YMMV / The Frontier

• Anvilicious: The mod's narrative takes great issue with the fact that a substantial amount of fans of the Fallout series find the Enclave cool, if not outright support them. This includes:
  • The Courier asking an Enclave trooper why they'd want to be part of a "racist, fascist paramilitary that is objectively evil" despite dialogue with Arcade Gannon in the base game suggesting the Courier has minimal knowledge of their history.
  • A loading screen bluntly saying "No, you can't join the Enclave".
  • Developers invoking contemporary politics when discussing the Enclave.
• Bile Fascination: The mod has become rather infamous for its ignorance of Fallout lore, shoddy plot and characterization, shameless indulgence in every "modern military shooter" cliche, and the behind-the-scenes antics of the developers.
• Canon Defilement:
  • The Enclave somehow still has a noticeable presence in the west despite being wiped out and any remnants being systematically hunted down by the NCR.^note Individuals like the Enclave Remnants of New Vegas were able to blend in with the population, but large organized Enclave groups survived by fleeing east to places like the Capital Wasteland, where they then also ended up getting wiped out by the time New Vegas takes place.And that's not even getting to them having a orbital space base when no human faction in the vanilla games was able to do the same after the nuclear war happened.
  • The Northern Legion has a female slavemaster, despite the fact that New Vegas makes it clear that Caesar's Legion is a misogynistic faction and would never allow women in their military ranks ^note  Caesar only makes an exception for a female Courier since she shows significant promise in helping him take over the Mojave Desert and even then she is subject to misogynistic remarks by members of the Legion and will be denied some benefits regardless of reputation.. The game tries to Hand Wave it by claiming that the Northern Legion has more "liberal views" towards mass education due to not being under direct Caesar's influence, but it's still jarring and a weird addition.
• Cliché Storm: One of the more prevalent complaints about the NCR Exiles campaign is that it often borrows set pieces and scenes from shooters such as Modern Warfare, Metal Gear, Half-Life, Spec Ops: The Line, Dead Space, and several others. In some cases the "borrowing" comes dangerously close to outright plagiarism, like a series of segments in ARCHIMEDES II which many players quickly pointed out were lifted wholesale from Wolfenstein: The New Order.
• Designated Hero: General Blackthorne is made out to be a noble and compassionate military leader, while General Lee Oliver is described as a warmonger. However, for such a "compassionate" man who "cares about his men", Blackthorne is the first to advocate for euthanising the injured soldiers outside of Helios rather than attempting to render any medical aid, will execute any soldier who tries to leave the Frontier, and sends an entire squad to rescue one captive soldier then claims he didn't care a whole lot for the soldiers in question when many of them ended up being killed in the process of that rescue mission. So he's not quite as saintly as the story wants to make him look, and as a result many players cheered when he is unceremoniously executed by Rancor.
• Designated Villain: While anyone who has played the base game will agree that General Oliver isn't a nice person by any stretch of the imagination, him refusing to release the conscripts when a major war has just started and the NCR is barely holding onto Hoover Dam following the Legion's surprise attack is quite understandable. The NCR basically went from beating the Brotherhood, to having a new foe without much time to do anything, yet Oliver is treated as a villain for not agreeing to Blackthorne's idea. The fact that the Exiles defend Blackthorne by saying he led them to the Frontier to keep them safe and he had no idea the Legion would show up and attack them feels like a Double Standard, considering the fact that Oliver also had no idea the Legion would attack them.
• Ending Fatigue: The NCR Exiles' campaign has, among other issues, a very long and drawn-out finale. First we have the shootout with Rancor in the main base, then there are two action sections with vertibirds and finally a drawn-out, two-phase fight with Rancor himself who gains a Power Armor out of nowhere and as result drags the final battle out even further than needed.
• Fandom Rivalry: Pretty much with the fans of any Fallout modding project with a focus on the Enclave, even those fans that acknowledge that the Enclave is evil. This is because of the disdain multiple devs have for Enclave fans, the manner the narrative treats even the idea of people wanting to join the Enclave in any Fallout games combined with the seeming lore-breaking way the Enclave was even handled in the story in the first place. This has gotten to the point where multiple what-if videos by a noteworthy fan of the Enclave on Youtube saw Portland totally destroyed as a Take That! to the Frontier devs.
• Memetic Mutation
  • "Why would I want to join a racist, fascist paramilitary organization that is objectively evil?" ^ExplanationOne of many ways the devs try to paint the Enclave as evil. Often held up as a shining example of the mod's writing. This is also used to make fun of what many perceived as the devs' Double Standard towards the Enclave, since they still allow the Courier to join the Legion, which also fits that description quite well.
  • The Sneedclave ^ExplanationThe name self-appropriated by a group of raiders from /v/ who dug up dirt on the devs' backgrounds after being told off for criticizing the mod for not having an Enclave option. It is a portmanteau of the words "Sneed" and "Enclave". "Sneed" comes from an old The Simpsons joke regarding the store name "Sneed's Feed And Seed (Formerly Chuck's)".
  • "You prevented Silus from being interrogated." ^ExplanationEarly on in the Legion questline, Legate Valerius lists off the accomplishments of the Courier that happened in New Vegas (regardless if you did any of the Legion specific tasks prior), but when he reaches this line sometimes he will glitch out and repeat it over and over again. For some, it is considered the Legion equivalent of "Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter."
  • Hunt Down the Frontier or Hunt Down the Mailman ^Explanation Comparisons to Hunt Down The Freeman are common, with both being highly ambitious fangames involving many people, and both being mocked for their terrible writing and liberal borrowing of scenes and plot points from other games.
• Mis-blamed: Blackthorne is commonly mocked for his anger over the Legion-NCR War in the Mojave, and defecting from the military... only to enter another meat grinder war in Oregon. However, if you actually talk to Blackthrone's troops they mention that Blackthorne only came here to get away from the war and create his own splinter faction of NCR outcasts, and had no idea that there would be a Legion presence beforehand. One member of the group even lampshades "You're not the first person to mock us for that.", when you choose the "So he took you from one pointless war... only to fight in another pointless war." dialogue option.
• Narm:
  • The game makes a few attempts at metanarrative storytelling, with characters criticizing the Courier and by extension the player for taking actions without considering the consequences of their actions à la Spec Ops: The Line. Instead, many players found the attempts comical, with the effort being considered far too blunt and on the nose to be taken seriously.
  • During the flashback about the NCR's attack on HELIOS One, General Blackthorne will approach the player and order him to put all injured NCR soldiers out of their misery, as they don't have enough resources to take care of all the wounded. It is a poignant scene, but the way Blackthorne speaks (coupled with his sighing) makes him seem either mildly annoyed or bored, instead of conflicted or sad. The fact that he orders you to keep it discreet but then the game requires you to do it in plain view of dozens of NCR soldiers, who barely even react to you killing the wounded, makes it worse.
    • Additionally, by the end of the flashback, we're treated with a shot of Gray miserably standing alone in the war-torn field, shaken from having to kill his comrades. But then it keeps going... and going... and going. Then it just stops being sad and you start wondering if the game glitched out.
    • And prior to the battle itself, the NCR troopers are sitting around and exchanging some small talk, one of whom is spouting the most cliche 'I got a girl back home' dialogue imaginable. Sure enough, you have to euthanise that same trooper, which the game plays up as a major tragedy even though he only has about a minute of presence in the story.
  • At one point, the player will have a weighty dialogue with an NCR trooper who was captured by the Legion and used as a Sex Slave. One of the player's response options is quoting a Metal Gear meme verbatim.
  • Characters in the Frontier have a tendency to address the player character as 'the Courier.' All the time. Which in itself is somewhat jarring when only a handful of characters in the base game refer to the player character by that title (if at all), but it becomes a little silly when you realise that all these characters are basically saying "mailman" in a tone of utter reverence. It gets even more ridiculous when you see that multiple different characters also refer to you as Courier Six, a name that literally only has relevance to Ulysses, with no reason given for why multiple people in the mod call you by that name.
  • After Rancor betrays the NCR by killing Blackthorne and framing you for the nuking of Sac-Town, he returns to the Frontier base and gives a speech about how the Courier was the one responsible for the nuclear launch. But when the camera switches to the perspective of the crowd, his voice is too low due to audio mixing issues, giving the unintentionally hilarious impression that he's too far away and the crowd can't hear him. Poor guy should have grabbed a megaphone or something.
  • Later in the NCR questline, you meet up with The Crusaders and catch up with the nuke you were looking for just as it begins to launch. The Crusaders' idea of destroying it is to shoot at it^note This is not in and of itself a terrible idea, since nuclear weapons require a synchronized detonation of explosives to activate their payload, so setting one off out of sequence will kill the weapon, but random firing into the casing isn't going to do it. And the squad you're with do so while standing right next to it. It ends about as well as you'd expect, with all of them being burnt alive by the nuke's exhaust as it launches into the atmosphere.
  • The fact that ARCHIMEDES II literally has a neon sign with its name written on it placed right above its hangar bay. The only way it'd be more blatant is if they had a bunch of arrows pointing toward it and another sign that says "HERE IS THE BAD GUYS' SPACE BASE!".
  • Regardless of the ending, the Courier's adventure will be described as "magnum opus" in spite of the story being seen as the weakest part of the game and treated as bad fanfiction more than anything.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • The prolonged hallucination during the NCR's campaign is meant to be a scary experience, but it overstays its welcome, lasting upwards of two hours, and a lot of it is blaming the player for people dying all around them, even though most of these deaths happened due to circumstances beyond their control.
  • In the Archimedes space station, one of the monsters in the cutscene rushes to attack you... but due to the unnecessary slow motion effects and problems with the model, it looks more like it's waddling towards you.
• Obvious Judas: There's a Legion spy in the NCR Exiles' ranks! Who could it possibly be? How about the guy with an obvious Latin name and wearing Sinister Shades, who simply cannot stop giving cryptic answers when asked about their history and motivations? The real plot twist is that nobody thought to question Tiberius Rancor before everything went to Hell.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The mod quickly came under fire for its questionable writing regarding the Fallout series lore and dialogue options which drew the ire of some devs on the development team in response to that. One dev in particular was discovered by 4chan to be a furry artist that illustrates "foalcon" (pornographic depictions of toddler versions of My Little Pony characters) leading to The Frontier being temporarily removed from the Nexus and the dev in question being let go and all of his work on the mod being removed, which included a large chunk of the item icons.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: It's generally agreed that the mod is an impressive technical achievement, seamlessly adding features like vehicles and cutscenes to an outdated engine never meant to support them, and the new worldspace adds plenty to explore with interesting side activities. The main story, though, could only be charitably called amateur fanfic-tier that, at most generous, can be enjoyed in a purely ironic way. And that's not even touching the now-infamous Squicky sidequests.
• Salvaged Story:
  • After some heavy backlash from players regarding some questionable content in the mod^note Elaborated in other entries, said content was removed in a series of post-launch patches.
  • As of December 2023, the NCR Exiles main quest (most unpopular part of the mod other than the aforementioned questionable content) has been removed entirely. Originally, they planned to redo it from scratch, but the mounting workload led to them outright scrapping it for the time being.
• The Scrappy
  • The Crusaders are considered this by some, having some of the mod's most poorly-written dialogue and the companion America, who features some of the mod's most uncomfortable sex-related writings (with her basically being designed as an underage Sex Slave in all but name). The worst part is that if you hurt America in any way besides enslavement, the Crusaders will automatically be hostile to you, with disastrously lethal consequences if done near their headquarters. Let's Player BraveSirLoin disliked them so much that he killed their leaders and left.
  • The NCR Exiles can also come off as this due to many of the questionable decisions they make during their campaign, such as sending in and losing multiple vertibirds and an entire spec-ops squad to rescue one person who has been with them for a single mission, and for failing to notice that the Legion spy in their ranks is the man constantly wearing sunglasses and using a Latin-sounding name like everyone else from the Legion.
  • General Blackthorne can be seen as this for the same reasons as the NCR Exiles listed above, in addition to also coming off as a massive hypocrite due to claiming that he cares for his men and this being his motive for leaving the NCR, yet is shown ordering the execution of his wounded soldiers in a flashback, wastes several of their lives just to rescue you, and having any of his men who try to leave his faction executed. As a result, not many players feel bad when he's killed in most of the endings, be it at your hands or Rancor's.
  • The Trochili, mentioned below in more detail, also became a great source of scorn upon release. They feel massively out of place in Fallout, the heavily fetishistic writing behind them naturally left many players uncomfortable, and they add the stereotypical snake sibilant sound on words that don't even have the letter S when they speak, which makes them downright infuriating to listen to. Doesn't help that you can't eliminate them.
• So Bad, It's Good: There quite a few players who argue that the much criticized NCR storyline is quite justifiably seen as a complete and utter trainwreck, but that it is also a spectacular and very entertaining trainwreck, due to the frequency with it veers into downright absurd territory and its overall tone-deafness in regards to the Fallout source material, yet always keeps taking itself unwaveringly serious.
• So Okay, It's Average: In comparison to the widely hated NCR story, and the awkwardly written Crusaders story, the Legion story is considered to be a generally okay story that, while not amazing, is easily the best overall story of the three major factions by comparison, and while there are Canon Defilement issues that can impact the ability to accept the premise, its noted by some for being the only story to really feel like some kind of theme or idea was being conveyed, just held back by the overall nature of the mod.
• Strawman Has a Point: As Rancor executes Blackthorne, he unfavorably compares him to the war-hungry politicians of the core NCR. The guy saying this is a two-faced traitor backstabbing every faction in the Frontier for his own goals, but considering his victim's actions throughout the campaign, it's hard to disagree with him.
• Squick:
  • On release, the Courier could pass a Speech check to make America, an emotionally vulnerable girl in her later teens at the oldest (meaning that even if she is technically of age, there's a hell of a lot of Questionable Consent at play), their slave. While the devs have stated that she wasn't meant to be a Sex Slave, many still felt the implication of sexual slavery due to the optics of the situation, and repeatedly mention it when criticizing the mod. The devs responded by removing the dialogue option in later builds.
    • America also had an uncomfortably fetishistic line about what her feet must smell like after running around in her boots with the Courier for so long. As expected, this didn't sit well with many players and the line was subsequently removed.
  • Another female character, Mae, will talk extensively with the player about how she spends most of her free time drawing porn, wants to go out to the wastelands to do drugs and have sex, and will (sarcastically) offer the player her virginity as a reward for learning that her brother is sick. Unlike America, Mae is explicitly confirmed in the text of her dialogue to be under the age of 18. ^note Though the voiced lines leave this part out, which Rimmy from Down Under Gaming theorizes was due to the team in charge of voice acting deliberately revising the line in protest and not getting noticed before implementation, which was apparently a common occurrence during development.
  • A race of strange humanoid snakes known as the Trochili live in the sewers under Portland. They all participate in a strange sex cult between humans who are "strangely attracted" to them, using them as breeders. To top it off, a potential reward for completing their series of quests is having sex with their queen, Juno. No, none of this is sarcasm or being made up — this actually happens in the mod. The discovery of this led to many denouncing the entire mod as nothing but fetish fuel.
    • It's worth noting that one of the very first submods released for The Frontier was one that allows the player to just bypass the whole section and every quest part related to it, by blowing up the sewer with a set of mininukes before the snake creatures are ever encountered. The reason why the Courier does this is only explained in the mod as them getting a sudden vague but very foreboding feeling that whatever is in the sewer simply shouldn't be allowed to exist.
  • There's a Deathclaw you could find in an unmarked cave who is described as having "lust in her eyes". What follows after is several different dialogue options where all but one lead to implications of you having sex with a Deathclaw. The backlash that came after this discovery led to the developers removing the encounter entirely.^note The encounter was broken; the actual end wasn't implemented (the player is meant to wake up with all of their limbs broken) and the encounter lacked the Wild Wasteland requirement it was supposed to have, but the backlash contributed to it being removed outright instead of being fixed.
• Take That, Scrappy!: The violent and unceremonious death of General Blackthorne in the NCR Exile ending can be seen as this by the mod's detractors, especially those who hate that overall faction, as is when you can kill him yourself in the mod's other endings.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Despite being a mod set in an Alternate History, the writer sees fit to place modern references such as one of the infamous lines from Kanye West and Lil' Pump's "I Love It" during one of the better-not-mentioned encounters with a deathclaw. While it was meant to be a Wild Wasteland event, a bug caused it to trigger regardless if you had the trait or not.

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