History YMMV / FallOut

*** Easy way to deal with Fire Ants; get a small group of them to chase you, and drop a Frag Mine behind you. It should blow the antennae off the lead ant, causing it to go berserk and start torching its buddies. Nothing for you to do but sit back and watch the barbeque, perhaps picking off the remaining ant, which is likely to be almost dead anyway.

*** This is debatable due to the large number of NPCs capable of repairing weapons and armor to 100% and the sheer quantity of caps you can earn at the casinos.

** Just on a basic level, it kind of makes sense. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 made combat, for the most part, very unrewarding and dangerous, which leads to role-playing and non-combat skills being the main focus of quest solving. The player also had a lot of leeway, even in Fallout 1, in terms of how you approached the main quest line. Don't care about your home vault? Then you can completely ignore the water chip quest that literally starts the game. Fallout 3, on the other hand, pretty much was a combat game. Technically, you could get through it without killing almost anything, but the practicality of that was almost non-existent. So, the first games were Black Isle style games that focused on role playing with combat being an option to solve problems where character development and leveling had significant impacts on the game. The third game was a Bethesda style RPG heavily focused on combat where making a "perfect" character good at everything was easy.

* BrokenBase: There is [[{{Understatement}} not generally much overlap]] between fans of the first two game and fans of the third one (though exceptions exist), and the disagreements between the two groups can get rather...[[SeriousBusiness vehement]]. It even spills over to TVTropes - much of this page's edit history can be summed up as a permanent low-intensity EditWar between ''Fallout 1'' and ''2'' fans and ''Fallout 3'' fans.

* CompleteMonster: Doctor Braun, who [[spoiler: trapped a group of people in a simulated virtual reality that he had absolute control over, where he proceeded to continuously torture them for ''two hundred years'' for no reason except that ''[[ForTheEvulz it was fun.'']]]]
** And if you attack him [[spoiler: in the simulation]] he [[spoiler: shocks you with lightning, sending you flying. And his sim avatar is a little girl named Betty.]]
** It's even creeper when you realize that the entire Tranquility Lane event can be seen as a giant shout out to IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream.
** Roy Phillips. Just... Roy Phillips. For reasons science is not adequately equipped to explain, you lose karma when you kill him.
*** Goad him, his "wife," and his guard into attacking you if you want to kill them without taking a karma hit. His wife will just run from you, but she turns hostile voluntarily anyway.
*** On the other hand, one has to consider the fact that Roy, like other ghouls, have been dealing with bigots for a ''long'' time. The game does imply he has been trying to get in there peacefully for quite some time, and that he's tired of doing things peacefully. Doesn't justify him killing off all the humans in the building after resolving the conflict peacefully, by all means, but it gives him a reason to hate bigots so violently.
** Tenpenny also counts. [[spoiler: He wants a town nuked because he thinks that it ruins the view from his penthouse. [[YouNukeEm Guess who he hires to do the job and yes, it does look cool]].]]
*** Well, Tenpenny at least [[spoiler: tells Burke to try to evacuate the town first. Burke chooses not to do so, and forbids you to warn anyone, making him more worthy of the title, IMHO.]] Tenpenny's still a bastard, but Burke is evil through and through.
** Hell, even ''you'' can be this if you [[VideogameCrueltyPotential choose to play the game this way]]. From [[spoiler: nuking Megaton]], wanton slaughter, slavery, to just being a general douche to everyone else, it's hard to call your character anything else.

** And the BadAss trailer for New Vegas. ''I love those Deeeeeeaaar hearts, and geeeentle people, who live in myyyy hometown...'' [[MissedMomentOfAwesome Too bad it didn't make it into the soundtrack.]]

** It's now been released, and is generally considered to be exactly as good as expected so far. [[BeyondTheImpossible Even]] [[UnpleasableFanbase No Mutants Allowed]] [[BeyondTheImpossible likes it]].

* FanonDiscontinuity: Hardcore fans generally refuse to acknowledge the existence of the ("good for what it is") RTS/RPG hybrid ''JaggedAlliance'' clone ''Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel'' or the console hack-and-slash ''Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel''. The developers of the original two games have adopted a similar policy. People [[CowboyBebopAtHisComputer believe]] the usual suspects of the UnpleasableFanbase declared this of ''Fallout 3'', though this opinion has largely died out as time passed.

** ''[[EarWorm I love those Deeeear hearts, and gennn-tle people, who live in my hooometown..]]''

* UnpleasableFanbase: There's at least one well-known fansite whose regulars hold up ''Fallout 1'' and ''2'' as the pinnacle of computer gaming (or at least of Western-type [=RPG=]s), had little or nothing good to say about ''Fallout 3'' until it came out (and generally still consider it mediocre, or a flawed gem at best), and are bitterly unhappy that "their" original version ([[{{Vaporware}} stillborn]] for [[ScrewedByTheNetwork various reasons including the collapse of the original company]]) will probably never see the light of day. (See the listing for ''Fallout'' on that trope's page for more details.)

* CharacterAlignment:
** LawfulGood: Elder Lyons' branch of the Brotherhood of Steel; The New California Republic; The Regulators are either this or NeutralGood.
*** Given that the note that the regulators have if you pickpocket them/be evil and get attacked by them about killing you says something about lawful bounties and the fact that they ''will not shut up'' about justice, the LawfulGood assumption is pretty good.
** LawfulNeutral: The main branch of the Brotherhood of Steel; The Brotherhood Outcasts; Ashur.
** LawfulEvil: The Enclave, Paradise Falls Slavers, General Jingwei, The Master, the Bishop crime family in New Reno, and Caesar's Legion.
** NeutralGood: Moria, the Wright crime family in New Reno if you managed to get the best ending for them, the Followers of the Apocalypse.
** TrueNeutral: The Brotherhood of Steel in the first two games is this, with traces of LawfulNeutral. The splinter group the player is a member of in Tactics swaps this out for LawfulEvil, and the East Coast Brotherhood is just straight-up LawfulGood; Charon; "Sergeant" RL-3; Clover (Would likely be NeutralEvil if her slave collar didn't keep her from thinking independently)
*** Also applies to Charon, who simply does whatever his master tells him to do.
** NeutralEvil: Roy Phillips; Braun; Talon Company; Wernher, most of the crime families in New Reno other then the Bishops and the Wrights.
** ChaoticNeutral: Super Mutants in ''1'' are either this or ChaoticEvil. Butch in ''3''.
** ChaoticEvil: While raiders are nasty people by definition in any of the games, the Capital Wasteland version attack anyone on sight, capture and torture victims to death, then decorate strongholds with their remains for the hell of it. YourMileageMayVary, as they also have shades of NeutralEvil. The Fiends from ''New Vegas''.

* {{Narm}}: Present in at least a few conversations in every game in the series, although ''3'' has the highest concentration.

*** Well, at least in New Vegas, that is addressed, with a good survival skill, your character understands how to make instant potable water using Radaway as the Catalyst for water purification and then filtering the dirty irradiated water.

** ChaoticNeutral: Super Mutants are either this or ChaoticEvil. Butch in ''3''.
** ChaoticEvil: While raiders are nasty people by definition in any of the games, the Capital Wasteland version attack anyone on sight, capture and torture victims to death, then decorate strongholds with their remains for the hell of it. YourMileageMayVary, as they also have shades of NeutralEvil.