purebred German Shepherd. Just where does Fallout 4 take place again?
  • Fallout 2 had a Shout-Out to Magic: The Gathering called Tragic: the Garnering, and a lore entry in New Vegas states that Tragic was created in 2023. In the real-life 2023, Magic announced a crossover set with Fallout.
  • While trying to find out who helped the Legion kidnap Boone's wife, when talking to No-bark Noonan, after revealing that he saw one of her kidnappers enter the lobby of the motel, he states his standing theory for the culprits' identity is a race of mole men that emerge from their underground utopia to kidnap human women. Come Fallout 76, one of the enemies encountered are mole miners, humanoids with mole-like claws and feet living in subterranean locations, though these turn out to be the result of pre-War coal miners undergoing heavy mutations from the fallout of the Great War rather than any sort of pre-existing species of mole men.
• Ho Yay:
  • Keely and Angela Williams (from the There Stands the Grass Quest) seem to be quite fond of each other, to the point that Angela will pay you a good amount of money to ensure that Keely makes it back alive. This happens even if you destroy the Vault 22 data.
  • Sunny Smiles and Trudy share the same house in Goodsprings - later, if you save the female Goodsprings settler in Back in the Saddle, she'll join the same house that Sunny and Trudy are in, which can be as innocent as the two giving a down-on-her-luck friend a hand, or just adding a third woman to their relationship.
• Hype Backlash: Retroactively thanks to its reputation in the fanbase as the best 3D installment in the franchise. There are many fans that love/enjoy Fallout 3 and/or Fallout 4 who tried New Vegas and either didn't find the game's writing and factions as engaging as they were told and found the game So Okay, It's Average or downright hated the game for its less-open setting, slow first hours and more emphasis on playing politics with the big three factions when they just wanted to explore the Mojave, kill monsters and complete sidequests which was the design philosophy that made Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 so popular and the reason they love the franchise. This division only fueled the inter-Fandom Rivalry between the old-school fans and the Bethesda fans, made even worse after Fallout (2024) was released.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Chris Haversam, the human living amongst the Bright Brotherhood. He's an abrasive jackass treating you with disdain, and it takes effort to talk him out of sabotaging the ghouls once they reveal they aren't taking him along for the Great Journey, but he's also a lonely man raised in a Vault that didn't care much about him, and ended up being left behind again by the Bright Brotherhood. You can twist the knife further by talking him down from sabotaging the rockets by pointing out Bright and others cared about him and didn't take him because radiation would kill him, then sabotage the rockets so they all die and then rub it in his face afterwards.
  • Cachino, if what he says in his journal is true. He knows that raping and hooking the prostitutes on drugs is wrong and wants to quit, but he seems to lack the willpower. He's essentially a slave to his own evil. He does go clean if you help him kill Nero, though the game doesn't provide you with a way to check to ensure it worked.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Rex ended up sliding into this territory. While he was a decent companion in the base game and had an overall useful perk, when the Lonesome Road add-on gave ED-E a slew of significant utility enhancements that put him leagues above Rex in terms of usefulness as an non-humanoid companion, the cyberdog fell by the wayside to the point some players wished that he had been given additional functions like serving as a mobile campfire/electric hot plate^*Veronica used to be considered helpful as a mobile Workbench until ED-E also gained that function too to at least give him relevance for certain character builds.
• LGBT Fanbase: The game has been praised for its good representation of well-written, non-caricaturized LGBT characters even by the standards of the time. There is now a Memetic Mutation of Fallout: New Vegas leading people to discover they are Transgender and start taking HRT. The impact of New Vegas on LGBT (and especially trans) gamers has been discussed on the Internet.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Robert Edwin House is the multi-billionaire leader of New Vegas and one of the major factions vying for control of the Mojave Wasteland. Mr. House created the Strip, an oasis in the wasteland where people can gamble, drink, and bang as long as they have the cash for it, and took advantage of the situation with the NCR and the Legion to bolster his own defenses and revenue, while keeping his agenda hidden. If the Courier chooses to help him, House enacts his plans; he activates his Securitron army, deals with potential problems via their destruction or cooperation, tries to save NCR President Aaron Kimball from assassination to use him as a political scapegoat later, and holds the NCR at gunpoint to accept the terms of surrender he made for them. Through it all, House is suave, ruthless, and deeply pragmatic, while showing his benevolent side during his interactions with the Courier.
  • Chief Hanlon is the leader of the New California Rangers and by far the greatest tactical mind in the Republic. Growing the Rangers from a small abolitionist group to a large and well trained special forces, Hanlon is beloved by the common people of the NCR for overseeing the first defense of Hoover Dam. Knowing the Legion veterans and officers were always in the rear, Hanlon set up squads of snipers to pick off the elites and send the Legion recruits into chaos. Tactically retreating, Hanlon drew the majority of the Legion army to a town he rigged with explosives and destroyed the Legion's army in a moment. Years later, watching the NCR stretch itself to the breaking point to defend the Mojave and be bled of its wealth by Mr. House ultimately leads Hanlon to falsify the army's reports sent back home and intentionally sabotage his own side to force the government to bring his men home from a hopeless war against Caesar's Legion.
  • Ulysses is the darkly philosophical overarching antagonist of the game's DLC chapters. Long before the events of the game, Ulysses discovered the Divide, a settlement that closely resembled the Old World, one that he loved and could pledge his loyalty to. After the Courier inadvertently caused its destruction, however, Ulysses would recognize the impact a single person could have in the Wasteland, and sought to replicate it for himself. During his journey, Ulysses effortlessly manipulates the Think Tank with an Armor-Piercing Question into giving him nuclear firepower, and tricks the malevolent Father Elijah into hunting for the Sierra Madre, knowing it'll be his undoing. In the Lonesome Road content, Ulysses goads the Courier into confronting him at the end of the Divide to showcase his master plan—to end the Mojave conflict with nukes so that a new civilization can rise from the fire—while setting up their climatic battle so that he almost always comes out on top.
  • Joshua Graham, the "Burned Man," was once the infamous "Malpais Legate," a warrior of the Legion and a feared tactician. Upon a single failure, he was set aflame and tossed into a canyon. Surviving, re-connecting with the Mormon religion, and finding a new community with the people of Zion, Graham became the exceptionally successful war chief of the Dead Horses when the Legion's vassal tribe, the White Legs, waged war upon the people of Zion. After winning a great many battles, Graham resolves to crush the White Legs entirely, his darker instincts having been reawakened by the conflict and desire to help his tribe. To this end, he holds the escape route of the Courier hostage, using their lack of taboos to get him needed resources. If he is given the chance to take on the White Legs, Graham wipes them out almost singlehandedly, eventually deviating from his path and reappearing at the end of the camp having already captured their leader and winning the final battle. While brutal, Graham can also be talked out of his brutal ways and find greater contentedness.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Boone, a thousand times over. People have even begun referring to awesome things in other video games as "Boone-tier."
  • Joshua Graham, both in-universe and out. 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 in the second DLC. He really is incredibly tough, with a damage threshold of 50. This basically means any weapon not called the rocket launcher, anti-materiel rifle, Gauss Rifle, YCS-186, Holorifle, Fatman, or Alien Blaster will only do Scratch Damage.
    Joshua: (glares at a Courier pointing their weapon at him) Make the first shot count. You won't get a second.
  • Every Veteran Ranger (see the cover) is a Memetic Badass to the NCR Troops.
    Random Trooper: They're sending the veteran rangers from Baja. I hear they chew nails and spit out napalm.
  • Easy Pete has become something of one. He won't let you have his dynamite because deep down, he knows you'll never be worthy. Oh, and "Easy" Pete is just the prelude to the unstoppable Hardcore Pete.
  • Private Kowalski gets a similar response, mostly due to his scripted response to immediately come after you to scold you if you do anything to desecrate the memorial in Boulder City honoring the fallen soldiers of the First Battle of Hoover Dam. What this means is that if not talked to, he will continue to follow you across the entire stretch of the Mojave, even attacking non-NCR enemies that try to get in the way of him giving a proper tongue-lashing. Youtuber Nerbit has a field day with this hilarious situation.
  • The Courier has become the most recognized and idolized protagonist in the Fallout series due to the sheer capability of them becoming New Vegas' most powerful man/woman by the end of the game. To refresh your mind, the Courier can have the Brotherhood of Steel, the Enclave, the Boomers, the Great Khans, the NCR and an army of robots armed with machine guns and rockets all by their side towards the end of the game, all for their own goal of securing New Vegas to themselves. And when they get to that point, they may have already wiped out entire factions, including Caesar himself. Why? That's the magic of the Courier. You decide why. It's YOUR story.
  • As of recent years, many players seem to view the Legion Assassins this way for their lack of hesitation in attacking the Courier should they be enemies of the Legion, and their apparent honor in letting the Courier defend themselves just before they launch their attack. On the other hand...
• Memetic Loser:
  • Many players seem to view the NCR Death Squad this way for their use of empty threats and unwillingness to attack the Courier even if they make it apparent that their intent is to attack them. They're often unfavorably compared to the Legionary Assassins, who forgo the feeble attempts at intimidation and immediately (futilely) start trying to kill the Courier.
  • Caesar, in a very specific way. His in-game Intelligence score is 4 out of 10. Some people like to point out that Snuffles, a pet mole rat from Sloan, has an INT score of 5, which would mean Caesar is dumber than a domesticated mole rat.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter. ^ExplanationOne of the repeated quotes from in-game NPCs.
  • Nobody's dick is that long. Not even Long Dick Johnson, and he had a fuckin' long dick. Hence, the name.
  • I GOT SPURS THAT JINGLE JANGLE JINGLE
    • In this same vein, "NO ONE DARED TO ASK HIS BUSINESS, NO ONE DARED TO MAKE A SLIP/THE STRANGER THERE AMONG THEM HAD A BIG IRON ON HIS HIP".
    • And one can't forget THEEEEEERE WAS NEVER A MAAAAAAAAAAAN LIKE MY JOHNNYYYYYY.
  • Easy Pete. For whatever reason, Tumblr just loves making Easy Pete into a Memetic Badass, sometimes christening him Difficult Pete.
  • Benny's first line upon meeting the Courier again ("what in the goddamn-"), along with his utterly bewildered expression.
  • Ave, true to Caesar.
  • Pretty much ANYTHING a typical Legionary would say.
  • YOU LIKE THE SIGHT OF YOUR OWN BLOOD?
  • "You take a sip from your trusty Vault 13 canteen".^ExplanationWith the appropriate part of the Courier's Stash DLC - specifically the Classic Pack, which adds a bunch of original Fallout-related gear - you get an in-game canteen branded with the number 13. So long as you have it in your inventory, every few minutes, this message will pop up in the top-left corner of the screen, most notoriously during the game's ending slides as well as during opening slides for the add-ons.
  • "Truth is, [X] was rigged from the start." ^ExplanationIn the intro cutscene, Benny tells the Courier, "The game was rigged from the start," and shoots them. People then changed the phrase to refer to something else.
  • "Degenerates like you belong on a cross." ^note Usually used as a "No. Just… No" Reaction.
  • "Hear that? We have options!" ^note A late-game Yes-Man line. Usually used when a set of choices offered are equally absurd, destructive, or just out-of-pocket in general.
  • Green Screen Nephi ^ExplanationExploring Dummied Out content reveals that the Fiend leaders besides Motor-Runner actually have a set of voiced dialogue and completed conversation clips. While everyone has their moments, Nephi takes the cake for being the most surreal and for how dull his delivery is, specifically his end quote "Get fucked". One certain user acknowledged this and produced various greenscreens of the aforementioned quote and many other variations.
  • OK Boomer ^note A meme not from New Vegas itself (it serves as a catchphrase used to dismiss or mock attitudes stereotypically attributed to the baby boomer generation), but since the game's main quest features a faction named "the Boomers"... There's even a mod that adds it as a dialogue option.
  • "I survived because the fire inside burned brighter than the fire around me," in part for being a legitimate Badass Boast, but also for how it shows up among real-world inspirational quotes, neglecting to mention it's a quote from a video game from a man who meant it entirely literally.
  • Merely pretending◊ ^ExplanationOne sidequest involving a phony battle with attacking thugs gives the option to use Medicine to examine their 'bodies' and determine they're playing dead. However, this happens even if the bodies have been gibbed and decapitated. The goofy expression on the body from the original screenshot doesn't help.
  • "YEEEEAH! WHO WON THE LOTTERY? I DID!"^ExplanationWhen entering the town of Nipton, the Powder Ganger Oliver Swanick approaches the player boasting of having just won the lottery, being one of only two survivors of the Legion's massacre of the town. He then proceeds to run directly into a radscorpion nest after the conversation, that is if the player doesn't kill him first.
  • President Kimball wants you to pay your taxes^ExplanationA short video of the courier failing The House Always Wins Part VII where he attacked President Aaron Kimball during his speech for the reason that he tried to make the courier pay taxes, in which Mr. House understood his frustration. Kimball labelled by the fanbase as an ambitious taxmonger who will not stop until every last citizen of NCR paid their taxes. Doesn't help that in the NCR related endings, several establishment were struggling due to the high amount of taxes they had to pay.
  • "Armed with a wide array of improvised explosives and stolen weapons, the Vault 19 Powder Gang tormented the Mojave Wasteland for years..."^ExplanationA snippet of one of the ending slides should you choose not to complete the quest "Why Can't We Be Friends?" or not discovering Vault 19 during your playthrough. The ending slide caught many players by surprise, newcomers and veterans alike, because chances are you haven't even discovered the questline yet, nor you even acknowledge the existence of Vault 19 in Mojave at all, hence the reason why players keep getting this ending slides even if they obliterated the Powder Gangers in NCRCF. Even the foreshadowing from the other Powder Ganger members gave you doesn't exactly tell you where Samuel Cooke and his cohorts went, making it harder to discover.
  • "My brother died at Hoover Dam! You're desecrating a war memorial!" ^ExplanationIf you attack the Hoover Dam memorial, a nearby NCR soldier accosts you for your actions. The soldier's tenacity (he will follow you across the game world until he can initiate dialogue) and the potential responses (choosing "You're a little bitch, and your brother was too." will turn him instantly hostile) have lead to him and the war memorial becoming a meme of sorts. Amusingly, since the camera used for "Classic Inspiration" is coded in the game as a weapon, taking a photo of the memorial also elicits this reaction.
  • The game's surprisingly vast LGBT Fanbase has resulted in a minor meme about how playing it inevitably leads to the realization that one is actually transgender, to the point that it's been photoshopped into "how do I know if I'm trans" quiz headings as well as "trans starter packs".
  • Big Iron parodies ^ExplanationAs mentioned above, Big Iron is a country song by Marty Robbins that is available in the ingame radio and tends to appear very frequently due to a bug, giving it memetic status. Around 2022, it became increasingly popular to take the song's memorable lyrics, which tell a story, and remix them into a different tale, in a manner not dissimilar to the DK Rap. Sometimes the outlaw is actually a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, sometimes the ranger is a dumbass who shoots the wrong guy, sometimes a wild west gunfight breaks out between people who like Big Iron parodies and those who hate them, etc..
  • Bear and Bull and Bear and Bull...^note One of Ulysses' dialogue quirks is referring to the NCR and the Legion as "Bear" and "Bull" respectively, and the fans of the game (some of whom find the character pretentious) started exaggerating it.
  • Mr. House watched Skibidi Toilet ^ExplanationKilling Mr. House reveals he was born in 2020. Skibidi Toilet became insanely popular with kids when it released a few years later, meaning if the Fallout world was like the real world, Mr. House could've watched the videos in his childhood.
• Memetic Psychopath: President Aaron Kimball and to an extent the NCR as a whole has been labeled by the fanbase as an ambitious tax-mongering maniac because of a short video where he wanted every NCR citizen to pay their taxes, in which the Courier attacks as described in the Memetic Mutation section above. He will not stop until every single living being in the Republic's territory pays their taxes, even all the way to the above frontier. Doesn't help that in the NCR-related endings, several establishments actually struggled due to the high amount of taxes they had to pay, further supporting his presence.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Caesar's Legion has a surprisingly large amount of fangirls despite being a society of misogynistic zealots religiously devoted to the practice of mass rape, mass murder, and mass slavery. Though most of them really only love the Legion because of Vulpes Inculta's (and to a lesser extent, Caesar's) Draco in Leather Pants status. There are, of course, the actual reactionaries who wholeheartedly agree with the Legion's ideology and wish they were real, but that's another can of worms altogether.
  • For some reason, a certain quote of Joshua Graham's ("I survived because the fire inside burned brighter than the fire around me.") has taken on a life of its own, with it being reposted on many inspirational blog sites, even quoting Graham as the creator of the quote. Graham's writer (and New Vegas Lead Designer) JE Sawyer actually stumbled across the quote written on a trail in his home state of Wisconsin and some people have reported teachers using it in English class as an inspirational quote. Even then, if you take the quote as inspirational (it can be interpreted as such), the lack of context ruins the inspiration Graham puts behind the words. Out of context, the outer fire is commonly interpreted as stress or general adversity, and internal fire is just inner strength. In context, Graham says the fire inside was his love for his people and for God, and their love for him, while the external fire is a literal fire, having been immolated and tossed into the Grand Canyon for failing to defeat the NCR at Hoover Dam. It is however a popular quote among Firefighters, especially Forest Firefighters, which despite not knowing the source, are much more in line with original meaning.
  • In-universe, the Kings could be seen as one to Elvis Presley. While Elvis would likely have approved of their anarchist philosophy, he absolutely would not have wanted them to make him such a revered figure in it. A devout Christian, he disliked even being called "The King," as he felt that title only belonged to Jesus Christ - and as a musician, he felt Fats Domino better deserved to be called "The King of Rock and Roll."
  • Some take Lanius' threat to return with a larger army if you talk him down at face value, with some even using this as an argument against going the independent route. While Lanius is indeed a formidable warrior and a terrifyingly general, these people are vastly overestimating Lanius as a leader. Lanius can only really lead if it's in battle, as he has no mind for politics or logistics, and the Legion will most likely suffer under his rule. Joshua Graham even calls out Lanius as being incapable of leading the Legion if you kill Caesar before meeting him and if Caesar is dead in a Legion victory and the Enclave Remnants are still alive, Lanius will lose hundreds of men pursuing them for no reason and won't even win. In truth, Lanius will likely lead the Legion to its doom long before he could return if you drive him away.
• Moe: Veronica Renata Santangelo. Bonus points for being voiced by Felicia Day.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • 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 enslaved a mentally handicapped Nightkin? Or was it when he kidnapped and murdered dozens of people in an attempt to access the Sierra Madre? Or when he plotted the mass murder of everyone in the Mojave Wasteland using the Cloud, and got damn close to accomplishing this? 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 crosses this the very first time you meet him in the ruins of Nipton, where he calmly and proudly tells you the tale of how he orchestrated the massacre of the entire town, a squadron of NCR troopers, and Powder Gangers, and made them all watch as he had them killed one by one in various gruesome fashions, with the "winners" being hauled away to be slaves.
  • Jeannie May Crawford crossed it when she sold Boone's wife and her unborn child into slavery by the Legion, implied to be because she complained about living in Novac.
  • The Courier 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.
    • Also, in a mini White Glove Society quest, if you have a human companion you can choose to let your companion get eaten if you save Ted Gunderson from the same fate.
    • The player is allowed to desecrate a war memorial right in front of a man whose brother is honored on said memorial. That's already a dick move. The kicker? The instant aggro dialogue: "You're a little bitch and your brother was, too."
  • Caesar passes this in Honest Hearts when he orders the destruction of New Canaan just 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 Caesar destroyed them 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.
  • The Brotherhood of Steel, or at the very least one squad of them (it's unclear whether the squad was under orders or taking matters into their own hands), in one route of "I Could Make You Care". If you convince Veronica to try to join the Followers of the Apocalypse, you connect with an outpost of unarmed doctors (though, admittedly, with a couple armed guards) and are told to come back later, when the Follower in charge of recruitment arrives. When you come to make that appointment, you find that the Brotherhood has slaughtered the entire outpost, because there was a faint possibility that Veronica had revealed Brotherhood secrets (she hadn't). And then they try to summarily execute Veronica for trying to do a good thing, and you for helping her.
  • Mr. House passes this in the endings where he slaughters the Kings, either because they "lied with a foreign invader" (read: signed a truce with the NCR) or just because he decided to expand territory under his direct influence. The Kings are a mostly benevolent gang that, Pacer aside, keeps peace in Freeside and the leader remains open to negotiations. Their "cooperation" with the NCR boils down to not ruining their relief efforts in Freeside; NCR endings have them steadfastly maintain Freeside's independence. In the end, House slaughters them solely because they aren't under his thumb.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The sound effect and music cue when your character levels up. Very rewarding each time.
  • The Good karma sound cue is nice to hear as well, which indicates that, in one way or another, you've just made the wasteland a slightly less terrible place.
    • The "Good Reputation" sound cue is also pretty pleasant, even better if you're a Good karma player.
• 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...
• Narm Charm:
  • Benny always comes off as weirdly emotionally bland.
    Benny: (while being crucified) "HAPPY now, you twisted bum?"
    • 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'll 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 himself is, even after his Klingon Promotion. The Tops and its employees all seem to be trying hard to embody the camp of the days of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.
  • One of the unseen raider tribes in Honest Hearts is called "The 80s". The name comes from the I-80 highway, since the tribe operates in Utah, near the Great Salt Lake area, but some fans affectionally wonder if they wear big hair, shoulder pads and bright eyeshadows, among other things.
  • 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, and you'll 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's female. The client you hire her for expresses sadness that it wasn't a he, but that you can't get everything you want, and the customers might not even notice. You can also use her services.
  • The "Bill of Sale" you find in Boone's companion quest, because it's sickeningly official and specific. The line "Payment of an additional five hundred bottle caps will be due pending successful maturation of the fetus" was enough.
• Never Live It Down: While glitchy Bethesda games are business as usual the company, there are some critics who will still use this game's launch day bugs against it, especially because the bugs are part of the reason the game scored one point below the agreement made by Bethesda and Obsidian.
• 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.
• Obvious Beta: The story is unique and lovingly crafted, but the bugs and glitches are plentiful and the game is prone to crashing even after several updates.
• Older Than They Think: The Lonesome Drifter's song "The Streets of New Reno" is a retooled version of a much older folk song.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Unlike other post-Bethesda games in the series, New Vegas was instead made by Obsidian Entertainment, which included many of the developers who worked on the first two games. It's also often hailed as the best game in the modern Fallout canon, with some fans claiming it as the real successor to the original duology and dismissing Fallout 3 outright.
• Pandering to the Base:
  • Lonesome Road contains a minor instance: By nuking Legion territory and opening up Dry Wells, you can obtain a suit of armor that's very similar to what Lanius wears. Chris Avellone himself has said it was included because many players liked Lanius' armor and wished they could wear it during the game. The same expansion also allows you to obtain several different facsimiles of his helmet.
  • Chris Avellone also explained that, when looking at what the fanbase and the modders added most often to the game, home bases came up again and again and so The Sink in Old World Blues was designed specifically to fulfill that need: give players a true home base to operate from. Completing the DLC even provides you with a device that will teleport you directly to The Sink from most outdoors areas.
  • The Wild Wasteland trait, and even New Vegas itself can be considered this - especially for those who prefered Fallout 2 to the original game.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The Ghost People from Dead Money. What's that clicking sound? Is someone there? Hey, wai—
  • Vault 34, especially if you have no companions. Feral Ghouls behind inaccessible 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're 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...
  • Vault 11. Everyone inside is long dead... the IEDs they left behind aren't.
  • The mines in Lonesome Road. They're small and well hidden in road cracks and have a awfully short fuse, meaning they're hard to disarm in time. They can make you look more on the ground when you should be looking for other dangers.
  • Everything seems quiet at first, until the Tunnelers go above the surface to attack you.
  • Silver Peak Mine if you know about the Legendary Cazador in advance, but don't know what triggers its appearance.
• Polished Port: The final release of this game in GOG.com fixed some of the bugs, making it large address aware by default (so the memory use isn't capped to 2 gigabytes), and making it more stable in all Windows PC systems including Windows 10. However several fan made fixes may still be required.
• 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 its 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 All Mankind" note that is given to you automatically upon killing Mr. House is meant to be this. Some players will experience a My God, What Have I Done? and thus, want to reload a save afterwards. Others may find themselves surer of their choice than before, especially if they reach the end of the obituary and realize that the whole thing is Mr. House ego-stroking, even saying that he ain't sure if everyone reading is literate. Even the people on the Strip has very mixed feelings toward the news of Mr. House's demise.
  • One of the ends of Veronica's sidequest can give this off. See the spoilers under her The Woobie entry for what happens in that end. This is even further exemplified in that if you do choose to do nothing, she's simply banished from the Brotherhood without having the self-guilt mentioned below.
• Ron the Death Eater: The New California Republic is far from flawless, with the game depicting them as mirred in bureaucracy, being strongly influenced by rich cattle barons, and imposing unreasonable tax rates on the populace of Mojave. Despite that, canonically supporting the NCR and doing the legwork to make the minor factions in the area cooperate with them offers one of the better (or at least more peaceful) endings, with only Robert House perishing. Despite that, the fandom likes to exaggerate the Republic's flaws beyond what the game depicts, to the point of making them come off as no better than the Legion (the faction of Rape, Pillage, and Burn), and quite a few large-scale mods (Fallout: Dust, New California, The Frontier) ended up going the Adaptational Villainy route.
• Rooting for the Empire:
  • The Think Tank has a pretty big fandom for a bunch of nutty pre-War scientists who seem to have forgotten what ethics are. This is probably most because of their eccentric personalities, which makes them into Affably Evil.
  • There are a disturbing amount of people who believe Caesar's Legion should win. The Legion isn't The Empire in name only; it's a firmly established No Woman's Land Military Dictatorship whose legal system boils down to five punishments for any given crime – torture/mutilation, slow and/or painful execution, slavery, rape (for the women), and combinations of the previous examples.
• Sacred Cow: Older gamers tend to love New Vegas because of the callbacks to the first two games and highly acclaimed writing from Black Isle writers incorporated into a more immersive gameplay. Newer gamers love the new feel of the game, where survival is not a concern anymore but instead it focuses on the power play of larger factions and how the player can influence the end. As such, the only criticism of the game that is permitted are about the bugs and issues present in the game, in which case, some gamers will quick to offer a fix. If there is any other criticism, expect to get roasted.
• Salvaged Story: The revelation in Dead Money that Matter Replicators were "a common pre-War convenience" created all kinds of strange continuity issues, seeing as how the Great War was fought over resource scarcity, broken replicators have never been scavenged from ruins, no replicators are found in the possession of the Brotherhood or the Enclave, etc. So when Old World Blues came out, it was "revealed" that the replicators were an experimental technology developed at Big MT and the characters who told you how common they were, Dean and Elijah, were wrong for one reason or another; Elijah's obsessed with the Sierra Madre and not thinking straight, and Domino either deliberately lied to you or simply forgot after over two centuries that they aren't common outside of the casino.
• The Scrappy: The Mick & Ralph's Crier. Since he's a child, you can't kill him to shut him up for good. Thankfully, there's a handful of mods available to either mute him, remove him from the game completely, or have him tied to a cross while on fire. PS3 players will thankfully never have to deal with him, due to a bug that prevents him from spawning at all.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • A low reputation with either the Legion or the NCR will cause these groups to send assassination squads after the player. The squads are made up of four members pulled from one of three "tiers" based on the player's level, making them a rather challenging fight for nearly any character build, especially early in the game. They respawn every three days to come after the player, making matters worse if you rest or fast travel frequently. The "scrappiest" part of it all, though? They'll always come straight for the player to declare that the player has been marked for death, even if the player has a 100 Sneak skill and is invisible thanks to a Stealth Boy(although in some versions of the game, the Legionary Assassins won't talk with the player before opening fire). The only way to get the drop on them is to see them coming from a long way off, which isn't always easy.^note Having ED-E, thanks to its maxed-out Perception, will at least show them as blips on the radar. Thankfully, some game mods exist which change their respawn rate to a more reasonable 7–10 days and/or remove them completely from the game.
    • Making matters worse is that due to the way Reputation is earned, it's borderline impossible to go back to either faction's good graces before reaching New Vegas and getting their respective Reset Button dialogues. The NCR's warning that the player has three days to get their act together feels less like an act of mercy and more like gloating as a result.
  • The inability to mod most Unique Weapons. Wanna add a scope to the Mysterious Magnum or a silencer to A Light Shining in Darkness? Nope, sorry, you can't. There's some justification with a few of the weapons because they're slightly different models than their generic counterparts, so it would be logical that the same modifications may not fit, but this is true only for a minority of cases. This also results in the irony of some fully-modded weapons being preferable to their unique counterparts because said mods make them more effective in spite of the fact that unique weapons usually have better stats.
  • Nobody likes to use the NPCs to repair their gear. The price for repairing a piece of equipment is such that repairing a broken item to 100% condition costs twice as much as buying the same item at 100% condition from a merchant, often only do so as a last resort. While this is meant to balance the economy so you won't sell items for more than you paid to repair them, it had the opposite effect of pushing most players to invest in the Repair skill so they can get the Jury Rigging perk and not worry about paying exorbitant prices to get their one-of-a-kind weapon or armor repaired.
  • One of the popular complaints about the Dead Money add-on is that despite having a great story, the literal tidal wave of Scrappy Mechanics makes this DLC barely tolerable. This includes:
    • The slave collar. As if that expansion wasn't hard enough without the risk of having your head blown off because of some unseen radios and loudspeakers screwing with its signal. And what's even more irritating is that the damn thing is stuck on you the moment you start the questline and doesn't come off until you finish it.
    • The cloud mechanic, which is worse in Hardcore Mode where just being outdoors will have your health slowly drop.
    • Having to dismember the Ghost People to actually kill them.
    • The invincible security holograms. They hit hard no matter what level you're at and their emitters are often hard to find.
  • Ulysses' dialogues with you in Lonesome Road, as well as the Courier Duster you get at the end of the DLC, are based on your reputation with The Strip (For Mr. House), NCR, and the Legion. The problem is that reputation with the three has nothing to do with which of the three you may have actually sided with in the main questline; in fact it's quite possible to have a mediocre reputation with your faction of choice, while you can rather easily rack up a high reputation with one of the others. Cue conversations where your player is spoken to, and speaks like, an NCR backer, even if you've thrown in your lot with House or Caesar. Naturally, fan mods exist to change this so he recognizes your alignment properly based on quest progress.
  • A mechanic carried over from Fallout 3 are the slow walking and running speeds. Fast Travel is practically necessary to get from point A to point B unless you're an immersion player.
  • While the Caravan minigame functions properly for the most part, it is still disliked due to its complicated ruleset that is still hard to follow even after reading the rules for the game. The face cards having different specific functions certainly doesn't help make the game any less complicated. While you can earn a lot of caps from playing with merchants (since they use a quarter of the amount of caps they currently have) with a specific deck of cards, it's much easier and quicker to play the casino minigames to get the extra caps.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Although not as extreme as other examples, there are people who debate whether Veronica should be with Christine or the Female Courier. Christine's side thinks that the Ship with the F-Courier is simply "Wish fulfillment" on the player's part, and that Christine is a much better option, while the side that supports the F-Courier does not deny that there is some "Wish fullfiment", but they also believe that Veronica should be able to move on from Christine, and seek happiness elsewhere.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: For some reason on the Kink Meme, Julie Farkas/Veronica has gained a large following despite the fact that they never directly interact, save for one instance in Veronica's quest... where the player does all the talking anyway.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: It's entirely possible to go into a casino, buy a whole load of chips, blow everything at the betting tables, and get so involved that you end up pawning off your possessions to buy more chips in pursuit of that fabled hot streak that will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. Just like in the real Vegas. Dead Money's Sierra Madre makes this worse by virtue of the fact that it has both the best potential Caps pay out of all casinos and that you can't return to it after concluding the DLC.
• So Bad, It's Good: The horribly acted sex scene your character can have with Benny if you have the Black Widow perk. His tone of voice is completely casual, he tosses in corny Strip-isms such as "You're a real ring-a-ding broad!" and "Nice charlies!", and at one point even says "Hello!" as if the Courier were passing by on the street instead of having sex with him.
• Spiritual Adaptation: With its dilapidated art-deco environments, Survival Horror-oriented gameplay, Dysfunction Junction cast of supporting characters, elaborate backstory told through diary entries and audio logs, and Visionary Villain Big Bad constantly addressing you via radio, Dead Money feels like a pretty good unofficial BioShock sequel.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Elder McNamara of the Mojave BoS wants to have his chapter just hide beneath the earth in their bunker due to them having too many enemies on the surface – especially after their humiliating defeat at HELIOS One. While his position as a Principles Zealot towards the Codex is correctly shown to be self-destructive and negative for the Brotherhood, he's not exactly wrong in wanting his chapter to be as subtle and seen as non-threatening as possible to the outside world, since they have barely any soldiers left and would be easily crushed by the NCR, Mr. House, and even the Legion without the Courier's help.
  • General Oliver is a General Failure and a Glory Hound, but he will make some legitimate points if you go the Wild Card route. Do you have the means to govern properly and renovate the surrounding areas and monorail as they and Mr. House had plans to? This is also reinforced with any of the quests involving non-aligned New Vegas residents (especially "Someone to Watch Over Me"); it's made clear that the only reason the locals hate the NCR besides harassing them over "squatting" and imperialism is... they don't want to pay taxes, because they view that as stealing. Several locals also despise businesses like the Crimson Caravan (especially desk jobs), not even viewing them as merchants, just thieves. Pretty much the locals have no interest in building up local infrastructure or business, and are unlikely to support anything but total anarchy; suggesting that Hobbes Was Right. And while Vegas might get some tax income from the Casinos on the Strip, two of the three families are on the verge of reverting to their tribal natures, and if you fail to do their quests in the right manner, they will. The only consolation prize is that Benny has to be killed in this path, replacing The Starscream with Swank, who's quite happy with how Vegas is run now. Building a nation is difficult, and Oliver is correct to be skeptical, however, the player's choices throughout the game can ultimately put them in a very good nation-building position. It is, at least, one possibility.
  • The Boomers are written as a bunch of hyper-xenophobic weapons fanatics, whose preferred interaction with anyone from the outside world involves artillery fire. And yet... given who they're surrounded by (bullying Khans, genocidal Legion, psychotic Fiends, expansionist NCR, and a half dozen smaller factions of raiders and bandits), their "shoot first" policy starts to look pretty sane. It's worked out pretty well for them overall, as their community is one of the few thriving and happy ones in the game.
  • Lucius advocates for unarmed and melee combat, as ranged weaponry isn't always reliable and can jam, run out of ammo ect. While The Legion is a luddite faction that you absolutely don't want to rebuild the world with, he isn't entirely wrong, at least from a gameplay perspective. While you can easily get through the base game without resorting to melee/unarmed, the Dead Money DLC is much more challenging, unless you have a spesific build. Ammo is scarce, the guns are worn and there isn't much to repair them with. Here it is useful to invest in Unarmed, and you can even use Unarmed in dialog section to bypass the vault security near the end if it's high enough.
• 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 Energy Weapons will actually have a really easy time beating Lanius because he's 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 slash 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.
  • Cazadore Poison. It's long-lasting and drains your health at a surprisingly rapid rate. This is why you'll see experienced players hoarding all of the Antivenom they come across. And prior to a patch, the poison never wore off of your companions, meaning that, yes, it will kill them. It's best to tell them to wait far away from areas with Cazadores.
  • Enemies armed with grenade launchers and other explosives can easily one-hit you, and even if you survive, you will get crippled. Even worse in Hardcore.
  • 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.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Up to the Challenge," "Combat Veteran" and "Pros Only," the achievements for completing three of the one-, two- and three-star Gun Runners Arsenal challenges, respectively. Many of the challenges involve weapons that the player is unlikely to use against opponents that are difficult to defeat, such as Deathclaw Pro Hunter(Kill adult Mojave Wasteland Deathclaws with .22 Pistols, Switchblades, Boxing Tape, Recharger Rifles, or Dynamite). Others involve targeting NPCs of specific factions, making them unsuitable to players who are allied with those factions, and a few involve specific NPCs, making them Permanently Missable Content. Unsurprisingly, these three achievements comprise three of the four Steam achievements with the lowest completion rates ("Caravan Master" ranking second), with completion rates between one and two percent each.
  • "Caravan Master" requires winning 30 games of Caravan, a game that isn't easy to win unless you've built up a rather large deck and not many people enjoy playing even then. This is the second least completed achievement in the Steam version of the game, after "Pros Only."
  • "Warhead Hunter" requires detonating all 30 nuclear warheads in Lonesome Road. Two of them are in the Courier's Mile, and are well-hidden enough that you'll have to fight your way through the extremely powerful enemies inside in order to find them.
• That One Boss:
  • 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 2,000 hit points. Lanius has 920 and the Legendary Deathclaw has 1,000 hit points.
  • For storyline bosses, Legate Lanius is this for many players, especially if you're underleveled. He has nearly as much HP as the Legendary Deathclaw, has a number of Prime Legionaries and Praetorian Guards backing him up (unless you convince him to fight you one-on-one), and he has a tendency to retreat, spraying the battlefield with grenades the whole time, in order to unleash even more enemies to swarm you. He can heal himself, too. Unarmed or Melee builds are at a particular disadvantage, as they have no choice but to deal with his sword and its tendency to hitstun you to death.
  • From the Lonesome Road 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 1,000 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.
• That One Disadvantage: Traits, while seen as unique and interesting, tend to be avoided by the vast majority of players because of the Power at a Price nature of them. Each gives some unique effects, but save one, have a downside that can be impractical or make certain builds tedious to play as. Some, such as Small Frame, give a small bonus and a fairly hefty penalty (+1 Agility but take 25% limb damage), while some like Four Eyes don't provide enough bonuses to justify wearing glasses (which don't really have any special options). The only three that really get picked are usually Wild Wasteland (which alters a few encounters for no penalty), Good Natured (which bumps non-combat skills, all of which are useful, while penalizing weapon skills, of which you'll use one or two at best), and Skilled (which, for a price of a negligible penalty in experience points, gives you +5 points in every skill, and comes with a bug that makes it outright broken).
• That One Level:
  • Dead Money: It's telling how punishingly difficult the entire DLC is when mods exist that register it as complete when the game begins.
    • There's a segment 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're very low on health and ammo, so fighting your way back through them is gonna be anything but a cakewalk. On your way up to the tower, you keep seeing "RUNRUNRUN" written near doorways in the "wrong" direction. After setting off the fireworks, on your way down, oh yes... now you know why "RUNRUNRUN" is written on some of the doorways.
    • Near the end of the DLC where you have to make your way to the vault proper. The way there is a gigantic complex filled with winding catwalks. The level is supposed to be a Final Exam Level where you have to make your way through poison clouds, speakers that will set your collar off, and holograms. However, many of the speakers in the area are unbreakable, with no terminal to turn them off, meaning that the majority of this section is making a mad dash and hoping you find a safe spot before your collar goes off. Another method people have used is a mod/console command that tricks the game into thinking your collar has already exploded - which means your collar won't explode again.
  • Lonesome Road wasn't out long before many players went crazy 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.
  • During final battle against General Oliver if siding with the Legion, there's a segment that you go through if you fail to talk Oliver down. A large office full of cubicles, with a stairwell along each end of the side hallways. Sounds easy enough to navigate, right? Well, toss down a large number of booby traps that shred your health, cripple your limbs, et cetera. Still manageable, though, right? Wrong. On top of all of this, you have two Veteran Rangers at the end of each hallway, armed with Anti-Materiel Rifles that can one-shot you if you're not bulky enough.
• That One Sidequest:
  • A Final Plan For Esteban, where Ranger Morales' widow asks you to retrieve his body. And by that, they mean you're carrying the dead Ranger to a nearby NCR barricade. The Fiends guarding him are extremely accurate and have enough range that if you just fast travel to REPCONN HQ, they'll start shooting the moment you load. To make matters worse, you move at such a slow pace while carrying a body that it's almost quicker to just chuck it a few feet, run over, pick it up, repeat. And to top it all off, it's an unmarked quest, so you get no Pip-Boy entries and quest markers — you get a map marker for Morales' corpse and a single line of dialogue telling you to talk to the NCR troopers on the barricade "north of there", and only these soldiers tell you that you only have to bring the corpse back to them as opposed to back to McCarran.
  • Oh My Papa, a quest that's required for any good ending involving the Great Khans, has a downright nasty section. While convincing Jack and Diane is insanely easy, and convincing Regis is only dangerous if the player has ticked off the Legion enough to shoot on sight, convincing Melissa is agonizingly hard—or, rather, simply reaching her is. She's set up on a ledge that's mostly encompassed by an impassable mountain range and has exactly two paths to get to her. The first goes through Quarry Junction, which is crawling with roughly a dozen Deathclaws. The second has a few Cazadores... and about half a dozen Deathclaws. The two paths converge just far enough away from Melissa that if you get too close to her ridge (which is pretty much the only high ground suitable enough to fight on) while the fight is active, the sounds of gunfire will attract some of the Deathclaws from the other path. Even worse, the quest instantly fails if Melissa is killed, regardless of how many of the other objectives in that quest are completed and while she and her two Khan brethren will engage any Deathclaw that gets within range and slowly chip them down if given enough time, a single Deathclaw is enough to tear them apart if it gets close enough. In other words, what was supposed to be a simple rendezvous can quickly turn into an Escort Mission with lasting repercussions (the Khans will have to be killed on an NCR run if this quest is failed) that can escalate into the Courier, possibly a companion, and three Khans versus anywhere between 12–15 Deathclaws and nowhere to run. Hope you brought Stealth Boys and/or some serious firepower.
  • Getting the Pimp-Boy 3 Billion involves the quest How Little We Know, where on top of the usual stuff required for it, the player has to find out why the Omertas aren't buying guns from Mick anymore. If the player just wants the Pimp-Boy without a care, all they have to do is side with the Omertas at the end of the quest, but for more moral players, it's far more complicated. The player must do an extremely specific sequence of events involving Troike and Big Sal's dialogue trees (clicking the wrong thing can lock you out of the Pimp-Boy) before blowing up the Omertas' gun shipments and completing the quest. Additionally, sometimes the game will just glitch out and not let Mick give you the Pimp-Boy anyway, making it all for nothing.
  • Early on during the quest "Debt Collector" for Francine Garret, you may not have the skills or SPECIAL needed to immediately get the payment from Lady Jane that you require to pay Francine with. As a result, you may have to head to the Broc Flower Cave that contains the R.O.U.S.'s (Rodents of Unusual Size), which are highly deadly giant rats that deal significantly more damage than standard giant rats and can easily kill a player early in the game (which isn't hard given that this quest is likely one of the first quests a player will receive after just having reached Freeside). This not only takes you out of Freeside just to go get the payment, but the difficulty of reaching the Brahmin with the caps when you're low level is enough to just make you pay Francine out of pocket for it. The only bright spots are the unique silenced and scoped Varmint Rifle that can be found in the cave (though you will have to do a bit of searching for it), and the fact that if you aren't using Wild Wasteland, the giant rats aren't nearly as tough.
• Tough Act to Follow: For all its flaws and base-breaking factions, New Vegas is frequently pointed to as a shining example of what both the Fallout series and Action-RPGs, in general, can be — a sweeping, highly replayable joyride through comedy, horror, and two-fisted pulp with rock-solid writing, rich worldbuilding, and legitimate philosophical musings to back it up. No small part of the lukewarm reception of Fallout 4 and catastrophic reception of 76 is due to having to live up to an iconic classic that's managed the rare feat of a video game becoming more appreciated with time (especially regarding the game's highly-praised approach to LGBT representation in video games).
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • The NCR, as far as Bitter Springs is concerned. On paper, shooting evacuating civilians (including children and the elderly) is a Moral Event Horizon and the most clear-cut demonstration of the NCR imperialism gone wrong. With that said, almost every soldier from the NCR side that was in Bitter Springs openly shows remorse, and reiterates that the situation was a result of faulty intel and the commander freezing up in a critical moment, unable to take back the orders to fire on sight before the tragedy happened. With the person that took charge and stopped the massacre getting promoted, it's safe to say that even the NCR brass considered it unacceptable. Also, the civilians in question belonged to the Great Khans, a faction of raiders and drug pushers, who has been antagonizing the Republic for over a century, and is currently allied with the Legion just for a shot at revenge, making them come off as Asshole Victims. On top of that, the one named NCR soldier that thinks the Khans had it coming is a former Khan himself, and he paints a vivid picture of Khans as a band of barbarians and drug addicts taking potshots at children and NCR citizens just for the hell of it. While the script notes suggest he's an Unreliable Expositor, it doesn't really come off in the dialogue itself, and there isn't any other character who provides a counter point to make it clearer. As a cherry on top, investigating the Bitter Springs area - a refugee camp by the time the game starts - can lead you to a Khan that has been killing people in the refugee camp in revenge, and it's been said that he's shot more innocent refugees than actual NCR soldiers. The end result is that a lot of players end up shrugging off the Bitter Springs massacre as a tragic accident or karma for the Unintentionally Unsympathetic Great Khans.
  • Joshua Graham's desire to exterminate the White Legs from Zion is meant to come across as a sign of his past as the brutal and merciless Malpais Legate lingering, but given how the White Legs have shown hostility to just about everyone, exterminated multiple peaceful tribes and cannot be reasoned with, it's not difficult to perfectly sympathize with him.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Although it's a stretch to say that Caesar's Legion is supposed to be sympathetic, there are a lot of remarks to the effect that it is meant to be a factor in the game's Grey-and-Grey Morality, with a number of characters remarking a preference for them over other factions, citing their ability to make the wasteland safe as opposed to the humanitarian, but bureaucratic NCR. A lot of discussions involving them treat them as at least an equal choice compared to the other possible options. However, their extreme violence, their slaving, their severe misogyny, their anti-technological policies, their dependency on a military dictator, and the cutting of any Legion-controlled area that wasn't a brutal war camp left many players confused as to what their upsides were supposed to be. The Wasteland has very few modern conveniences and is full of slaving, raping and killing psychopaths? Obviously, the solution is to institutionalize all those things and put a psychopath in charge! And even if you think the NCR is full of it, there are two other possible factions that sidestep its issues in a much better-adjusted fashion. Tellingly, Legion playthroughs are statistically the least common by a fairly wide margin.
  • The Legionaries themselves, in a way. Lore and Word of God paints them as victims of Legion's brainwashing, either as tribals with their identity forcefully erased or as kids of raped slaves indoctrinated from birth to die fighting for Caesar. It's said outright that Legionaries that don't kill themselves to avoid being captured are the exception rather than the rule. Having said that, on top of Legion being almost-cartoonishly evil as a faction, a large chunk of both rank-and-file mooks and named commanders are dicks on a personal level, and a lot of people feel that a man's fate in the Legion is much better than a woman's, and so the tragedy of Legionaries doesn't come across that well.
  • The game tries to make the Great Khans seem like victims of NCR's reckless expansion who turn to Caesar's Legion out of desperation and revenge, but most players view them as a faction-wide Asshole Victim. The Khans have been the Arch-Enemy of the NCR since they were just the village of Shady Sands and preyed on them for more than a century before the events of the game, and their slow exodus north hasn't so much been fleeing NCR's expansion as it was NCR driving a raider tribe off their borders. Papa Khan even gloats about the Khans' history of attacking the NCR for fun if you ask him about it but still treats the NCR at fault without the player being able to point that out. They've also become the major chem pushers of the region and prominently deal with the Fiends and other raider tribes. The only thing that can inspire even the slightest sympathy among them is the Bitter Springs Massacre, where the NCR killed the Khans' children, elderly, and injured as they fled their settlement; but every NCR trooper who took part in it expresses deep guilt over what happened, it's explained that it occurred due to poor communication and intelligence (the ground troops were Just Following Orders and the commanders didn't realize they were shooting unarmed civilians), and when they realized what was happening they ceased fire immediately. Even Bitter-Root, an NCR trooper who comes from the Khans, expresses that they were scummy drug-pushers and what happened at Bitter Springs was Laser-Guided Karma for provoking NCR. The Golden Ending for the Khans is them leaving the Mojave for Wyoming, where they carve out "a mighty empire", and the narrative frames this as a positive thing.
  • Also, as noted above under Designated Hero, the Mojave chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel. They are presented as an organization struggling between a desire to preserve their rich legacy and the growing realization that the wasteland around them doesn't really need them. While many individual members indeed come across as sympathetic (especially Elder McNamara), the faction as a whole doesn't do anything objectively benevolent or beneficent (even to their own members, as Veronica can attest), and, in fact, other factions that do use advanced technology for their own purposes, such as The Followers of the Apocalypse, the NCR and even Mr. House, have improved the lives of far more people than they have. If they weren't a mainstay of the series, they'd just be an obsessive sect that posed a latent danger to everybody else around them on account of their Blue-and-Orange Morality.
  • Ulysses is meant to be a sympathetic villain who, after seeing the only wasteland society he found promising totally destroyed by the player character, decided to both get revenge and tear down the institutions of the wasteland. However, his logic is so flawed that many players did not find him sympathetic at all. For one, the player character did not intentionally destroy the valley; they were simply a courier who delivered an anonymous package, which later turned out to be a bomb. In addition, because this job happened before the beginning of the game, the player themselves had no agency in it. Ulysses’s criticisms of Wasteland societies and institutions are obvious Author Tracts that many players found pretentious and annoying rather than profound. Finally, his “solution” is to basically destroy all civilization in the Wasteland, including potentially millions of people, for the crime of having flawed governments. Essentially, players felt that the main writers expected Ulysses to be sympathetic simply because they agreed with many of his ideals, completely disregarding that players may not hold the same ideology and that even those who agree with his criticisms might think he was taking things beyond all reason.
  • Daniel from Honest Hearts. He's meant to be seen as an upstanding pacifist who wants to help the Sorrows, so they don't become like the White Legs. However, his over focusing on the Sorrows innocence is seen by many as treating them as literal children and leaves them poorly equipped to live. This isn't helped by his decision to lie Wakening Cloud and cover up her husband's death, so she'll focus only on the evacuation. Should the player reveal the truth to Wakening Cloud, she'll be devastated (and angry at Daniel), but she'll push her feelings down to focus on fighting the White Legs, showing Daniel didn't have enough faith in her despite having known her for a long time by that point. This comes to ahead in the DLC's endings as most fans consider Daniel's approach (evacuate the Sorrows from Zion) the worse choice of the two choices between his and Joshua's approach (lead both the Dead Horses and the Sorrows to destroy the White Legs), as Daniel is so single minded in preserving the Sorrows innocence that he is willing to uproot the Sorrows from their home, risk their lives in the evacuation, and let the White Legs continue their rampage elsewhere while dismissing the idea of fighting the White Legs as only about keeping a piece of land. Not only does this come as selfish of Daniel, but it is also infantilizing of him as his ideal version of the Sorrows is impractical for the wasteland. Joshua's approach on the other hand not only stops the White Legs from hurting anyone else, preserves Zion as one of the few true paradises in the wasteland, and saves the Happy Trails Caravan Company, but (assuming you get Joshua to spare Salt-Upon-Wounds) the Sorrows can learn to defend themselves without losing their good nature and redeems Joshua as a person, while Daniel's leaves everyone worse off and not even Daniel is completely happy. While Daniel is a good person and has good intentions, players feel as though violence is a perfectly valid option against an Always Chaotic Evil faction like the White Legs and feel that his focus on the innocent of the Sorrows is a flimsy excuse for what is him pushing his ideals onto another group.
• Vindicated by History: The game was generally well-received, but suffered from heavy criticism at release for its numerous bugs thanks to Obsidian rushing the game to release in an unfinished state (13 months, 3 of which were spent on stuff like Q/A, as Bethesda mandated). Reviews also criticized the game for using the same engine as Fallout 3 and recycling a lot of 3's assets, to the point where at least one reviewer described it as essentially an expansion pack to 3. New Vegas is now considered one of the best modern role-playing games of the 2000s-2010s for its open-ended choices, Grey-and-Gray Morality, detailed and logical worldbuilding, and excellent writing. In fact, many people now consider it a Tough Act to Follow for Fallout 4. By 2015, New Vegas had also obtained lifetime sales of 11.6 million, just slightly below Fallout 3 (12.4 million), despite the latter game having a two-year head start and a much higher development cycle and budget.
• Win Back the Crowd: For the many who were disappointed in Fallout 3, New Vegas was a welcome return to form. As it was made by the same core creative team as the original two games and is a relatively direct sequel to it, utilizing content from the cancelled Fallout 3 project at Black Isle, many consider it to be the true Fallout 3.
• Woolseyism: The French translation of the game is average at best and has several "Blind Idiot" Translation moments, but there are some interesting (in a good way) translations:
  • The Fiends are now called the "Tox" (from Toxic), since "drug fiends" would translate awkwardly.
  • Nightstalkers are called "Crocs" (Literally "Fangs")
  • The Big MT/Big Empty is called the "Grand RIEN" ("Great/Big Nothing"), with RIEN standing for "Recherches Innovantes Et Nouvelles" ("New And Innovative Research"). It's a bit awkward, but it preserves the spirit.
  • The Ghost People are called "Brumeux", roughly "Misty Ones" or "Foggy Ones".
  • The Nightkin are called "Nocturnes" ("Nocturnals")
  • Private Sexton's joke on "Legion Ears" obviously wouldn't work. Instead, he says "Avoir l'oreille de la Légion" ("To have the Legion's ear"). "Avoir l'oreille de quelqu'un" ("To have someone's ear") means you have their full attention and they listen to you, which is adequate considering the Legion and the NCR are embroiled in a massive war and the Legion spies on the NCR, plus it's a Pun.
  • Since there's no equivalent expression of "Yes-Man" in Spanish, Yes Man is called Servitron in the Spanish translation.

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