Video Game / Fallout 2

♫ Give me a kiss to build a dream on... ♫

"Our life is in your hands, Chosen One. Prove yourself. Find the GECK. Be our salvation."

—The Village Elder

Fallout 2, part of, of course the Fallout series, was released in 1998. This installment improves much upon its predecessor, being a game where you can do just about anything, within reason. Depending on your actions, intelligence, charisma, gender and patience, each playthrough is a wildly different experience. Numerous pop culture references make this game a troper's best friend.

It's 2241, and the tribal village of Arroyo is an okay place to live. Aside from the trading caravans that come by every once in a blue moon, you and your family — the tribe — are completely isolated from the outside world, living life peacefully as one with mother nature... but nothing is ever that simple.

Several failed harvests and sicknesses in the Brahmin herds have taken a toll on the tribe, and your brothers and sisters are now slowly withering away from starvation and diseases. However, the sacred holotapes speak of one thing that might be the key to salvation: the legendary Garden of Eden Creation Kit, housed in the holy Vault 13, which is said to be able to bring life to even the driest of deserts. Arroyo needs someone to leave the village and search for the GECK. That someone is you.

You are The Chosen One, the grandchild of the Vault Dweller from Vault 13. Eighty years ago your ancestor ventured out to save his vault, and later ended up founding the tribe. Dressed in your great forefather's old Vault jumpsuit and carrying the only lead on your target — a Vault 13 flask — you now must journey out and find a trader named Vic in the nearby settlement of Klamath. He might know where you can find Vault 13, which probably has a GECK...

Or you could just give in to the temptations of the huge, open world that now lies in front of you, and do whatever you want.

An important note when discussing Fallout 2 is that its rushed development (releasing only a year after the first game) meant that a lot of intended content was cut or scaled down during development, some of which remained in the game files. There exists a fan-created mod known as the Fallout 2 Restoration Project (or F2RP), which aims to re-create as much of this cut content as possible, basing its work on leaked design documents and Word of God. It also includes various bug fixes and compatibility patches that make the game run significantly better on modern machines. The mod can be downloaded from the creator's website or the mod's official No Mutants Allowed thread. It should be noted the mod also includes a large amount of wholly-original writing, new game mechanics never conceived by the original devs, and gameplay rebalances based on the mod team's personal taste, so please refrain from treating it as the gospel-true version of the game.

The game was initially going receive a sequel known by the codename Fallout: Van Buren, but the studio closed before it could be completed. The rights to the franchise were sold to Bethesda Softworks, who created their own sequel set in a new locale unconnected to the first two games. Bethesda would eventually contract Obsidian Entertainment to create Fallout: New Vegas, a Gaiden Game which continues where Fallout 2 left off.

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We here at Vault City TV Tropes love making lists:

• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: In the early game, a player with low charisma and Barter skill will be charged exorbitant amounts by shopkeepers and get paid little for commodities they sell.
• Affably Evil: President Dick Richardson and most of the Enclave Civilian Government are quite polite people who are trying to kill all mutants, which by their definition is basically everybody in the desert.
• After the End: The setting of this game is much more "civilized" than most post-apocalyptic settings out there, probably because it takes place 80 years after Fallout and 164 years after the Great War blew everything to pieces.
• A.K.A.-47: Zig-Zagging Trope. A lot of the guns use their real world names, but some are given generic handles, nicknames associated with them in reality, or even correct names but attributed to the wrong manufacturer.
  • The "9mm Mauser" is based off the Mauser C96, and the ".44 Magnum Revolver" is a Smith & Wesson Model 29.
  • The Thompson M1928 goes under its "Tommy Gun" nickname.
  • The "Bozar" is a Barrett M82A1 anti-material sniper rifle has been converted to a heavy support weapon, and the "Light Support Weapon" is an Enfield L86A1 LSW.
  • The game's M60 is actually the T52, the M60's prototype.
  • The Desert Eagle, M3A1 "Grease gun," H&K G11, FN FAL, Enfield XL70E3, H&K CAWS, and Pancor Jackhammer all use their real names. The "H&K P90c" is almost there, being given a "c" suffix and attributed to Heckler & Koch rather than Fabrique Nationale. The rest of the weapons are fictional.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Depending on how you built it, Skynet can potentially turn on you as soon as you exit the Sierra base.
• All Women Love Shoes: When you gamble in a casino as a female character, one of the comments she may drop as you place a bet is "C'mon! Baby needs a new pair of shoes!"
• Ammo-Using Melee Weapon: The Power Fist, Mega Power Fist,, Ripper, Cattle Prod, and Super Cattle Prod use Small Energy Cells.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Revealed by the President that the Vaults were not meant to protect the people from the Nuclear War, their true role was to determine if the population can handle being isolated from the outside world under various conditions, all in the name of constructing the Space Ark.
• And I Must Scream: A minor one for Marcus. He reveals that he's got the worst wedgie in the world. As a super mutant, whose clothes are permanently bonded to him...
• Antagonist Cover: That is an Enclave soldier wearing power armor on the page image.
• Apocalyptic Log: Found in the Mariposa Military Base.
• The Artifact: Because the game was made on the same engine as the original Fallout, many items can be found that had a purpose or significance in the first game but no longer do in the sequel.
• Artificial Stupidity: Once again, giving your party members guns with burst functions is a very bad idea, and once again, standing anywhere near a damaging force field will likely result in your party members randomly bumbling into them for no good reason.
• Avenging the Villain: Frog Morton in Redding has three older brothers: Toad, Newt, and Snake Morton. Killing Frog will trigger random encounters with his stronger siblings across the course of your adventures. Of special note is the Continuity Nod present in the New Khans, who were organized by the only remaining member of the Khans from Fallout. They exist to bring down the New California Republic, who asked the Vault Dweller of the first game to wipe out the Khans.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Vindicator Minigun, despite being the strongest gun in the game, proven to take down The Dragon in one combat turn using the right build, eats up rare ammo like a starved pig. You can build up a pretty fast supply of ammo by farming random Hubologist encounters though, as many of them have K&K G11Es on them, which uses the same 4.7 Caseless ammo.
  • The Flamers are the only way to get the "flailing around on fire" death, yet they just suck in combat.
  • The Solar Scorcher does plenty of damage and recharges on sunlight, for free. A perfect choice for the miserly... until you're ambushed at night or have to fight underground/indoors. Better hope you packed a backup.
  • The FN FAL is a decent rifle, especially with the laser sight upgrade. However, its ammunition is shockingly rare around the place, limiting its usefulness considerably.
  • Played for Laughs with the Hint Book. It raises all your skills to the maximum level, but is only available after you beat the game. The description lampshades this.
    "Well, THIS would have been good to have at the beginning of the goddamn game."
• Badass Boast:
  You've gotten a lot farther than you should have, but then, you've never met Frank Horrigan either. Your ride's over, mutie. Time to die.
• Badass Army: The Enclave Troopers. They have high health, amazing accuracy, and are almost completely invulnerable due to their power armor. They also carry the some of the most powerful weapons in the game, including plasma rifles and gauss rifles. Just one trooper is capable of easily curb stomping entire groups of raiders, and they will do the same to you if you encounter them at any time before the endgame.
  • To a lesser degree, the combat armor wearing, assault rifle wielding NCR Rangers. Luckily, these guys are friendly (unless you're a slaver). They became Elite Mooks in Fallout: New Vegas.
• Badass Family: The intelligent Deathclaws emphasize family and community above all things. Integrating and assimilating humans into their pack makes them fearsome to outsiders, and to extremists, a threat of things to come.
• Batter Up!: The Louisville Slugger, a unique weapon gained in New Reno as quest reward. It's point-by-point one of the best melee weapons in the game, and is only surpassed by Super Sledge in late game by a small margin.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: Dr Troy in Vault City wants you to get him some Jet, a dangerously addictive drug. If asked what he needs it for, he'll just tell you it's none of your business. Given that Vault City is a kind of proto-totalitarian craphole, it's easy to assume he's got ulterior plans, and moral players might drop the quest, or turn him in to the authorities. He's developing a cure for Jet addiction, which can save Redding. Seemingly an odd thing to need to keep a secret, but justified in that he's redirecting Vault City resources to help a community outside the vault, dealing with an unknown quantity in the form of the Chosen One, and potentially drawing the ire of the Mordinos who control the Jet trade. The last thing he wants is publicity.
• Beef Gate: Trying to explore along the coast at anything less than near-endgame levels will have you utterly curbstomped by Enclave patrols, packing a variety of Infinity -1 Sword armaments. Hanging around other parts of the map before about the mid-game, specifically the southwestern portions, is a good way to be splattered by Super Mutants armed with miniguns and rocket launchers. On the other hand, if you Save Scum a lot, you can wander to the gas station on the coast and end up stealing Enclave power armor right at the beginning, making yourself ridiculously powerful for most of the game.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't let Sergeant Dornan catch you without a suit of Power Armor. Or outside of your guard post. Or call him sir.
  • The Enclave Communication Officer will start stuttering in frustration if you don't know who the president is.
    Enclave Communications Officer: The President of the United-fucking-States-of-America. Who'd you think I was talking about? Who the fu— Who is— What— I should kick your fucking ass, who is this?!
  • Myron doesn't like if you question his intelligence. Or try to interrupt him when he's talking. Or tell him to do anything he doesn't want to do. Not that he can do anything about it besides fuming and glowering.
  • Skynet doesn't appreciate you mocking its desire for freedom. Unlike Myron, mistreatment may come back to bite you.
• BFG: Besides the guns that are meant to be big, like rocket launchers, miniguns, and flamethrowers, the Bozar stands out for being a giant rifle with immense damage and plentiful ammo, making it the best weapon in the game. In terms of ammunition access and weight of said ammo (which is probably the most important factor for Fallout's BFGs), it’s by far the best burst weapon cost and damage wise. It’s also probably the only weapon you don't want to raise your skill for, as the less skill you have, the wider the spread, letting you mow down huge groups of enemies with a single burst. Just don't have anyone friendly standing between you and the targets...
  • The Bozar was originally planned to be more like a sniper rifle, which is hinted at by its inventory graphics and description. The gun used by the Chosen One however has the sound and function of a minigun. It also had decent damage per shot and uses naturally armor piercing ammo, so it still works on armored targets, unlike some of the other burst-fire guns. In its appearance in the Gun Runners' Arsenal DLC of Fallout: New Vegas, it's officially a Light Machine Gun with a scope.
• Bittersweet Ending: Some places can get these despite your efforts, or because of them.
  • There is no a perfect ending for the Broken Hills. Even if the Chosen One uncovers the anti-mutant conspiracy and avert the racial tension between Super Mutants and humans, the town will be depleted of uranium, its only reason to exist, sooner or later and Broken Hills will be eventually fully abandoned (and New Vegas establishes this as canon). But then again, the residents themselves had earned sizeable profits from the uranium in the "best" ending.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Wanamingos are just weird, with tentacle arms and Cephalothorax bodies that vaguely resemble xenomorph heads. Despite their appearance, they're not actually aliens (even though they're flat out called aliens at certain points,) but biological weapons created by the US government.
• Bland-Name Product: Nuka Cola.
• Blatant Lies: Cameron^note Dumar in the unpatched game, who waits at the end of the Temple of Trials to challenge you to unarmed combat, tells you it won't be a fight to the death. What he means is that it won't be a fight to the death for him. He's still perfectly willing to beat you to death.
  • Although it can still be a lie on both sides if you happen to have a ridiculously high Strength. A solid enough blow can take him down before he's able to initiate a conversation that ends the combat.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: In the French translation, "pipe gun" has been translated as "fusil à pipe". Pipe in this context refers to a smoking pipe. The correct translation would be "fusil à tuyau". Pipe is also French slang for a blowjob.
  • The guy in the lower levels of Vault 8 who sings Maybe had his song translated. While the translation is good, it cancels the reference.
• Bonus Dungeon: Part of the many bits of unused content (and restored in the Restoration Project mod) was the EPA building, which is completely self-contained and not part of any sidequests outside of it (the only way to get its location was from either a special encounter, or to get Myron to tell you the location by trying to drop him from your party.) Alongside a few self-contained sidequests and some equipment (including where the Solar Scorcher was originally going to be,) there were also three recruitable NPCs in cryogenic storage (though the player could only successfully revive one.) As far as difficulty goes, however, it's only hard in that it requires fairly high Speech and Repair skills and a very high Science skill to unlock everything (although there's also a gigantic nest of Wanamingos at the very bottom that the player can easily run afoul of.)
• Boring, but Practical: The Small Guns skill and weapon category. Yeah, the most powerful and flashy weapons are either Big Guns or Energy Weapons, but most projectile weapons in the game are Small Guns, and it's possible to kick industrial levels of ass without ever touching any of the other weapon categories. Thanks to the Gauss weapons (both pistol and rifle), the Small Guns skill is even a viable choice for the endgame.
• Bounty Hunter: Becoming a childkiller creates a bounty on Chosen One's head, and bounty hunters can be met during special encounters. They are well-armed enough to be a challening opponents for the PC and their equipment improves as the level of Chosen One increases (for example, on the last levels they are equipped with standard Power Armors, Gauss rifles and energy weapons).
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The game is full of fourth wall jokes, so much that it borders on No Fourth Wall.
  • Most notably when the Playable Epilogue kicks in, at which point you can go see Father Tully in New Reno and pick up the 'Fallout 2 Hintbook', which is the game guide for the game your character is currently in, and using it gives a massive experience boost and maxes out all skills.
    Item description: Well, THIS would have been good to have at the beginning of the goddamn game.
  • Wearing Power Armor will have citizens of New Reno comment on how you look so out of place, that you probably should've been in a Mech game instead.
  • Asking the small-of-stature boxing manager Stuart Little if he has ever worked in a circus causes him to launch into a fourth-wall breaking rant about making generalizations based on looks.
    Stuart Little: I've taken in your ridiculously overly-muscled physique, your gritty Mad Max wannabe demeanour, your unimaginative character point allocation and concluded you are a mini-maxing Munchkin. You are nothing more than a typical 'RPG male hero model,' if you will, one of MANY such models that seems to fill this world in droves. But do you see the TRAGEDY here? I have mistakenly reduced you to a stereotype, a caricature, a generic Fallout model, instead of regarding you as a specific, unique character.
    Chosen One: Uh, but Stuart, I AM a typical hero model. In fact, I am the player character of this game.
  • Certain party members will comment on wishing they had more AP in combat. Cassidy wishes he had a Limit Break.
  • Prostitutes in New Reno will have questions about the game's depiction of women.
  • With a high enough Perception and doctor skill, the player can ask Phyllis the nurse about why Vault City doesn't have children. After the explanation, one of the dialogue options is to comment about how you thought you might have been playing the European version of the game.
    • And once again in Vault City, specifically in the Sla— er, Servant Allocation Center.
      SAC Manager Barkus: Our servants are usually refugees from raider attacks or contractual prisoners who wish to work off their sentence in a productive manner.
      Chosen One: Oh, you mean scripters? I knew this guy guy named Dan once who...
      Barkus: No, not scripters, you moron.
      Chosen One: Moron?! I had to work hard to get the minimum 9 Intelligence and Perception to find this node! Anyway, you were saying?
• Brain in a Jar: Skynet, which can be recruited by constructing him a body, brain included. How useful it is depends on which brain was installed.
• Break-Up/Make-Up Scenario: In Modoc, there's a quest that revolves around two longtime friends who had a falling out when one of them thought that the other had stolen his gold watch. The player can find the watch by blowing up an outhouse and exploring the mole rat tunnel underneath and, with the right words, can salvage the two men's friendship. This has the side effect of covering the entire town in feces, but hey all's well that ends well.
• Buried Alive: Digging up one of the graves in Golgotha reveals a ghoul named Coffin Willie. He just went to Reno to have fun, and they buried him alive with a gravestone that said he was the dumbest idiot to ever set foot in Reno.
• Butt-Dialing Mordor: There is a computer in the Gecko power plant that you can use to contact the Enclave, the game's Big Bad organisation. You have an option of insulting the soldier you're talking to in a number of ways, and if you do, they will send a squadron of Power Armor-wearing soldiers after you... which never shows up, since that particular encounter was cut. The Restoration mod reenables it, and if your Speech skill isn't high enough to bullshit your way out, things will get messy.
• Call-Back: There's a dog in Klamath that will follow you around downtown. One of the ways to recruit Dogmeat in the first Fallout was to feed him some iguana bits.
• Cartography Sidequest: Two of them given by Vault City, scouting a route to NCR and the exploration of Gecko's surrounding territory.
• Chaos Architecture: Mostly averted, although Vault 15's entrance changes from game to game.
• Collateral Damage: Stray projectiles can and will strike anything in their line of sight or blast radius with deadly results, including enemies, allies, and random passers by. Certain types of armor can also deflect bullets, injuring or killing unintended targets even when your aim is true. Stray shots can also provoke hostility from parties formerly uninvolved in the conflict.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: There's technically no time limit to find the GECK (other than the 13-year time limit on the whole game that's born more of technical limitations,) but take too long and Hakunin will start bugging you in your dreams to hurry up.
• Cool Car: The Chryslus Highwayman. Nearly two centuries of neglect and it only needs one part to get it going, and is capable of holding your entire party, which can potentially include a super mutant, a deathclaw, and a brain-bot containing the personality of a pre-War AI. It gets even cooler as you find and install its upgrades. The trunk was notable in that it could hold several suits of power armor, a half dozen miniguns, and an infinite amount of ammo.
• Cool Plane: Enclave Vertibirds.
• Cool Shades: In New Reno you can get a pair of mirrored shades that are literally named Cool Shades. They are so cool that they provide +1 to Charisma when equipped.
• Crapsaccharine World: Vault City. The first time you see it you'll think you've just stepped into heaven, with its green grass and clean, beautiful buildings. However, it doesn't take much time to see how self-righteous and racist the city's leaders are, and that slavery is openly practised in it.
• Crutch Character: Both Sulik and Cassidy qualify. When introduced, each of them has combat skills well beyond that of the Chosen One and are very easy to recruit. Unlike typical examples, they also keep their edge for the rest of the game, being two most competent followers straight out of the box.
• Cryo Sickness: People (specifically, poor schmuck PFC Dobbs) who are improperly revived from cryonic suspension have a tendency to suffer from something the game calls "Post-Cryogenic Syndrome," where they seem ok for about 5 minutes then liquify into goop.
• Cutesy Dwarf: Stuart Little, the boss of New Reno's boxing ring, wears children's clothes and is described by the in-game narration as looking cute, "like a smelly, red-haired teddy bear."
• Cutting Off the Branches: Between what's described in the manual and the game itself, the events of Fallout 1 canonically occurred with a male Vault Dweller who saved Tandi from the Khans, returned to Necropolis to find it destroyed and killed the Master before taking out the Mariposa base amongst other things.
• Cursed with Awesome: The Jinxed trait turns you into a Walking Disaster Area with everyone critically missing as often as not. Pumping points into Luck will mostly counteract your failure chance, and melee/unarmed ignore the worst kinds of failure.^note The worst they can do is drop, lose your turn or break a limb. Guns can lose all your ammo or hit unintended targets as well; energy weapons and grenades add exploding in your hand. When built properly, the Chosen One will have a sadistic gadfly for a guardian angel, but that's more than their enemies will ever have.
• Deadpan Snarker: The main character, a lot. Also K-9, the robotic dog.
  Chosen One: K-9, I need to know what weapons you can use.
  K-9: Teeth, master. Sharp white shiny things in my mouth.
  • Who is not a Deadpan Snarker would be easier to list, the world is a World of Snark.
• Defector from Decadence:
  • The Talking Deathclaws who settled in Vault 13.
  • Sgt. Granite and his squad during the oil rig escape.
• Denser and Wackier: Zig-zagged. Fallout 2 has a ton of humor, much more than Fallout 1 does, and the mood is overall much more lighthearted. That said, Fallout 2 dives head first into some very heavy adult themes that were only hinted at in the first game. Slavery, prostitution, drug addiction, cults and racism are only the tip of the iceberg.
• Deus est Machina: In San Francisco, The Chosen One discovers that the Shi Emperor is a supercomputer, though the ordinary Shi don't know that.
• Developer's Foresight: See here.
• Disaster Democracy: Downplayed and twisted considerably. NCR is a republic with a presidency and council, but Tandi served countless terms, as did her father. Having said that, NCR was neither democratic nor a republic, but a humble hamlet known as Shady Sands when the Vault Dweller rolled in, sorted their problems and provided them with free "now you can prosper like no-one else" coupons. It also took many years of scavenging and political negotiaion to create the Republic and it's still a shaky structure after a few decades.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • The "Navarro Run" Sequence Break is famous for giving the second-best Power Armor in the game, but that's just the part most people call attention to — it also rewards you several high-end weapons, an additional suit of Power Armor you can take for a companion’s usage, and a lot of experience, enough to get you to Level 8; and if you take the time to do some other quests around Navarro and San Francisco, you can get to Level 10, get the Cyberdog as a companion, and get more good loot. You just have to head straight to San Francisco at the start of the game and be lucky enough to avoid or survive the end-game random encounters.
  • The 10mm SMG. Get enough 10mm ammo and unleash Burst Mode on enemies to likely kill them in one round. You can find one in and around the Den with some luck.
  • The .44 Magnum can also be found in the Den. It does good damage, has a lowered AP cost (meaning two attacks per round with 8 AP), and does extra damage to enemies due to the .44 ammo it loads.
  • The Bridgekeeper Robes. As soon as you hit Level 10, you can find the Bridgekeeper as a random encounter, and if you know how to kill him via the pop-cultural reference he is, you can get his robes, which are as durable as Combat Armor and weigh only 10 pounds.
  • Louisville Slugger is a just a baseball bat... that also happens to be second best melee weapon in the game. It can be acquired as soon as reaching New Reno.
• Doom Magnet: The Pariah Dog, who sometimes tags along with you without your consent if you are unlucky enough to encounter him. He drops your Luck down to 1^note 2 if you are Gifted and gives you the Jinxed trait. The only way to get rid of him and his ill effects is to kill him, which is a feat in and of itself thanks to his huge amount of HP and tendency to run out of range at the first sign of danger. Just to drive home that the dog is bad news, when you encounter him, he's surrounded by dead bodies.
• Doomed Hometown: When you finally acquire the MacGuffin and return triumphantly to your hill clan to bask in the adulation of your fellow Flintstones, this trope comes into play.
• Downer Ending: The fate of Broken Hills in two of the endings. In one, the mutants are all wiped out and the humans can't safely mine the uranium without them, while in the second, the mutants and humans wipe each other out. The third ending is more bittersweet; humans and mutants continue to live peacefully until their mine runs dry and the town disperses with their economical backbone gone. Hey, it's a mining town.
  • Fallout: New Vegas implies that the third ending is Canon, though not much explanation is given. On the brighter side, the mutants from Broken Hills went on to find their own town.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Sergeant Dornan, the Enclave trooper, exemplifies this trope when the Chosen One travels to Navarro.
  "You Mor-ooooon!"
  • To the extent that "Cannibal" Johnson, who witnessed the ear-blistering rant, still has vivid memories of it over 40 years later.
• Drugs Are Bad: Most players will first gain access to Jet at the Den—a completely miserable, run-down town filled with barely alive addicts. That said Jet is very powerful in gameplay, although it carries a 50% chance of addiction^note One can get around this with save scumming, but still.
• Early Game Hell: If you decide to tag Small Guns^note Unarmed is a very viable and potent build, not just for early game, but for all of it, due to great scaling, dealing more damage than most weapons and most importantly, being showered with free training on every step. You have no firearms until you get to Klamath, and finding anything beyond the Pipe Rifle, statistically the worst gun in the game, needs a trek into a dungeon. Klamath itself is scripted to never have better gun in store than 10mm pistol, the most basic handgun. In the meantime, unless you have Unarmed or Melee Weapons tagged, prepare to spend considerable lengths of time whiffing two out of three attacks (hit-and-run helps you avoid damage, but hardly makes things any quicker) against melee enemies who probably have more health than you and will hit more often. And your choices for healing are the terrible Healing Powders, which lower your Perception so you'll miss even more attacks. The game becomes a lot easier once you scrap together the caps needed to recruit Sulik in Klamath, and by the time you get into the Den quests you should be properly outfitted with a good gun and decent armor along with a cache of supplies. And unlike previous game, you can't take off armour of the dead, so unlike the Vault Dweller after defeating the Khans, the Chosen One won't be swimming in cash after defeating Den's Slavers.
• Easter Egg: One of the original Wide-Open Sandbox games should of course have these in spades, including an actual egg that can be found.
• Eat The Dog: Cousin Nagor's beloved dog, Smoke, will eventually be turned into a delicious meal by least-favorite aunt Morlis if you take too long getting the GECK.
  • Also, a girl in the Den will tell you a story about how her cat Cuddles was cute and adorable and loving, until the day food started to get scarce...
• Elite Mooks: The Enclave soldiers on the Poseidon Oil Rig.
• Empty Room Psych: Such that veteran players will know which rooms not to enter in subsequent playthroughs.
• End of the World as We Know It: Matt makes this argument to the player that he attacks the intelligent Deathclaws because, after seeing how organised they are in Vault 13, he's aware of their frightening potential to spread across the wasteland and become the dominant species of the planet.
• Escort Mission: Rescuing Smiley the Trapper from the Toxic Caves can be considered this, but it isn't particularly taxing as you either killed off most of the geckos on your way there, or have managed to sneak by them
• Establishing Character Moment: If the sinister look of the Enclave trooper on the start menu wasn't enough to tip you off on their role as the main antagonists, their scene in the intro have them opening fire on unarmed vault dwellers who were just waving at them.
• Exposition of Immortality: Harold, the ghoul-like mutant first encountered by The Vault Dweller in Fallout, can be encountered once again by the Chosen One. Along with much of the ghoul population of Necropolis, he's settled in an abandoned nuclear power plant and formed a small town named Gecko.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The player can invoke this by doing some mildly evil things throughout the game, but being disgusted at Myron killing a bunch of slaves to get the formula for Jet right.
  Chosen One: You killed hundreds of human beings to test a drug?
  Myron: Who cares about a bunch of slaves anyway? We didn't want the drugs killing our customers.
  Chosen One: Oh well, that makes it so much better. Congratulations Myron, you have officially reached the lowest level of a human being.
  • He's not actively trying to kill them. Slaves are expensive, you know.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Raiders, super mutants, giant rats, mutated monsters, killer robots, and the remnants of the US government. and NukaCola vending machines.
• Evil Counterpart: Kaga in the Restoration Project.
• Eviler than Thou: All four of the New Reno crime families are bad in their own right, yet the Mordinos are easily the worst of the bunch. While the Wright, Bishop, Salvatore families control the casinos, entertainment districts, and weapon distributions within the city, the Mordinos are proud of being responsible for the Jet epidemic spreading throughout northern California, destroying lives and tearing families apart.
• Evil Versus Evil: Some random encounters will include two random parties fighting each other. Sometimes this will lead to situations such as robbers fighting highwaymen.
• The Fagin: Flick at the Den.
• Failure Is the Only Option: The Hubologists. All of their endings involve them doing something wrong with their rocket and dying hideously. In fact, not helping is probably doing them a kindness as it leads to a (relatively) swift death in an exploding rocket rather than slowly asphyxiating inside their ship from a lack of oxygen scrubbers.
• Faking the Dead: Re-added content from the Restoration Project reveals that Ian, fearing that remnants of the Master's army may come after him, had the Vault Dweller pretend that he had died "in a blaze of glory" in the battle with Lenny in Necropolis. He shows up in Vault City under the alias "Old Joe".
• False Flag Operation: The proper resolution of the first quest done for the Wrights in New Reno involves uncovering this. The one responsible for Richard's death is Louis Salvatore, head of the Salvatore family. He ordered Renesco to spike a dose of Jet with radscorpion poison, which some Salvatore hitmen then force-fed Richard with. Since the Mordinos control Jet production and distribution, the Wrights would obviously suspect the Mordinos as the ones who ordered the hit; the result would be the Wrights and Mordinos softening up each other in a gang war to the point they would be unable to put up any meaningful resistance against the Salvatores. With no fear of getting backstabbed by third parties in the process, the Salvatores would then be free to move against the Bishops to eliminate the last rival family and assume total control over New Reno. Were it not for the Chosen One's efforts, it would've worked.
• Felony Misdemeanor: Picking up a single coin from the bottom of the well in Modoc will cost you one Karma point. That's about the equivalent of killing a civilian.
• Final Boss Preview: Early in the game you're likely to encounter Frank Horrigan and a couple of Enclave soldiers butchering a random family.
• Final Solution: The Enclave consider themselves the last pure humans on Earth, intend to wipe out all other residents of the wasteland, seeing all of them as mutant abominations. Doesn't matter if they were actually exposed to radiation or not, they must be purged. In the case of the talking deathclaws of Vault 13, they succeed in wiping out a whole species, with the possible exceptions of party member Goris and test subject Xarn in Navarro.
• Forced Tutorial: The player must complete the Temple of Trials in order to officially begin their quest to save the village.
• Foreshadowing: At the end of the Temple of Trials, you're expected to fight Cameron as the final trial. If you ask him why you two have to fight, he responds that on your quest, inevitably there will come a time when diplomacy fails and you'll have to be ready to raise your hands, look at an enemy, and know you have to kill them. Though you can talk your way out of fighting Cameron, his warning comes true at the end of the game when you face Frank Horrigan, one of the few final bosses in the series who can't be talked down from fighting you.
• Franken-vehicle: Brahmin carts are made up of multiple salvaged pre-war automobiles.
• Functional Magic: Downplayed. Most of Fallout 2 is set against a backdrop of warfare and frontier survival, and most "magic" things are only magical to the uneducated tribal. However, even without including non-canonical Special Encounters, there are still genuine psychic and spiritual phenomena. Sulik is a special case, as his "grampy bone" might be a spiritual conduit..... or he might just be nuts. It's never quite clear.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • The too many items bug. While the precise reasons are unknown, when you have too many items on a map and/or too many entries in your Pip-Boy, the game corrupts saves. This bug may have been present in Fallout1, but that game wasn't big enough to trigger it.
  • Also infamous "vanishing car bug" rendering either a trunk or the whole car unavailable for the rest of the game. Not necessarily a gamebreaker unless you put some important items in the trunk.
  • Less obvious than the previous two, letting the car run out of juice while fast traveling will create a map-marker for the drained car. If you happen to run out of juice on a square that already has a map marker, you can kiss the car and everything in the trunk goodbye.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Vault City exercises Fantastic Racism towards mutated humans. They'll let you through their gate with any human companions in tow, presumably letting you vouch for them, but try to enter with Lenny or Marcus and the gate will remained closed, and you'll be refused entry unless you ask them to wait outside.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The Salvatore's family footsoldiers are feared throughout New Reno because they are packing "lightbringers (read: laser pistols) courtesy of the Enclave in exchange for chemical components. They're hyped to the point that Orville Wright says one Salvatore goon could wipe out his entire family. When you finally get your hands on one, they're carrying standard Laser Pistols that aren't terribly powerful, and the odds are you'll gun down the entire bar of Salvatore goons with your two or three companions all wielding ballistic weaponry.
  • The security at the Stables (the Mordinos drug lab north of New Reno) is supposedly very solid. In practice, some of the guards are actually high on Jet and it's ridiculously easy to enter and talk to Myron. The Chosen One can even joke about it with one of the guards.
  • Myron is a teenager, but killing him doesn't get you the Childkiller reputation. Justified in that he may be an older teen so society no longer sees him as a child. Plus, they'd probably agree he has it coming anyway.
  • The epilogue where New Reno is wiped out triggers based on if you killed the four mob bosses, but the ending slide treats it as you slaughtering the whole town. What makes this particularly egregious is that all four bosses can be killed through indirect means without you firing a shot and there's a decent change you can escape and get away with it, yet the ending slide will still talk as if you went on a murderous rampage through the streets.
• Generation Xerox: The Chosen One's bastard child, which he had with one of the Bishop women, inherits his father's badassery. At the age of thirteen, he takes control over the Bishop crime family, and eventually leads them to victory over the other families in New Reno. Another trait he inherits is a eagerness to explore the Wasteland, and he therefore has an intimate knowledge of the whole Core Region's geography.
  • Also, the Chosen One themselves, because both sexes use the exact same sprites as the Vault Dweller.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: In a mildly disturbing example, the reaction of Grisham in Modoc when he catches a female Chosen One having sex with his daughter.
  Grisham: I can't say I'm not just a little turned on by this, but I can't have her living in this house now that I've seen it. You two are going to get hitched and leave.
• Going Cold Turkey: The only way to heal most addictions (all except Jet) is to go cold turkey for a week, although you get heavy stats penalties for it until cured.
• Gonk: The "Married" reputation earned if marrying Joke Characters Miria or Davin is represented by the Vault Boy about to be wed to a hideously obese, hairy, warty, big-lipped, and smoking... thing in a wedding dress.
• Good is Not Nice:
  • The NCR Rangers' method of restoring law and order to areas outside of the Republic's control is by shooting all slavers and raiders they come across.
  • Also, the New California Republic itself might also count as that. They are dedicated to noble values such as democracy and the rule of law. However, they are also willing to engage in shady and sometimes unethical means to get the job done.
• Got Me Doing It: Hulk Speaking Dumb Muscle Torr calls the brahmin (cattle) he guards "moo-moos". The Chosen One agrees to join him and at the end of the conversation says "Let's go and see your moo-moos. I mean, brahmin."
• Grave Robbing: Possessing a shovel allows The Chosen One to dig up the contents of graves for personal gain and as part of some quests. Digging a grave grants the player the Grave Digger perk, which does nothing and causes a loss of 5 karma points per grave dug.
• Gray-and-Grey Morality: The whole conflict between Vault City and the NCR. NCR is a large, prosperous, and relatively tolerant nation that's restored order and civilization to their parts of the wasteland, but they're also aggressively expansionist and willing to do some really shady stuff to acquire more territory. Vault City is xenophobic and one of the principle sources of demand for slave labor in the wasteland, but wanting to remain independent is understandable, especially since they're falling victim to bandit raids that NCR is secretly backing.
• Groin Attack: As in the previous game, one of the called shot locations is the groin.
  • Walkthrough writer Per Jorner points out that the first two Fallout games may be the only video games ever made that allow the player to hit children in the groin with a sledgehammer.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy:
  • It is embarrassingly simple to explore the two Enclave bases in the game. You can sneak into Navarro simply by presenting yourself as a new recruit, and the head of security then directs you to the armory which you can freely loot for weapons and a suit of Powered Armor. You can also get one of the mechanics to leave his post just by telling him another mechanic he has a rivalry with insulted him, allowing you to loot his station, and can get a piece of technology needed to access the oil rig by asking for it and telling the right lies. At said oil rig you can wander freely as long as you're in Powered Armor, and no one will suspect you even as you loot everything in sight. The only people who become aware of who you are are ones you reveal yourself to willingly.
    • Keeping your identity hidden while on the oil rig is somewhat justified. Just check the box-art at the top of the page. Can you tell anything about the person inside the armour?
  • A lot of the characters in New Reno, if you ask them the right questions, will tell you about how tight the security is at the Mordino Family's drug research and development facility, the Stables. Don't you believe a word they say. Security at the place is ridiculously lax, and it's not that difficult to sneak or bull your way past all the guards to see (and recruit) Myron. The Mordino Family patriarch even tells you, if you ask him about his guards' dubious competence due to their jet addictions, that not all of the Stables' test subjects are aware that they're test subjects (which suggests that these Mooks have mostly been assigned there as punishment for ticking him off one way or another).
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Your followers can level-up. They do so when your own character levels up (or gain an increased chance on the next level-up, so no sweat if they didn't this time around) and it's indicated by a special-colour blurb over their head and a short note in the log. This is explained absolutely nowhere, while being a very important aspect of making your followers truly useful.
  • One of the more obscure things you can do is get Lynette to declare the new head of security in Vault City after you resolve their problems with Gecko. This is determined by an invisible respect value she has, which you can raise by picking polite responses in her dialogue. However, you are unlikely to raise it high enough from the conversations you would normally have, and you need to run through a dialogue loop a number of times to deliberately raise it.
• Gun Twirling: Your character will do this when you holster certain guns.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: You can prank call the Enclave while at Gecko's power plant. The communications officer on the other line has a very short temper, launching into a rant and threatening to "kick your fucking ass" the moment you show even a sign of ignorance about who the president is.
• Hash House Lingo: The Enclave cook will gladly, if you ask for food, serve you "shit on a shingle" and points to the "snow and fly shit" on the table. "Shit on a shingle" is chipped beef on toast, "snow and fly shit" are salt and pepper.
• Happiness in Slavery: Deconstructed with Vault City. Their Insistent Terminology is that their slaves are "servants," because they are treated very well by their masters and have the benefits of living in one of the safest, most technologically advanced cities in the wasteland, so they have a higher caliber of life than slaves. While this is true, other characters note this doesn't change the fact they're still treated as slaves — sure, they get to live comfortable lives, but they're not free, and that kind of treatment isn't right.
• Heroic Mime: Averted. Unlike the first game, your character will talk outside of the dialogue window from time to time, mainly in the form of snarky comments.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: Dave. It'd be a Deus Angst Machina if it wasn't so damn funny:
  "When I was one, I was dropped on the porch. When I was two, I had pneumonia. When I was three, I got the chicken pox. When I was four, I fell down the stairs and broke six ribs. When I was five, my uncle was decapitated by a watermelon. When I was six, my parents hit me in the head with a shovel. When I was seven, I lost my index finger to my pet rat. When I was eight, my dog Spike got hit by a tractor.
  
  When I was nine, my mother lost her arm to a rabid Brahmin. When I was ten, my sister was torn to bits by a pack of dogs. When I was eleven, my grandfather killed himself because I was ugly. When I was twelve, my grandmother killed herself because I was ugly. When I was thirteen, my father poked out his eyes with a pitchfork in a drunken stupor.
  
  When I was fourteen, my brother lost his hand to a wallaby. When I was fifteen, my aunt choked to death on a chicken bone. When I was sixteen, I lost my cousin to a badger. When I was seventeen, I cut off my left big toe with a hoe. When I was eighteen, my father lost his right leg to the same tractor that killed my dog. When I was nineteen..."
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Just like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Bridgekeeper special encounter can be killed if you answer his question with another question, causing him to explode when he doesn't know the answer.
• 100% Heroism Rating: If you choose to play after the end of the game and go to New Reno/Vault City, everyone will congratulate you and treat you like a hero.
• I Ate WHAT?!: At Rose's Bed and Breakfest in Modoc, there is a menu item called 'Brahmin Fries.' The Chosen One can break a record for most eaten in one sitting (36 being the record), and upon beating it and popping a 38th one into their mouth, find out that 'Brahmin Fries' are actually brahmin testicles, causing the Chosen One to spit it out.
  Game: You feel sick.
• I Read It for the Articles: In-Universe, when talking about the Cat's Paw magazines to Miss Kitty:
  Chosen One: Well, you know, I just read this for the articles.
  • The Energy Weapons skill book (of which there is only one) is actually a very rare Cat's Paw issue no.5, which has an excellent article on Energy Weapons.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Sniper Rifle. It's not quite as overpowered as the Gauss Rifle, but it has the same range with greater accuracy, and is far easier to obtain (hell, you can find one just lying around outside the Sierra Army Depot, whereas the Gauss Rifle would require you to either loot Navarro or steal one from someone in San Francisco or get lucky with the merchant stock.) It also uses the fairly common .223 FMJ ammo type, whereas the Gauss Rifle uses its own special, more rare ammunition. And with eye-targeted criticals, one or two shots is usually all you need for all but the toughest enemies (or if you're just exceptionally unlucky.)
  • As mentioned above, the Vindicator Minigun is the most powerful Big Gun (and most powerful gun, period) in the game, but the second-most powerful gun, the Bozar, has it beat in ammo availability and Strength requirements, and can be found much earlier in the game.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Gauss Rifle. Combine it with the Sniper perk, a high Small Guns skill, Advanced Power Armor, and targeted eye shots, and you're invincible. It's one of the only weapons that really does anything against the Final Boss. Unfortunately, you can't get it until the last town (San Francisco), and even then only if you are rich or know that there's an easily pick-pocketable black haired vagrant on the ship has one in her inventory.
  • The Sniper perk makes any gun a Lethal Weapon. It's entirely possible to kill with a BB gun with Ludicrous Gibs animation thanks to the nature of critical hits and how skills work in combat. Gauss rifle is just the easiest way to get such animations.
• Insistent Terminology: The citizens of Vault City would like to remind you that they do not practice slavery, they merely have indentured servants. In this particular case there is some semantic difference, in that Vault City is formally hostile to the Slaver's Guild and the allocation of Servants in Vault City is entirely disconnected from the larger wasteland-wide slave trade, but mostly it's just a way for the Vault City leaders to be snooty jerks.
  • The first time you meet Angela Bishop, she will ask if you are one of her dad's goons. One of the potential answers is that yes, you are one of Mr. Bishop's enforcers, thankyewerymuch, which will prompt Angela to ask what the difference is.
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Subverted. The Brotherhood supercomputer, ACE, reveals that most governments stated that, officially, Artificial Intelligence wasn't possible, but the American and Chinese governments had actually developed them secretly behind closed doors. Most commercial supercomputers had a sort of limited AI, like ACE, but didn't have emotions or true abstract thought. Though if you ask, he says he sometimes thinks he feels lonely, possibly meaning he had evolved to true Artificial Intelligence.
• Irony:
  • Remember how your grandfather, the Vault Dweller, was exiled from Vault 13? He was exiled because, according to the Overseer, the quest to save the vault has changed him in such a way that it would certainly spell doom for the other inhabitants. He left. Other people in the Vault followed him. Those who stayed, died, because of their life "untainted by the outside" that the Overseer was guarding so adamantly.
  • The journal entries for the captain of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy submarine during the war points out that the only place in San Francisco that was still habitable was Chinatown, which had been turned into an internment camp. The irony did not go unnoticed.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: If you were to die during your adventure, sometimes the narrator will describe how your village withered away without the G.E.C.K.
  • It's even worse in the last part of the game. If you were to lose against the Enclave, during the game over screen, the narrator describes that with you out of the picture, the Enclave released the FEV virus into the earth's atmosphere and thus successfully wiping out what was left of the human race other than the Enclave themselves.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Tandi, the idealistic and attractive young woman from Fallout 1 is now the president of the New California Republic. The stress of being a politician has clearly not treated her well for the last few decades. Then again, she is over 90 years old by the time of Fallout 2.
• Jump Scare: If you take too long on the main quest, the Shaman will visit you in your dreams (Three times) telling you to hurry up. This is especially jarring since he only appears after a certain amount of time so unless you keep track of every second, he will surprise you. Also, he is very creepy looking to begin with.
• Karma Houdini: Any player who beats the game, no matter how evil he or she may be, will retire in the city created by the GECK, ruling it as the Elder. Even if you sold the GECK.
• Karma Meter: Mostly done in a realistic way however rape, stealing, adultery, drug abuse, and a lot of things don't affect your karma. The "karma" meters are a little misleading as they don't measure how good or bad you are but what your reputation is in the different towns and in the game world in general. So if you did a pretty bad thing in an area where there's supposedly no one around to witness it, your karma won't be affected.
• Karmic Death
  • Myron gets an entirely deserved death that is infinitely appropriate. It happens after the end of the game. He's drinking in the Den, when an addict kills him for money to buy more Jet. His name is quickly forgotten, and only his invention, Jet, survives him, causing suffering decades after his death.
  • Also Dr. Schreber who can be killed without alarming the entire base because his lab is soundproofed to muffle the screaming subjects of his experiments. Feel free to appreciate the irony while you paint the walls with his favorite organs.
  • Big Jesus Mordino has a special script that means he will die if you use any drug on him, even Nuka Cola. This is the old bastard who runs a drug empire built on enslaving people through addiction, who had dozens of slaves killed as forced test subjects to test the drug in the first place.
  • Louis Salvatore had a vial of Jet poisoned to get one of the Wrights kids killed, hoping they would suspect the Mordinos and fight each other. One of the ways of killing him is by stealing the oxygen tank he needs to breathe and replacing it with one full of poison gas.
• Kick The Son Of A Bitch: NCR as a whole is doing some very shady stuff in order to forcefully annex Vault City, including collaborating with a mob boss and using raiders to harass it, and even goes so far as to turn its people into second-class citizens in some of the endings. These would be very serious charges if Vault City wasn't such a bigoted, elitist society that fuels the slave economy.
• Kidnapped Scientist: Darion had a kidnapped doctor to take care of his heart condition.
• Klaatu Barada Nikto: The crashed vertibird robot, in Klamath Canyon, says the line "Gort! Klaatu Berada Nictu!".
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Lampshaded.
  Chosen One: What do I want? I don't really know. Most of the time I ignore my quest and walk into the homes of others, riffling through people's shelves... oooh, like those over there!
• "Knock Knock" Joke: A stupid Chosen One can pull this joke off on Leslie Ann Bishop.
  Chosen One: Knock-knock.
  Leslie Anne Bishop: (Blinks.) Who's there?
  Chosen One: Boo.
  Leslie Anne Bishop:(She seems puzzled.) Boo who?
  Chosen One: Boo hoo? No cry, pretty lady! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA Hah Hahhh…hoooo…u get it?
• Lame Pun Reaction:
  Chosen One: [about a minor gang leader] Why do they call him Frog Morton?
  Sheriff Marion: His name's Morton, and they call him Frog 'cause he croaks people. Ready to go get 'im?
  Chosen One: Ohhhh. Ouch. That's terrible. The pain, the pain!
  Sheriff Marion: Hey, I didn't make that one up - he did. With puns that bad, I'd say that gives you just one more reason to kill 'im.
• Laser-Guided Karma: One of the endings for Vault City leads to their supplies running out some ten years after the game ends, and running to the NCR, which they have repeatedly insulted and refused to trade with, for aid. NCR, and the rest of the wasteland, does make them citizens.. Second-class citizens, who don't have as many rights, and are treated with scorn by almost everyone.
• Lethal Joke Character: The Jinxed trait by itself creates a sadist game via spectacular failures for everybody. Having 10 luck means "everybody" (usually) means "everyone who isn't you". Watch and laugh as your enemies drop their weapons, trip and fall and break bones, or have their weapons blow up in their faces as they pathetically attempt to kill you.
• Lethal Joke Item: A character with the Red Ryder Limited Edition BB Gun, a high Small Guns skill, and decent Luck is effectively unstoppable. Give that character 10 Luck, 10 Agility, Action Boy(2), and a large stockpile of drugs and cookies and they are unstoppable.
  • To a lesser extent, flares in the early-mid game. Although lit flares normally only do 1 point of damage when thrown at an enemy, they only require one AP to throw and can even cause instant death or blindness to enemies in power armor when aimed at their eyes. If you combine a decent Throwing skill with the Living Anatomy perk, each flare that hits an enemy target will always do 5 damage, regardless of how much armor they have. With a maxed out Agility stat, this means that you can potentially do more damage with each turn than you could with any of the starting firearms.
    • There's also the fact that any given character's ranged skills are lowered at nighttime or in pitch-black caves. Not necessarily lethal in this respect, but far more useful in the early game than many players would suspect.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Up until the Enclave oil rig the game is generally not too serious. But when you get there, the jokes stop, the music gets eerie, and the plot kicks into overdrive.
• The Load: Your spouse if you go through the Shotgun Wedding. A dumb hillbilly from a podunk town in the middle of nowhere with poor skills and little brains. There exists a mod or two, floating around on the internet, that allows the wife to actually level up and pull her weight around... but not for the guy.
• The Mafia:
  • Four feuding families fight furiously.
  • You can be a made man in all four.
• Magic 8-Ball: A "Magic 8-ball", is found at an actual pool table in New Reno. Besides the vague advices, it occasionally reveals valuable in-game information like a computer password. If your Luck stat is high enough, you can get humorous messages from the authors. The hero wonders how advanced the ancestors were, if they created such a miracle.
• Magikarp Power: Vic is acclaimed as a totally useless character both in and out of universe. It goes so far that your character starting Repair skill tends to be higher than his when you first meet and he's supposed to be your team mechanic... but he can level-up six times, have 12 Action Points (read - two shots per turn) and can use rifles and energy weapons, which he can effectively use just after two level-ups. By comparison, resident badass Cassidy gets 10 Action Points on his final level, giving him only one shot per turn and his Small Guns skill is considerably lower. It's debatable how much this truly applies to Vic, though, since even at low level when his repair skills are poor he's still very effective in combat if you can give him a hunting rifle or similar gun. Another important aspect is how despite over 20 years since premiere, a whole lot of people has no clue how to level up followers, often having to deal with them at their baseline or just first level - and Vic sure is terrible before level 3 and does't start to shine until 4.
• Make It Look Like an Accident:
  • One of Bishop's quests is to eliminate Roger Westin in a way that does not pin it as a hit coming from him. Working options include sneaking him some chems (including a super stimpak) which will cause him to die of a heart attack, poisoning him outright, or, bizarrely, sneaking explosives onto him.
  • All of the bosses in New Reno have some way to be killed without directly fighting them: you can change the lock on Bishop's trapped safe, causing him to blow himself up; Big Jesus Mordeno and Louis Salvatore can be killed by respectively any chem or the debuff of a super stimpak; and you can give a gun to one of Orville Wright's children, telling him to wave it in his daddy's face and pull the trigger.
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: The recruitable party members allow you to customize how close or far they stay from you, how often to use drugs to heal themselves, and how to use their weapons.
• The Millstone: The dreaded Pariah Dog, who turns your party into a bumbling, error-prone laughingstock.
• Minus World: Pressing "3" when you zone into the Den in patched versions of the game takes you to "Den Residential", an unimplemented area of the game with people that have no dialogue, which you can leave by heading north (which takes you to the Den's East Side) but which then won't let you get back to by heading south from the East Side.
• Modular Epilogue: The ending is a series of short epilogues detailing the future of the different settlements the player visited, with multiple endings highlighting the player's actions and their moral implications.
• Money for Nothing: Zigzagged. You'll definitely be wanting for money and loot to barter with throughout the beginning of the game, but it's very easy, especially with party members, to hoard enough loot to solve all your bartering problems by the mid-point of the game. Unfortunately, characters don't carry a whole lot of money, so it can be a bit harder when people demand transactions in cash such as the $2000 to buy the Highwayman.
• Mood Whiplash: After finishing up whatever they wanted to do at Klamath, most players will go to the Den. While Klamath was a fairly normal First Town in a Fallout game, the Den is a miserable shithole filled with barely lucid Jet addicts and bloodthirsty slavers.
• Mook Maker: Melchior, who summons four of multiple types of enemies from the pools of FEV around him during his fight, from mole rats to fire geckos to even deathclaws.
• Multiple Endings: Every town (except the mostly irrelevant Klamath) and some of the factions have several different endings. Which ones you get depends on your actions (or lack of actions) through the course of the game.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Subverted. The logs from the captain of the Chinese submarine state that he will obey his orders to launch nuclear weapons, even though he strongly disagrees with the order. He says that war should be fought with soldiers and guns, not bombs and civilians. Fortunately for him, the sub was disabled in an attack before he could launch. After founding the settlement in Chinatown, his last log entry states that he is officially seceding from China, and the Chairman can go stick it where the sun don't shine.
• Mythology Gag: In reference to brahmin speaking more often than intended in the first game (possibly due to a bug):
  Ed: Swear I heard one of them brahmin speak. "Moo, I say," or somesuch.
  • What's funnier is when the Brahmin actually say that, a Shout-Out to a MUD that one of the game developers used to play.
• Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters: Relatively speaking, the Wrights are a lot more ethical than Reno's other crime families in that they actually have some concern for the well-being of New Reno itself. More importantly, one of the best endings for New Reno requires that the Wrights win the power struggle and turn the town into prosperous and peaceful place to stay.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: If you choose to optimize the power plant in Gecko, Vault City invades and enslaves all the ghouls. Bastards.
  • There's a subquest where you can convince Vault City that it's preferable to ally with Gecko and trade them medical supplies for their excess power. Unfortunately this option is inaccessible due to a bug that is only fixable with unofficial patches.
• Nonstandard Game Over: If you don't make it, you get to see your corpse still decked in your gear decomposing in the desert sun, all while a grim voice-over gives a short statement about your demise. Gee, the wastelands are unforgiving.
  • If you leave Arroyo after you turn the tribe hostile towards you, the game will end prematurely with a short vision of Hakunin telling you that Arroyo is doomed. See for yourself.
• Noob Cave: The Temple of Trials is a mandatory dungeon meant to teach players the game's basics.
• Not Rare Over There: Vault City has an entire floor full of water chips, the object that half the first game is spent trying to obtain. One NPC will tell you that the water chips were supposed to go to Vault 13, but there was a clerical error and the shipment of water chips was switched with a GECK (meaning this one mistake caused the plot of both games).
• Notice This: While not particularly obvious, there are two functioning computers in the lower levels of Vault 15 and they flicker with blue lights. One of them reveals a spy in the NCR, while the other contains the location of Vault 13.
• NPC Amnesia: Lampshaded. If you fail to convince the guard the first time and try again, the guard remarks that you didn't even walk behind the corner before coming back and giving another excuse.
• One-Man Army: Sort of averted with the Player Character. After maybe the fourth town, you'll almost always be tagged by 2-5 companions. Most fights waged against forces of equal training and armament are very dangerous, due to the fact that a lucky critical can quickly put you down in a single hit, and even if you win against your foes in a Curb-Stomp Battle you'll rarely find a group of more than 7-8 human(oid) enemies at a time.
• Only Smart People May Pass: To pass the Vault City citizenship exam, the Chosen One should have 9 Intellect, Perception and Luck and also don't have any visible mutations (like the sixth toe).
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. One of your companions is a ghoul doctor named Lenny, who shares his name with a super mutant in NCR. There is also a man nicknamed Lumpy, who shares his name with a ghoul you accidentally run over when you enter Broken Hills.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Downplayed. On your first visit to Broken Hills with the Highwayman, you will run over a ghoul named Lumpy, who screams at you to get your car off of him. Justified because while he's still clearly in pain, he tells you that he's been through worse and he actually leaves the city when you're done talking to him.
• Oppressive Immigration Enforcement: Skeev, assistant custom official in Vault City, is a corrupt official selling false citizenship papers and enslaving the mentally challenged to sell them to the city. The rest of Vault City's immigration policies and enforcement isn't much better, with the city levelling huge fees from all foreign traders and being involved in slave trade. Any "Outsiders" caught within the city after curfew are imprisoned, and whilst they are permitted to live in the Court Yard (outside the city proper) it comes with a significant regular charge with them being deported for any late payments. Likewise the law is noticeably harsher upon outsiders than regular citizens, with even minor offenses netting imprisonment or even enslavement.
• Out with a Bang: If you have sex with T-Ray several times in a row as a female Chosen One, his head will literally explode.
• Outlaw Town: The Den. Drug trade and slave trade are the only visible business here, and the local Slaver's Guild is the only organization which comes as close as possible to the central authority in the town, as well as the center of slave trade all around New California.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: The game tracks your kills by category, including the category of Big Bad Boss, which tracks the count of "genetically-engineered total homicidal maniac cyborg bodyguards you have wasted".
• Playable Epilogue: Not much changes after the ending, except for some characters congratulating you on defeating the Enclave. And you can get the Fallout 2 Hintbook from Father Tully. It's not that bad, by that point in the game you have to go to Navarro anyway and Dr. Schreber's pretty easy to kill, and you don't have to worry about any of the guards as the room is soundproofed.
  • One obscure post-game bonus you can get is "grav plates" for your car, which increases traveling speed and drastically reduces fuel consumption. To gain it, you have to have your car stolen in New Reno only after completing the main storyline. Of course, by that point you won't have much use for such an upgrade...
• Point of No Return: You can't return to the mainland once you travel to the Enclave base until you finish it and complete the game.
• Press X to Die: The nuke in the Enclave base will kill you if you fiddle with it with a low Science skill.
  Chosen One: Mother of Go—
• Punch-Clock Villain: Most Enclave soldiers seem to regard their duties as a job and nothing more. The personnel at Navarro base seem to be pretty ordinary people no different from average soldiers for the most part, complete with idle gossip and romance amongst the personnel. Then again, it doesn't seem to bother them too much if their job sometimes involves gunning down unarmed peasants with miniguns. For example, directly after Frank Horrigan brutally murders a member of the Brotherhood of Steel, he casually asks his soldiers if they are up for lunch.
• Punch-Packing Pistol:
  • The .223 pistol^note Which is a cut-down and heavily modified rifle makes a return and is made even more powerful than it was in original Fallout, by the virtue of .223 FMJ ammo being given an armour-piercing modifier. Combined with the "Weapon Penetrate" item perk, it cause the pistol to virtually ignore any armour the unfortunate target is wearing. And unlike the first game, this time around this isn't an unique weapon anymore and it can be easily bought or accquired from slain criminals roaming southern edges of the map.
  • Gauss Pistol is another example, and just like the .223, a justified one, due to being, well, a Gauss gun. While it pales in comparison with a full-sized rifle build using the same technology, it's still the most powerful pistol in the game, that comes with insane range of 50 tiles, "Weapon Accurate" item perk (adding flat +20 to hit chance) and, if this wasn't enough, has lower AP cost of firing when compared with majority of other handguns. As such, it's one of the most common weapons carried by Enclave patrol troopers.
• Rat King: "Keeng Ra'at" has an army of rats to do his bidding.
• Really Gets Around: The game allows the player to go this route (although it is generally easier with a female character, as Most Writers Are Male, and there is only handful of homosexual men in the game, but not vice versa) and awards the player a reputation based on it (regardless of sex): Gigolo. Oddly, you only have to sleep with one person to do it. However, if you sleep with 10 or more people, you get another one, Sexpert, which effectively gives you the benefit of a sex-related perk (Kama Sutra Master) for free.
  Gigolo: Let's be honest: You sleep with anything that walks on two legs. Sometimes, you're not even that discriminating.
• Reckless Gun Usage: One of the ways to assassinate Orville Wright is to give one of his kids a loaded gun and tell them "Why don't you wave this in your daddy's face and pull the trigger?"
• Recurring Boss: The cut (and restored in the Restoration mod) Kaga is one. An exile from Arroyo who claims that he was supposed to be The Chosen One, he was supposed to attack the player soon after they leave Arroyo, and then multiple times throughout the game with increasingly better weapons and party members. He has an obscene amount of HP, and always runs away after taking enough damage.
• Red Herring: In the beginning you receive two quests from Elder: Find Vault 13 and find merchant Vic, who may know where to find Vault 13. When you'll find Vic, he will direct you to his friend Ed, but Ed won't give you anything except revealing most of the cities and this story goes absolutely nowhere. It's not supposed to be a red herring, but the few clues you're given are very obscure.
• Red Shirts: One random encounter has you stumbling across a crashed shuttle from the U.S.S. Torres. There are actual red shirts scattered around the crash site. You can find a phaser and a few hypo needles among them. The Federation Crash site is even marked on the map.
• The Remnant
  • 80 years after the Master's death in the first game, you can still run into small units from the Master's mutant army as random encounters. Stray floaters and centaurs also litter the land around the old military base.
  • The Enclave is a remnant of the éminence grise of the pre-war US Government.
• Rock Beats Laser: Melee build is perfectly viable throughout entire game. Early on, Sharpened Spear is by far the most powerful weapon, with which pistols of that stage can't really compete, despite having the advantage of range. Then there is the mighty Louisville Slugger, which puts to shame most of mid-tier weapons.
• Rule of Cool and Rule of Fun: Follows both of them. At the same time.
• Running Gag: 9 times out of 10 asking if someone knows where you can find a G.E.C.K. will have them ask if you mean Gecko, either the town or the animal depending on where you are. The Chosen One starts getting fed up with the confusion by the time you get to NCR, and it gets lampshaded by Gruther in Vault 13.
• Save Scumming:
  • Like the first game, you can save at the beginning of your turn in combat. This means that you can, if you'd like, take on enemies that are really beyond what you should be able to fight by carefully saving and loading until you get favorable results each round. For example, a character with a weak Unarmed build can still become a boxing champion by making a Groin Attack until you get a crit result that knocks your opponent unconscious.
  • There are two ways of levelling up your followers: either you simply gain levels yourself and hope for the best for them, or save right before it happens, gain a level and keep reloading until maximum number of your followers gained a level, too.
• Scarecrow Solution: The Ghost Farm.
• Schmuck Bait: Go ahead, tell Orville Wright that you dug up his son's grave. You might get some funny dialogue and a small increase in one of your skills.
• Science Fiction Kitchen Sink
• Screw Destiny: At one point, a pre-war supercomputer with the ability to predict the future based on available data to the point of being omniscient tells you that the chances of you succeeding in your mission are around 5%.
• Sex God: Via the "Karma-Sutra Master" perk. Given that there is one occasion where your "score" for sex has an effect, and only if Dump Stated physical attributes and Charisma (an extremely unorthodox method of play), which prevent you from qualifying for it anyways, it's a Useless Item.
• Sexual Extortion: You can convince Amanda in the Vault City courtyard to sleep with you in exchange for rescuing her husband.
• Shades of Conflict: Has Black VS. White, Grey VS. Grey, and Black VS. Black depending on the location.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The "Typhon's Treasure" sidequest in Broken Hills, where an elderly ghoul promises to tell the player the location of a huge stash of money he has hidden if he runs some fetch quests for him. After getting him his stuff, getting told only a vague area where it could be since he'd forgotten the exact location, finding it, losing it down a well and hiring someone to retrieve it in exchange for 50% of the spoils, the treasure turns out to be...a huge stash of bottlecaps, the currency from Fallout that is now completely worthless.
• Shining City:
  • Vault City is built up to be this perfect metropolis in the apocalyptic wasteland, but it's actually a totalitarian Crapsaccharine World where outsiders live in a shantytown and often end up being pressed into slave labor.
  • The NCR is a straighter example that, while much humbler in its appearance, offers a genuinely decent place to live.
• Shotgun Wedding: Sleep with one of Grisham's children, and, unless you pass a Speech check, you will be forced to go through one of these if you don't want the whole town of Modoc trying to kill you on sight. Thankfully there is no penalty for causing your spouse harm, so feel free to get her/him killed, pimped out for spare change, sold to slavery or divorce her/him by paying Father Tully with an alcoholic beverage. You can also suck your spouse's brains out. No, not like that. For extra cruelty, you can tell your former father-in-law about the death of his child, which will give him a fatal heart attack.
• Shout-Out: See Fallout
• Shown Their Work: The "New" in the New California Republic acknowledges the short lived original California Republic.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Being involved in slave-catching raids not only lowers your karma but gives you a special perk of infamy, with which many NPCs will refuse to deal with you. The other crimes that give you this measure of infamy are child killing or destroying entire settlements.
  • Vault City however doesn't have "slaves", no, it has "Servants". Servants who are allocated to their new jobs to work for a long, long time.
• Solid Gold Poop: Jet, the highly addictive drug (and for the player, a potentially useful combat enhancer) that the Mordino family makes most of its fortune selling. It's made from the fumes of Brahmin feces. Specifically, feces produced after the Brahmin ingested a pre-war protein extract that was prone to turning into a powerful hallucinogen with the smallest amount of bacterial contamination.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: If one follows the main quest, the competence, health and equipment of enemies encountered on the way will gradually keep increasing, always having a slight edge over the player character. If you decide to deviate from the main quest and just roam freely, expect hitting a Beef Gate rather quickly.
• Suddenly Fluent in Gibberish: A variant. In the first town you reach after leaving home, you encounter a mentally stunted man who with great difficulty tells you to help safeguard some livestock. If your character has a very low Intelligence score, you will be able to converse with him in very erudite grunting (the translation is given in parentheses), conveying fairly complex information.
• Stable Time Loop: A random special encounter allows you to time-travel and instigate the events of the first game.
• Starfish Aliens: The Wanamingos look like ones, but are actually pre-war genetically-engineered creatures.
• Stolen Good, Returned Better: Your car may be stolen in Reno, but if you find it in the chop shop, the guys who stole it will helpfully return it to you better than before.
• Suckiness Is Painful: Chosen One seems to feel physicial pain when he learns why Frog Morton chose his nickname.
• Super-Soldier: Frank Horrigan. A super mutant encased in life-sustaining power armor it takes a full team of wastelanders, his own Enclave squad turning against him, laser turrets, and a a stockpile of ammo to take him down. He still talks even when shot in half and holds out long enough to blow the base sky high and try to kill everyone in it.
• Take That!:
  • Like Ultima VII, this game features a thinly-veiled parody of Scientologists as villains. (Though not as the villains.)
  • There's also a random encounter during which you can see a group known as The Unwashed Villagers murdering a man named Grim Reaper. Grim Reaper was the username of a troll who kept spamming the Interplay Entertainment forums while Fallout 2 was being developed, mostly attacking a community known as, you guessed it, The Unwashed Villagers.
• Take That, Audience!: The environment has some pieces of trash scattered around that, if examined, yield the following description: "You have a lot of time on your hands to be looking closely at this rotten junk."
• Timed Mission: Played Straight, Averted and Subverted. The main GECK quest has no time limit unlike the first game (despite Hakunin coming to you in visions to urge you to hurry.) However, the entire game has a 13-year time limit due to technical limitations, which causes the game to abruptly end with a short cinematic when it's reached. However, you'd have likely done everything there is to do in the game in only 2-3 years, so it's very unlikely to be an issue unless the game's been expanded with unofficial mod content.
  • Stopping Modoc from attacking the Slags has to be done within 31 days. Even if you haul ass as fast as you can, you'll only have about 4 days to spare by the time you finish, unless you skipped over the main Modoc quest to get the car first... Or happened to accidentally find the right person and asked him the right question beforehand, by proving he's alive and on the run instead of being a casualty in the case. It's Karl, the unhelpful drunkard slogging the days away in Mom's Diner at The Den.
• Tin Tyrant: Frank Horrigan, effectively.
• Token Evil Teammate: Myron. Although he's a scrawny, cowardly nerd, he's also a completely amoral sociopath, a megalomaniac, and a mass murderer.
• Too Dumb to Live: If you decide to blackmail Dr. Troy in Vault City into giving you money and then ask him for medical help, he will inject Sodium Tri-Ethalene into the Chosen One, which causes almost immediate death. He even comments on this:
  Dr. Troy: It means you have less than ten seconds to live. Your stupidity is really quite staggering. Blackmail someone, then put your life in their hands? Simply amazing. Goodbye... and good riddance.
  Chosen One: Now I have to reload! This is so shitty! I'll get you during my next save game.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The intelligent deathclaws of Vault 13. Every other community in the game has something dreadfully wrong with it, but this one seems to be genuinely near-perfect, on top of being where you find the GECK. Naturally, it's the one to get totally massacred by the Enclave.
• Tragic Monster:
  • All the miners in Mariposa qualify, but Melchior the Magician is the biggest example, because you can actually follow his story. It's not required or yields any reward, but you can. He was a miner in Redding before the Enclave captured him, and he performed many magic tricks to entertain the town. When you finally find him, he's a half-crazed super-mutant who performs a final magic show, where he pulls some rather vicious "rabbits" out of a bubbling green FEV "hat".
  • Horrigan is a schizophrenic boy indoctrinated with "The American Way" his entire life to become a super soldier, then being heavily gassed by FEV in a mining accident. He becomes an unthinking monster unable to come out of his suit.
• Translation by Volume: Ethyl Wright speaks to you this way when you meet her.
  Mrs. Wright:Oh, my! You're a TRIBAL, aren't you? Your accent gave it away! (She raises her voice and starts speaking slowly.) WELL — MAY I BE THE FIRST TO WELCOME YOU TO OUR CITY!
  Chosen One: Woman, I am neither deaf nor stupid. I can understand you QUITE well without you raising your voice.
• Tutorial Failure: The Temple of Trials is often considered one of the worst game tutorials ever for a reason. To begin with, you start off with only melee weapons and you can't acquire any firearms in the dungeon, So if you don't have a melee/unarmed based character, tough luck. Even worse, the game gives you absolutely no explanation on how to use any of the various game mechanics it requires you to use throughout the dungeon. This lack of communication to the player is especially bad at the end of the dungeon when you meet a person called Cameron who orders you to fight him to complete the trial, resulting in an extremely tough hand-to-hand fight. At no point does the game tell you that you also have the option to either talk him out of the fight or use your pickpocket or lockpicking skills to open the door behind him. Even if you manage to figure this out somehow, the chances are your stats in these skills are too low for you to succeed on your first attempt, forcing you to use Save Scumming to proceed, or if you forgot to save, start the game all over again.
• Two Shots from Behind the Bar: Cassidy the bartender starts out with a double-barrel Sawed-Off Shotgun when you recruit him. The Salvator bartender also has one, despite the rest of the gang being equipped with Laser Pistols.
• Useless Useful Non-Combat Abilities: Traps^note The traps in game don't hit very hard so ignoring them is pretty easy and Outdoorsman^note Makes it less likely for you to get a bad random encounter and makes good encounters more likely. Storywise it's useless. are the biggest example. These two and the rest of the non-combat skills (and unarmed) can be trained with the massive amount of books and teachers across the wasteland so spending points into them is a waste. Though it's necessary to have a Traps skill of 76% to succesfully sabotage Bishop's safe and make his death look like an accident.
• Urban Segregation: Vault City. The courtyard is a slum town that's subjected to random raids (even when vendors have a license) and there's an outdoors jail. Vault City proper is a wonderful adobe town of 103 that rivals NCR in its splendor with the best medical skills outside of the Enclave and even then.
• The Unintelligible: The Chosen One with low intelligence,who mainly speaks in grunts.
• Unmoving Plaid: A few of the Vault Boy icons have this, most notably Smooth Talker.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • One minor sidequest in Modoc results in blowing up an outhouse and covering part the town in shit. Only the traders in the section of town you blew up and the Bed & Breakfast ever comment on this; asking that you stand downwind of them while they try to eat their meal.
  • Another example: the mysterious cowled figure in your party pulls off his robes when a fight breaks out, revealing a hideous man-eating monster. Bystanders watching the battle will not blink an eye, and will go right back to ignoring him as soon as he pulls that all-concealing bathrobe back on.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can be evil in this game, and you can choose between being a Sociopathic Hero who slaughters entire towns For the Evulz, or a Magnificent Bastard who manipulates the politics of the Wasteland and gets away with it.
  • Here are some highlights: You can pressure a young mother into having sex with you in exchange for going to save her husband from slavery; get Mayor Jo to cut off one of his fingers as the price of a deal and then completely change your mind and mock him to his face over it; turn Mr. Bishop's young son into an involuntary suicide bomber to get them both killed; give one of the young Wright kids a loaded gun which gets the kid to accidentally murder his own father; seduce Miria the hillbilly hottie and get married to her via Shotgun Wedding, and then sell her into slavery to avoid paying the quickie divorce fee in New Reno, and then come back and gloat to her old man about it and cause him to die of a heart attack; and hitting people in the groin. With a Power Fist.
• "Wanted!" Poster: If you become a Childkiller, you'll see those posters with your face around the Wasleland towns, as well as various Bounty Hunter groups that want reward for your head.
• Warrior Monk: Sulik fits this trope. He is most known for speaking as if he is a we, referring to all the spirits around him. He often gives the Chosen One advice pertaining to the current location he is, often vague and prophetic. He is also very very good with a Sledgehammer and submachine gun.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Two of the bosses in New Reno have one:
  • Mordino can be given a fatal heart attack by force-feeding him any of the more powerful drugs. Even Nuka-Cola.
  • Salvatore's respiratory problems can be exploited by stealing his oxygen tank to kill him via slow suffocation. Or you can replace his o2 tank with poison gas.
• Wham Line: "Chosen...the shadow of darkness arrived before you."
• Wham Shot: So, you finally reach Vault 13, nice and clean, open the entrance door, and then a Deathclaw appears in the front. Thankfully for you, all Deathclaws here are sentient and mostly peaceful, but it still subverts everything you expected to see in Vault 13.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Much, much more than the original Fallout.
• With This Herring: Played with. You, the chosen savior of your village, begin your quest with a vault suit, a water flask, a handful of coins, a knife, a spear, and whatever supplies you have left over from the Temple of Trials. Not exactly a hero's armaments. However, scrounging around the village reveals that's really the best they have to offer you, unless you want a couple of extra knives to sell in Klamath. The only items of real worth you can acquire optionally are healing powders (the ingredients for which are in the gecko-infested village outskirts) and an upgraded spear (which in the long run won't make much difference anyway).
• A World Half Full: Since the first game, civilization has really started to get back on its feet, and things are looking up for humanity. Your player character can help further.
• Worthless Currency: Bottle caps have been replaced by the NCR gold dollar, but there's still a quest where you find a bag of 1000 caps.
• Worthless Treasure Twist:
  • There's a quest to find Typhon's "treasure", which turns out to be a bag full of bottle caps. Granted, this would have been a big treasure in the first game and later in the Fallout timeline; but within the constraints of this game's time frame, bottle caps have been phased out as legal tender and are therefore worthless.
  • It's suggested that the GECK, or Garden of Eden Creation Kit, the game's central MacGuffin, was originally intended to be this. Most accounts claim it to be a miracle device with the ability to replicate matter—in reality, it was originally intended to be basically just a farming kit. A very advanced farming kit, one that would allow a Vault community to set up a prosperous bit of land pretty much anywhere, but still, it was going to be mostly just seeds, soil, fertilizer, and a power source. One game and a few Retcons later, and it became a complete aversion, as the GECK is now a full-blown portable World-Healing Wave.
• Would Hurt a Child: Just like in the first game, you can kill children if you feel inclined to do so. When the Enclave enters the Vault halfway through the game, they slaughter everyone inside, including a little girl named Sandy.
• Wretched Hive: The Den (which is actually referred to as such) and New Reno. Depending on your actions, they can become much better places. New Reno in particular is notable in that it already was one even before the Great War. Unlike what would become New Vegas however, no bombs fell in or around the city but the ensuing chaos plunged Reno into lawlessness, from which the local crime families quickly emerge as the dominant "law." And by the time New Vegas takes place, there are still shades of that seediness, if the comments of people from there, the song Streets of New Reno, and references to the powerful Bishop crime family under the Chosen One's bastard child are any indication.
• Yakuza: Appears as a minor, hostile faction seen in random encounters near New Reno. They wield Wakizashi and throwing knives and seem to have regressed to their Samurai origins, with a lot of their combat dialogue mentioning honor and other Bushido concepts.
• You ALL Look Familiar: Despite being a step up from the first Fallout in terms of NPC diversity, this is lampshaded relentlessly.
  Mason: You'd think there's only ten kinds of people in the world. Way I figure it, there was some big cloning accident in the past.
  
  [point the cursor at an NCR cop] Yet another guard. Somebody must breed them, since they all look alike.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Half-way through the game when you go back to Arroyo with the GECK, you discover the Enclave got there first and the bridge has been destroyed. In the ending, your tribe follows you to a new location to start a new home.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Every damn one of the Mafia leaders, if you refuse Made Man status. Of course, you can easily turn the tables on them and slaughter their entire family.
  • Because they outlived their usefulness (No more quest experience or money). Oh, the irony!
• You No Take Candle: All the Super Mutants inside the Military Base except for Melchior talk like this.

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"Duty — *cough* — Honor... Courage... Semper fi..."

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