History Fallout4 / TropesQToZ

* VideoGameCrueltyPunishment: Most of your companions will dislike or hate villainous actions, especially committing wanton murder. The only standouts are Dogmeat, who is [[CanineCompanion a dog]] and doesn't know better (so he loves you no matter what you do), DarkActionGirl Cait, [[TokenHeroicOrc Strong]], who loves violence, the sociopathic X6-88, and Ada, who is programmed to follow her leader unquestioningly. Even then, Cait, Strong and [=X6=] have points where they'll disapprove for reasons [[EvenEvilHasStandards moral]] or [[PragmaticVillainy practical]]. Continuing to act like an ass or a psycho killer while they're travelling with you will cause them to hate you and eventually [[PermanentlyMissableContent leave you, never to return]].

** If you go through the files in Nick's office one of them talks about the MysteriousStranger who Nick assumes is some immortal serial killer due to recording sightings from the [[CallBack time and setting of every previous title]]. While you cannot talk to Nick about this, should you have the perk and receive a Stranger visit, Nick will react by attempting to stop the Stranger (fruitlessly) or just expressing frustration at his ability to instantly appear and disappear at will (though who knows what *he* sees, since the player only ever sees him appear BehindTheBlack during VATS camera transitions).

** There are two opportunities for you to insult bereaved fathers in Jun Long and Blake Abernathy. The latter would get you a WhatTheHellHero from your companions.

* TragicKeepsake: The player character can take [[spoiler: their dead spouse's wedding ring]] after they escape the cryo pod. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from hocking it off to the first merchant you find.

* TrickBoss: The fight against Gristle and his Raiders in Concord. Gristle ''is'' tougher than a normal Raider, but still goes down quickly, especially if you turn your newfound minigun on him. The Concord Deathclaw that appears after that, however, is the ''true'' boss.

* VideoGameCrueltyPunishment: Most of your companions will dislike or hate villainous actions, especially committing wanton murder. The only standouts are Dogmeat, who is [[CanineCompanion a dog]] and doesn't know better (so he loves you no matter what you do), [[TokenHeroicOrc Strong]], who loves violence, the sociopathic X6-88, and Ada, who is programmed to follow her leader unquestioningly. Even then, Strong and [=X6=] have points where they'll disapprove for reasons [[EvenEvilHasStandards moral]] or [[PragmaticVillainy practical]]. Continuing to act like an ass or a psycho killer while they're travelling with you will cause them to dislike you and eventually [[PermanentlyMissableContent leave you, never to return]].

* Overconfidence: The standard response by Raiders if you're in power armor is to actually say ''"Power armor?? BRING IT ON!!"''. This also applies if you revisit a low-level area in the lategame, with Raiders running at you with pipes and knives even though you're one-shotting them left and right with a PlasmaCannon. Justified because they're so zonked on Psycho and other chems that they're out of their minds.
** This can be taken to even further heights thanks to the ''Automatron'' [=DLC=], as the Robotics Workbench allows you to remodel a robotic companion into a military-grade [[KillerRobot Sentry Bot]], or simply build one from scratch. Raiders will see the Sole Survivor accompanied by a tanklike rolling mountain of metal and guns, and ''still'' think "[[TooDumbToLive easy pickings]]".

** In the Minutemen's PostClimaxConfrontation should they become enemies with the Brotherhood, [[spoiler: the Brotherhood's high-tech airship Prydwen is taken down in a CurbStompBattle by the Minutemen's rather low-tech artillery]].

** While it has since been patched with a work-around, it was once possible to completely screw up "The Lost Patrol", the quest Paladin Danse gives you when he informally inducts you into the Brotherhood of Steel. You have to talk with him, but if you completed the quest after the Prydwen shows, you couldn't complete it, as he was now recruitable as a companion; setting it as your active quest would cause an irritating quest marker to follow you around anywhere. This was fixed by talking to Captain Kells. The second time the player talks to him, if Tactical Thinking is not active and Acadia remains undiscovered, he'll immediately ask about Paladin Brandis.

** Of course, that’s not to say there are ''no'' opportunities to be a complete asshole. For starters, pretty much everyone aboard the ‘’Prydwen’’, every member of the Railroad and everyone in the Institute is non-essential, meaning you can have lots of fun going on a murderous rampage. There’s a quest where you have the opportunity to sell a ghoul child to some slavers, or if you refuse, give up their entire family to them. In one Diamond City quest, you can ambush a chem deal, and then murder your partners to take all the chems and money for yourself. And then, of course, [[spoiler: you can join the Institute and announce to the Commonwealth you’re their new overlords and that their pitiful lives are meaningless. If you side against them, you have to blow them up, and you can choose to not sound the evacuation alert so that all the civilians and children living there get blown up with their home]].

* SiliconSnarker: KL-E-0 is a gun seller of Goodneighbour, originally a Assaultron. As a killing machine nowadays tasked with selling deadly tools, she displays a lot of cynicism at her trade:

** Of course, that’s not to say there are ''no'' opportunities to be a complete asshole. For starters, pretty much everyone aboard the ‘’Prydwen’’, every member of the Railroad and everyone in the Institute is non-essential, meaning you can have lots of fun going on a murderous rampage. There’s a quest where you have the opportunity to sell a ghoul child to some slavers, or if you refuse, give up their entire family to them. In one Diamond City quest, you can ambush a chem deal, and then murder your partners to take all the chems and money for yourself. And then, of course, [[spoiler: you can join the Institute and announce to the Commonwealth you’re their new overlords and that their pitiful lives are meaningless. If you side against them, you have to blow them up, and you can choose to not sound the evacuation alert so that all the civilians and children living there get blown up with their home]].

* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: Nick Valentine doesn't just tolerate your sarcasm; he usually finds it refreshing. However, in the ''Far Harbor'' DLC, if you're sarcastic if and when [[spoiler:[=DiMA=] is executed for crimes against the Harbor]], he'll put you in your place.

* ShaggyDogStory: The game retroactively makes Elder Lyons's entire crusade against the Super Mutants, Enclave, and other evils of the Capital Wasteland into this. It's not a ShootTheShaggyDog one because some progress is made. However, the Brotherhood of Steel has become an amalgam of Lyons' humanitarian principals and the Western ideals. It's implied the Capital Wasteland has become part of the country that the Eastern chapter is establishing on the East Coast (with country being referenced in one of the ''Prydwen'' terminal entries).

* ShownTheirWork: Bethesda Game Studios clearly put a ''hell'' of a lot of effort into researching the Boston area when designing the Commonwealth. Just as a few examples, famous historical monuments and landmarks like the Bunker Hill Monument, the Old North Church and Paul Revere Monument, the ''[=USS=] Constitution'', Faneuil Hall, Walden Pond, Fort Independence (now called "The Castle"), Saugus Ironworks, and the Minuteman statue outside of Sanctuary Hills (which is located where Minute Man National Historical Park is in our world, and has the Old North Bridge as its entrance) are all where they roughly should be. Most of the differences can be chalked up to either an {{Acceptable Break From Reality}} or examples of how the Fallout Universe is an {{Alternate History}} to our own.

* SinisterSubway: While the remains of what is left of the Boston [=MBTA=] underground aren't as extensive compared to the DC metro in ''3'' (and the real life [=MBTA=] is [[TruthInTelevision indeed compact when compared to the other subway systems in the U.S.]]), the stations are still crawling with Raiders, Super Mutants, traps, and pockets of radiation just as ever. Fortunately, you no longer have to travel from station to station as the [=MBTA=] underground areas mostly have dead ends and no pathways to other stations.

** The Concorde Deathclaw. You can simply skip the entire town. Or you can zoom through (ignoring Preston), get the Armour off the roof, and them leave town before the Deathclaw script kicks off.

* SlowlySlippingIntoEvil: This is the case with the raider encampment at Libertalia. You can access the terminal of the leader, Wire. His log reveals, over several entries, that they were Minutemen who fled after a defeat, just looking for a way to survive. They begin to run out of food, but he still executes two of his men who raided caravans to get needed supplies. They find work escorting trader caravans, but after being stiffed on their pay a few too many times, Wire decides to make an example of a caravan; this evolves into a protection racket, where his group is getting rich just being paid to do nothing and not attack the caravans. The final entry is a HeelRealization when some new recruits comment how excited they are to join his raider group, his acknowledgment of how ashamed his old Minuteman leader would be of what they've become, and that he doesn't feel like writing any more.

** There are a fair few junk items intentionally designed to be sold for caps rather than scrapped, by virtue of having low weight, high value and yielding few useful components: the most obvious examples are pre-War money, cigarette packets and cartons, and cigar boxes. Gold-plated lighters, silver and gold watches, Giddyup Buttercup parts and Assaultron Circuit Boards, as well as the rare metal bullion bars, ''do'' yield useful components, but are usually too valuable to bother scrapping.

** Similar to the above, the "Two Shot" legendary effect produces truly ridiculous results when applied to a Fat Man or Rocket Launcher, but is at its most simple and efficient when used on a semi-automatic rifle (automatics suffer from massively increased recoil). The hitscan nature of these weapons means the "two shots" are essentially treated as one, so there's no danger of missing the second, and the effect in practice translates to a ''massive'' unconditional damage increase[[note]]The damage isn't quite doubled, as the "second shot" does the weapon's base damage, excluding any mods[[/note]]. A Combat Rifle with this effect, named Overseer's Guardian, can be purchased from Alexis Combes in Vault 81, and remains a powerful weapon throughout the entire game.

* RandomDrops: The equipment you get from defeating a legendary enemy.

* RandomNumberGod: The odds that the above drop is actually something good that you can use.

* SuicidalOverconfidence: The standard response by Raiders if you're in power armor is to actually say ''"Power armor?? BRING IT ON!!"''. This also applies if you revisit a low-level area in the lategame, with Raiders running at you with pipes and knives even though you're one-shotting them left and right with a PlasmaCannon. Justified because they're so zonked on Psycho and other chems that they're out of their minds.

** Should the Sole Survivor piss them off enough, their companion will give them one of these speeches before announcing they are leaving them.

* UnionsSuck: During the quest "Unlikely Valentine", the player eavesdrops on a conversation between 2 members of the Triggermen gang. One wonders why there's a vault beneath a subway station when it wouldn't be airtight, defeating the whole point, and his friend tells him that a common scam in Pre-War America was to get a load of union boys to run PointlessCivicProject a construction job that wasn't intended to go anywhere but still keep everyone on payroll.

** If choosing to fight against the Institute, Father will have a Synth copy of [[spoiler:Shaun]] as a child, meet you at the exit of the Institute. Regardless of which faction you choose to complete this quest with, and how pro or anti-Synth they are, they'll have this reaction towards you, if you choose to leave the kid behind. [[spoiler: That being said, Maxson would instead being more disgusted toward The Institute going so far to the point of using "fake" child as a bait if you tell Maxson that the Shaun is a synth.]]

** If choosing to fight against the Institute, Father will have a Synth copy of [[spoiler:Shaun]] as a child, meet you at the exit of the Institute. Regardless of which faction you choose to complete this quest with, and how pro or anti-Synth they are, they'll have this reaction towards you, if you choose to leave the kid behind.

* UnfazedEveryman: The protagonist isn't terribly surprised by what the wasteland has to offer. The husband, Nate, had fought in the Sino-American War, so he's prepared for future combat. {{Subverted}} all to hell by the part until meeting Codsworth where the protagonist acts like they're suffering a horrible nightmare - which is actually an option of dialogue to give the robot.
* UnfriendlyFire: While it's never explicit, it's heavily implied that this has happened to [[spoiler:Sarah Lyons]] on behalf of [[spoiler:the Lost Hills Elders]]. It's highly suspect that a that a high ranking Sentinel and leader of an elite Brotherhood squad would perish in combat [[spoiler:''very'' shortly after being named Elder]] especially when Arthur Maxson was being trained in the same Brotherhood group.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: When exploring the Island in the ''Far Harbor'' DLC, the Sole Survivor can find a note near Rayburn Point that leads to a stash buried in a small grave. However, the "Excavate" option only works if they have a shovel in their inventory, which is considered a junk item meant to be scrapped. It's far easier to dig up dirt with a tool than to use one's hands, and faster too, especially when it's on [[DeathWorld the Island.]]