Fallout 2 Early Gun

• Fallout 2 Weapons

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Fallout 2: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game is a turn-based role-playing open world video game developed by Black Isle Studios and published by Interplay Productions in September 1998. While featuring a considerably larger game world and a far more extensive storyline, it largely uses similar graphics and game mechanics to those of Fallout. An updated version of my 'Top 25 Fallout 2 weapons', contains two tops: 1. The ten weapons in Fallout 2 that I think are the best ones (for arsekickin'!) 2. My ten personal favorites Music: Iron.

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 a lot of content was Dummied Out and/or unfinished for various reasons (thought the vast majority is simply time constraints, the game came out a year after the original after all), including numerous locations, quests, and NPCs. There exists a fan-created mod known as the Fallout 2 Restoration Project (or F2RP), which adds most of this content back to the game and fills in the blanks based on the game's design documents and Word of God, making it highly faithful to the developers' original intent. 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 changes a handful of game mechanics based on personal decision of the modder and it's a very touchy subject within the fandom.

The game was initially going recieve 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.

We here at Vault CityTV Tropeslove making lists:

• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: In the early game, a player with low charisma 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 afterFallout 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.
  • The '9mm Mauser' is based off the Mauser C96, the '.44 Magnum Revolver' is a Smith & Wesson Model 29, the 'Desert Eagle .44' is n IMI/Magnum Research Desert Eagle Mark VII.
  • The 'Tommy Gun' is an Thompson M1928, the 'H&K P90c' is an FN P90.
  • 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 M3A1 'Grease gun,' H&K G11, FN FAL, Enfield XL70E3, H&K CAWS, and Pancor Jackhammer all use their real names. 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!'
• 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.
• An Aesop: A recurring aesop throughout the game is the importance of peaceful coexistence and mutual cooperation. Each of the rivaling towns have something the other side wants or needs, and getting them to cooperate with each other will result in a happier ending for both sides.
• 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.
• Anything That Moves: 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.
  • On the flip side there is the Virgin of the Wastes reputation which was cut from the final game. It is put back in the Restoration Project.
    Virgin of the Wastes: You really need to get out more. Your sexual exploits have been.. well, two dimensional.
• Apocalyptic Log: Found in the Mariposa Military Base.
• 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 H&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.
• Badass Boast:
  You'be 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 travel in small squads, have high health, amazing accuracy, are almost completely invincible against bullets and lasers due to their power armor, and carry the greatest weapons in the game such as Plasma Rifles and Gauss Rifles. Each and every one of the soldiers is capable of easily curb stomping entire groups of raiders by themselves, and they will utterly destroy you if you try to attack them at any time in the game except at the very end when you have several companions and almost as good weapons and armor as them (or if you did the quests in Navarro, their exact same equipment).
  • To a lesser degree, the combat armor wearing, assault rifle wielding NCR Rangers. Luckily, these guys are friendly (unless you're a slaver). Retconned into Elite Mooks in Fallout: New Vegas.
• Badass Family: The intelligent Deathclaws place emphasis on 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!: Louisville Slugger, an unique weapon to be 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 of damage.
• 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 not too hard to assume he's got ulterior plans, and moral players might drop the quest, or worse turn him in to the authorities. He's planning to develop an addiction-breaking cure, 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: Aside from 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), Bozar is the best burst weapon cost and damage wise. And probably the only one you don't want to rise your skills for, as the less skill you got, the bigger the spread, ending with mowing down entire gangs or squads in single burst. Just don't have anyone friendly standing between you and the target..
  • 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 graphics, sound and function of a minigun. It also had decent damage per shot and used naturally armor piercing ammo, so it still worked on armored targets, unlike some of the burst fire guns. In it's 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 supermutants and humans, the town will be depleted of uranium, its only source of existence, sooner or later and Broken Hills will be eventually fully abandoned.
• 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 , 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 cancells the reference.
• Bonus Dungeon: Part of the many bits of Dummied Out 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 Maxx wanna-be demeanor, 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.
  • 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 theEuropean 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 setence 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.
• 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 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. You WILL encounter them later in a special encounter, and unless you're high level by that point, or unless you have a high enough Speech skill, it's not going to be pretty.
• 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.
• 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 practiced in it.
• 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 everyonecritically 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 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.
• Darker and Edgier / Lighter and Softer: Somehow manages to be both compared to Fallout 1. On one hand, Fallout 2 has a ton of humor, way more than Fallout 1, and the mood is overall much more lighthearted. However, one the other hand, the themes are much darker, rape, prostitution, drug overdoses and slavery are regular occurrences in many towns, and the villains are a pure evil instead of Anti Villains like The Master and his army.
• 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.
• 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.
• Developers' 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 compaion'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 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 accquired 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 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.
  • To the extent that 'Cannibal' Johnson, who witnessed the ear-blistering rant, still has vivid memories of it over 40 years later.
• Dummied Out: Because Black Isle Studios ran short of development time, quite a few places and quests were only halfway implemented or completely left out of the game, which leaves a couple of plot threads, such as finding Sulik's sister and exposing the cattle rustlers in Klamath, hanging in the wind. Fan-made patches, such as the Restoration Project (still updates regularly), seek to restore them to a playable state. Still, there are many things even the Restoration Project has yet to explain, such as the 'Brotherhood' area in the Oil Rig.
• Early Game Hell: 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. 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.
• 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.andNukaCola vending machines.
• Evil Counterpart: Kaga in the Restoration Project.
• Evil vs. 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.
• Featureless Protagonist: The game has some fun with the Vault Dweller's status as one. NCR has a monument for the Vault Dweller, but the plaque attached to it can't decide if s/he was a man or woman. The manual also contains a journal written by the Vault Dweller after the events of the first game..but still gives no clue as to his/her canonical gender, even to the point that s/he eventually settles down with a spouse of indeterminable gender with a Gender-Blender Name.
  • Strangely underappreciated by the Ron Perlman intro monologue, which could, with some verbal finangling, have avoided referring to the Vault Dweller as male or female, but just goes full lazy and calls 'him' he. Possibly the only time in the game the character is explicitly sexed; later in the game, people remembering Fallout 1 just call 'him' the Vault Dweller, sans pronoun.
• 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.
• Five-Man Band: Your party can be one with sufficiently high Charisma.
  • The Hero: The main character, of course.
  • The Lancer: Vic or Cassidy.
  • The Smart Guy: Lenny, Myron, even Goris.
  • The Big Guy: Sulik or Marcus.
  • The Chick: Miria or Davin.
  • The Sixth Ranger: Any of the late-game party members (Goris, Skynet).
  • Team Pet: Dogmeat (Series Mascot of course), K-9, Robodog, and Pariah Dog (though the latter you don't want to get)
• Forced Tutorial: The Temple of Trials.
• 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 Fallout, 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.
• 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 a intimate knowledge of the whole Core Region's geography.
  • Also, the Chosen One himself, because he uses 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 addiction (all except Jet) is to go cold turkey for a week, although you get heavy stats penalties for it until cured.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 maybe 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).
• 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 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.
• 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.
• 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 Fransisco that was still habitable was Chinatown, which had been turned into an internment camp. The irony did not go unnoticed.
• 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.
• 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.
  Leslie Anne Bishop: (Blinks.) Who's there?
  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 Jinxedtrait by itself creates a sadist game via spectacular failures for everybody. Having 10 luck means 'everybody' (usually) means 'everyone who isn't 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.
• 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.
• 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: Try pressing '3' next time you zone into the Den. (This only works in the vanilla game)
• 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.
• 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. Talk about pulling a rabbit from your hat.
• 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.
• Not Rare Over There: Vault City has an entire apartment 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.
• Obvious Beta: The numbers of bugs and things left half-finished are quite high, even with the official patches installed. Luckily, there are a lot of unofficial patches as well. Sadly, these patches, due to the larger game world, are more likely to trigger the above Game-Breaking Bug.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Rat King: 'Keeng Ra'at' has an army of rats to do his bidding.
• 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 Dummied Out (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.
• 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.
• 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%.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: So, so much, at least when it comes to combat. Even the simplest guns and armor are much harder to get in this game than in Fallout 1, and your shooting accuracy will be much lower than what you would have in the previous game with exactly the same stats.
  • Example: In Fallout 1, you were given a 10mm pistol right when you left the vault. In this game, you can't get one until the third town, unless you got really lucky with a random merchant inventory and a had a lot of money. (Although you can find one on a corpse during a side quest in the first town.) The Temple of Trials also skips over the easily killed rats from the beginning of the last game and instead throws giant ants and lesser scorpions at you instead, along with being forced into an unarmed duel at the end of the dungeon (woe be unto you if your character isn't good at unarmed combat right out of the gate, nor is geared towards stealth and theft or diplomacy.)
    • In another sidequest in the first real town, you will encounter a locked door, and a damaged generator. If you can fix the generator, and unlock the door.. You will find a security robot with a semi auto missile launcher. If you survive, there is a Bozar, Plasma pistol, Laser pistol, and combat armor MK 2. Sending you through a sequence of hell fit for this trope, and thoroughly averting it for most of the game.^note
  • Also, economically. Slain enemies almost never drop their armor anymore, which you could sell for thousands back in Fallout 1.
  • If the Restoration Project mod is any indication, the beginning was meant to be even harder, with a higher encounter rate and a Recurring Boss that starts attacking you as soon as you leave Arroyo.
• 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 White VS. Black, 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. Subverted in that it's a totalitarian Crapsaccharine World where outisders live in a shanty town and can be made into slave labor. NCR is a somewhat straighter example, but also much humbler in its appearance.
• 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. 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.
  • You can also
• 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, destroying entire settlements and robbing graves.
  • Vault City however doesn't have 'slaves', no, it has 'Servants'. Servants who are allocated to their new jobs to work for the rest of their lives.
• 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: Played straight. In the first few hours in and around Arroyo, the worst you come across is giant rats and giant ants. Klamath steps it up a bit with its quests and random encounters having you fight radscorpions and giant geckos, but still not too challenging and mere wild animals. You might get an easily avoidable random encounter with muggers armed with melee weapons, but that's it. The next town, the Den, will probably have you fighting your first human enemies on the way there, in the form of raiders with pistols. Upon arriving you are introduced to the first major antagonist group, Metzger's slavers, and will see your first human vs. human battle if you haven't already with nearly everyone having pistols or SM Gs. It's made clear that Metzger is small time compared to the ruling families of New Reno, the next town, who you may come into conflict with as part of various quests; piss off the Salvatores in New Reno and your ass will get lasered. Redding is light and friendly, but the Sierra Army Depot nearby has various battle robots far above anything you've fought at that point. NCR and Vault City both have well-armed guards in combat armor, and Broken Hills has the same plus Super Mutants, but like Redding, they're not villainous. Nearby, the raider hideout and Vault 15 are full of raiders in leather armor and boasting pistols and hunting rifles but three of them has combat armor and assault rifles, overall similar armament and size to most of the single families of New Reno, albeit not as much 'soft power' over the region. Marisopa, the next big collection of enemies, is where things get truly high-level as a small army of newly-created Super Mutants is present and heavily armed with rocket launchers, miniguns, flamethrowers, and so on. San Francisco is another friendly settlement but nearby Navarro, the Enclave's base on the mainland, will see your first introduction to the Omnicidal Maniac main antagonists with their generic troopers (who you can encounter randomly while traveling near the base) all boasting heavy weapons (usually energy weapons), very high stats, and Powered Armor that is effectively the Armor of Invincibility. Finally, when you get into the Oil Rig, you meet the Big Bad behind the whole mess and face not only larger numbers of the aforementioned super Elite Mooks, but also their robotic defenses and The Dragon, who is basically a walking tank. At 15 feet tall and with 999 hit points he would be absurdly dangerous even if he wasn'textremely fast and wasn't clad in his own Armor of Invincibility that laughs off anything short of anti-tank weaponry.. to say nothing of his BFG that deals more damage per shot than the plasma cannon you use and fires automatically.
• 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.
• 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 thevillains.)
  • 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 causality 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.
• Useless Useful Non-Combat Abilities: Traps^note and Outdoorsman^note 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.
• 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.
• '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.
• 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.

In this Fallout 76 Weapons guide, we are going to list down a few Rare Weapons and where you can find them. The locations we have mentioned below are static spawn location i.e. every time you will go to these locations you will find something, and most of the time, it will be the weapon we have listed. Don't panic if you don't find anything because there might be a possibility that somebody else has looted the location. In this case, what you can do visit the place after 25-30 minutes, a couple of times and you will find the loot you are looking for. This 25-30 minute is the approximate time for the loot to reset and respawn.

Fallout 76 Rare Weapon Locations

Out of all the Fallout 76 Rare Weapons listed below, just a couple of them are of higher levels, and rest of them are good for a character level between 10 to early 30.

Where To Find Rare Weapon Locations in Fallout 76

NOTE: We have been told that Bethesda has patched the server hopping trick. This allowed players to visit a good loot spawn location as many time as possible by switching servers and continue to farm the loot.

1: 50 Caliber Machine Gun

To make use of 50 Caliber Machine Gun, the player character must be at least Level 25. There are three locations in Fallout 76 where you can find 50 Caliber Machine Gun, and we have listed them below. This weapon is also available as a random drop from Scorchbeasts.

• Location 1: At Hemlock Holes. It will be in the back of a destroyed truck. South of the white warehouse, near a downed Vertibird.
• Location 2: You will also find it in a destroyed truck on the road south of Clarksburg.
• Location 3: At Abandoned Bog Town. It will be in the back of a truck on the main road in town.

50 Caliber Machine Gun Core Stats

• Damage: 20
• Fire Rate: 91
• Range: 204
• Accuracy: 47
• Weight: 18
• Value: 111

2: Black Powder Items (Pistol/Rifle)

• Location 1: At the Philippi Battlefield Cemetery. You will find a total of 4 pistols spawn at the Museum. Look for them inside display cases. If you are at a high enough level then there is a possibility that you will get Black Powder Rifle.
• Location 2: One pistol spawns at the North West of Helvetia.
• Location 3: You can also get Black Powder Pistol as Vertibot Airdrops.

Black Powder Pistols Core Stats

• Damage: 115
• Fire Rate: 2
• Range: 204
• Accuracy: 67
• Weight: 3
• Value: 63

3: 10 MM Pistol (SMG)

This is available at Mama Dolce's Food Processing, but you will have to access a secret area, so we have provided a video guide for it below. You character level needs to be at Level 10.

4: Guitar Sword

One of the best melee weapons in Fallout 76, and it can be found at the following three locations. Your character level needs to be at Level 15.

• Location 1: Outside Pleasant Valley Ski Resort.
• Location 2: At an unmarked house on top of the mountain, at the east of Vault 76, and south of the north Kanawha lookout.
• Location 3: At Sons of Dane Compound. It will be in the main building on the stage.

Fallout 2 Weapons

Guitar Sword Stats

• Damage: 45
• Speed: Medium
• Weight: 3
• Value: 45

You can also get Guitar Sword as a reward for completing the quest Signal Strength. In addition to this, Guitar Sword is also sold by a vendor at Pleasant Valley Station.

5: Crossbow

At the following three locations you will find a Crossbow. Your character needs to be at Level 15.

• Location 1: In the outside building at Belching Bettey, near Bernie.
• Location 2: The Plan: On a table just outside a southwestern cabin of Pioneer Scout camp with a crossbow shooting range.
• A crossbow can be found in the outside building at Belching Betty, near Bernie.
• Location 3: Outside of the Palace of the Winding Path. Check out the video guide (from All Things Fallout) below.

Crossbow Stats

• Damage: 100
• Fire Rate: 4
• Range: 186
• Accuracy: 70
• Weight: 8.4

6: Missile Launcher

• Location: At the Top of the World. You will find Missile Launcher off the bodies of Mole Miner Foremen.
• Missile Launcher Core Stats
• Damage: 124
• Fire Rate: 2
• Range: 204
• Accuracy: 69
• Weight: 24

7: Laser Pistol

• Location: At Morgantown Airport Hangar with the crafting benches downstairs. Go upstairs and the Laser Pistol will be on top of a chest of drawers at the back.

8: Minigun

You will find Minigun at the following locations in Fallout 76. Your character needs to be at Level 35.

• Location 1: At the end of the tallest tower at Poseidon power plant.
• Location 2: Outside area around Atlas Observatory
• Location 3: At Camp Venture - Behind a level 3 lockpicking door in the armory.
• Location 4: At Top of the World - On the mezzanine level at one of the shops.

Minigun Stats

• Damage 11
• Fire Rate: 273
• Range: 204
• Accuracy: 47
• Weight: 21.6

9: Alien Blaster

Download days gone for pc. We have a dedicated guide on where to Find the Alien Blaster in Fallout 76.

Did you know the location of any other Rare Weapons in Fallout 76? Tell us in the comment section below, and we will update this guide with it.