I am a sucker for Bethesda games' huge open-worlds, however, with great big maps comes a crapload of quests. I'll admit I'm one of THOSE players, the ones who have to do EVERYTHING, I start in the very south east of the map and work my way west until I hit the other end... and then I move up a little bit and work my back to the east. This way I can eventually find every quest and location and get the fullest gaming experience possible.

Just kidding, I get tilted from some AWFUL quest, put down the game and then never come back to it.

While the Fallout series has some pretty amazing and legendary quest lines, some of them are just... bad to put it lightly. Whether the plot behind it is just stupid, an annoying NPC requires an escort, the difficulty is ridiculous or the reward loot just plainly isn't worth the effort there are some undeniably annoying quests in the series... but then you end up doing them anyway.

This could be for a lot of different reasons, maybe you were hoping the storyline would get better, or it would add something to your experience, maybe you put up with that annoying NPC because you were praying the loot would get better. I did them because I hate leaving things unfinished.

Regardless we've collected the 20 worst quests in the Fallout series that you probably ended up doing anyway.

20 Best Left Forgotten

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Best Left Forgotten is a blemish on the otherwise amazing Far Harbor DLC for Fallout 4. It involves you essentially diving into Snyth Leader, DiMA's memories by getting into The Nucleus, a base owned by the Children of Atom and then fighting your way through a hellish automated security system in order to get to a computer that you need to hack.

While the regular hacking minigame isn't so hard, Best Left Forgotten doesn't USE the regular hacking mini-game, instead deciding to force you to complete five over complicated puzzles using the cringe worthy settlement building interface.

To make things more frustrating, this isn't ever actually explained because there's no tutorial or explanation. You just show up in this ugly VR world and are told to sort it out. You only need to complete three puzzles to clear the quest (though the extra two puzzles, while impossibly hard to drop good loot) and are rewarded with a measly 500 exp.

19 Volare!

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Volare! from Fallout New Vegas is a quest for the Boomers, a faction of former vault dwellers that are really into blowing shit up and want to restore an ancient B-29 Bomber they found so they can blow more shit up.

In Volare! you're tasked with raising the sunken plane from Lake Mead, you can even earn an optional rebreather to make swimming down to the plane easier by speaking to Jack and either knowing enough about Science! or by grabbing him a pressure cooker.

After you get your gear you have to travel your way to a map maker out near Callville Bay, swim down and attach some ballast beneath the engines then go back to Callville Bay, find a sweet spot on the pier and hit the detonator, causing the plane to shoot up from the depths. After all this incredibly boring busy work you're rewarded with some low tier gear and a kinda "Huh. Neat." feeling.

18 Bye Bye Love

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The maps in all the Fallout games are huge, which on the surface makes you excited for all the quests that will send you traipsing across the wastes to exotic locales in which you'll discover new quests.

Coming back to report the quest completed is rough though, and quests that just send you back and forth along the same route repeatedly either end up in either a boring routine of backtracking or an endless hell of fast travel loading screens.

In Bye Bye Love you start having to ferry letters between a man in love with a prostitute and the prostitute in question a few times as the finalize his lady loves plans to escape. The man then advises you get some backup cause escaping is gonna be hard... and then it isn't. You go talk to the girl, and she just escapes along with a few others, there's a fight when you get back, but it's not much of a challenge.

17 The Great Hunt

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To be honest, the first time you do The Great Hunt it can be hilarious in a maddeningly frustrating way.

One of the side quests in the Far Harbor DLC for Fallout 4, The Mariner speaks of a fearsome sea monster, responsible for the sinking of many ships and the death of untold multitudes.

The Red Death they call it. The Mariner then asks your help to track and slay the beast, to add to the hype when you're about to leave to go to the island she says she's tracked it too, Avery stops you warning you it's only a myth, and you're putting yourself in danger for no reason. Expecting a hard fight or a massive conspiracy nobody would blame you for getting your best weapons and gear.

You arrive at the island and find...

A Tiny Mirelurk with glowing red eyes. Damn thing doesn't even try to attack you.

16 Kid In A Fridge

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Escort quests are undeniably frustrating, escort quests with poor writing and awful rewards are even worse.

While wandering to the south of University Point in Fallout 4 you might hear a child calling for help nearby, an investigation will lead you to a fridge sitting amid a bunch of tires. Apparently, to escape the nuclear bombs two hundred years ago, a small child by the name of Billy hid in a fridge and ended up somehow surviving but ended up trapped in said fridge for two centuries without food, water or being able to move at all.

He asks you to take him to where his house stood before the apocalypse so he can reunite with his parents... who also somehow turn out to not be dead. Along the way, some random dude asks if he can by the kid off you because... reasons.

Either way, you only get a few caps for your trouble.

15 Come Fly With Me

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Sometimes things drag on for far too long, and you just sit there completing task after task praying that soon the quest will end and you'll get your reward.

Come Fly With Me in Fallout New Vegas starts with Manny asking if you can clear a facility of the Nightkins, a group of sentient super mutants. From there, the quest (somehow) slowly morphs into you either trying to convince them to leave or outright killing them, followed by trying to convince a human he's not actually a ghoul followed by then helping a group of ghouls leave the wasteland by way of a rocket ship.

There's a lot going on here, and it takes FOREVER to get everything done to clear the quest, and while the story isn't too awful the reward of 800 exp is abysmal.

14 Young Hearts

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In Fallout New Vegas, you seem to help a lot of people through their relationship troubles, in one young couples case that relationship trouble is being shot on sight by the Boomers.

The Boomers are extremely xenophobic and not at all interested in the Young Janet wanting to meet Jack. They will shoot her as she approaches the base to visit him unless you do a hell of a lot of running around back and forth asking people for permission for her to enter the base. Sigh. Get her the outfit she needs, so they know it's her, and convincing her boss to let her leave (with pay if you're feeling generous)

At the end of all this back tracking, you're rewarded with your choice of a pathetic SMG or 470 caps

13 Back In The Saddle

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Nobody wants to do the tutorial quests, and in Back In The Saddle's case, you can see why. Most other Fallout Tutorials are fairly interesting (Fallout 3 gave you the experience of being a child in the Vault for example).

The one in Fallout New Vegas, however, is, by comparison, boring and dull with only a starting rifle, some ammo and a pittance of money and exp granted.

It doesn't take a lot of work to do, thankfully, it just takes a while to complete and involves shooting some bottles stacked up on a low fence. Learning to crouch and then getting to test your new deadly assassination techniques on a bunch of geckos that were obviously planning to overrun the settlement... actually, they do kill someone if you're not quick on the draw.

12 Hidden Valley Computer Virus

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While not an official quest per say since it's unmarked, the Hidden Valley Computer Virus is a maddening chase of a computer virus that keeps jumping from terminal to terminal.

The loading screen when opening a terminal in Fallout may be short, but it gets repetitive very quickly, and to catch this damn virus you have to find which three terminals it's currently infecting within the database in under one minute. Upon finding one of the right terminals, you have to quickly navigate a few options to isolate it, mess up and take too long to find which ones it's gone to and you have to start the process all over again. You don't even get anything apart from access to the database once you get rid of the virus.

11 Blood Ties

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The Metro Tunnels of Fallout 3 were a nightmare to navigate. Any quest involving them likely was going to have you stuck underground for an extended period of time in the boring same-ish environments fighting the same type of enemies over and over again.

Blood Ties involved A LOT of backtracking. Also, the guy who gives you the quest sends you to three WRONG places beforehand, and it's not until you speak to a guy at one of these wrong places he recommends following the sewers. Once you somehow deduce the people you're looking for are in the Meresti service tunnel, good luck navigating all those traps. A few more times of backtracking, fighting or a speech check rewards with the print to the Shishkebab.

10 THOSE!

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In all games, fire damage sucks and Fallout 3 is no exception. Probably the most universally hated quest, THOSE! involves a small child running towards you in the wastes asking you to help his father who's trapped somewhere in the middle of these horrible fire breathing ants.

Turns out though he's dead. A bit of investigation leads you to discover the source of the ants and a trip down into a Metro locates the Doctor behind it all, you'd think that after dealing with the cause of the ants you'd be able to finish the quest but not so. Now you have to find a place for that newly orphaned kid to stay which means you have to trek across the wastes to find him a new home before finishing the quest.

9 The Nuka Cola Challenge

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Fetch quests are a cancer on gaming. Fetch quests when there's only a limited number of items in the game world and you could have already consumed enough to make the quest impossible upon getting it are even worse

The concept of Fallout 3's The Nuka Cola Challenge is simple enough, bring 30 bottles of Nuka Cola Quantum to either Sierra or Ronald. However, there's only a total of 94 bottles in the base game of Fallout 3, making them incredibly rare and hard to find across the huge map.

Each one is worth 40 caps to either person you're giving them too, and on the off chance you do manage to track down a total of 30 that you decided to give to Sierra and not Ronald, you're gifted a blueprint for Nuka Cola grenades.

8 Mixed Signals

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The Dead Money DLC for Fallout New Vegas contains in it a quest titled Mixed Signals which is long, complex, involves hunting down some hard to find radio speakers and sprinting through a poison cloud that just drains a good portion of your hit points.

The quest only gets more annoying as well if you don't have a particularly high Repair, Science, and Lockpick skills to quickly deal with a few of the challenges as well as open up alternate routes.

It's also an escort quest, and the person you're escorting through this mess doesn't even have any funny dialogue since they're mute! Plus unless you force her she won't go through the easiest path to the end of the damn quest. JUST GET IN THE ELEVATOR CHRISTINE.

7 Order Up!

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While Order Up from Fallout 4 may be incredibly short, it's also absolutely pointless as you can complete the quest without going anywhere.

If you happen to wander past Drumlin Diner, you'll overhear a woman arguing with a man, turns out the woman (Trudy) is annoyed because the man (Wolfgang) got his son hooked on jet and wants you to kill him. Walk five feet away from the diner, and there's Wolfgang, he explains that yes he intentionally turned the kid into an addict but that's not his problem, and the kid has to pay up, like Trudy he then tries to hire you to help him get his money.

Either way, all you end up doing is convincing her to pay, or shooting two people (on either side) earning a pathetic amount of caps and unlocking one or both of them as a piss-poor merchant at the diner.

6 Devil's Due

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Much like The Red Death, The Devil's Due in Fallout 4 is a case of a hell of a lot of hype done by the NPC's only to result in massive disappointment. Hearing that something weird is going on at the Museum of Witchcraft may excite a player into going and checking out the possibility of some magic craziness.

When you get there to the horror vibe is HUGE tight rooms corpses strewn everywhere, audio logs of some horrible supernatural monster stalking innocents. Hell every now and then bodies even mysteriously fall from holes in the ceiling... when you finally confront this mysterious obviously satanic beast you discover...

It's an ordinary Deathclaw. While frightening it's hardly what all the hype had teased, especially if by this point you'd already encountered one or two of the creatures.

5 Any Quest Given By Preston

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The Radiant Minutemen quests that Preston Garvey gives in Fallout 4 you are so bad and annoying that they've become a meme. I personally dread approaching him just to hear "Another Settlement Needs Our Help" and then my minimap is updated with a marker I desperately did not want there.

The quests are always awful and boring, the rewards terribad and not worth the time and effort that could be spent doing literally anything else.

Seriously Preston leave me the heck alone! I'm just trying to drop some death claw parts off in my storage locker, I don't need to know about some random awful settlement that's barely going to pay me anything for saving their butts.

4 Trouble On The Homefront

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Vault 101 from Fallout 3 are a bunch of ungrateful sods. In the quest Trouble On The Homefront, where you pick up a distress signal from the Vault you escaped from, you're tasked with either closing up the Vault permanently or opening it up so the dwellers can interact with the outside world.

After running a lot of either peace talks or shooting up the faction in Vault 101, you like least you can either have them close up the doors for good, exiling you forever for your troubles or you can convince them to accept the world with open arms and smiles and... get banished for your troubles.

That's right, even if you side with your childhood friend and convince her dad that opening up is the right thing to do, and she becomes Overseer, she exiles you.

Rude.

3 Hard Luck Blues

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Moral choice is a huge part of the Fallout series and in New Vegas, one particular quest does offer a hard choice: get rid of some radiation poisoning crops at the cost of the lives of trapped innocents, or save the trapped innocents and be forever unable to fix the crop issue.

To even get this choice though, you have to crawl through an extremely irradiated Vault in the quest line Hard Luck Blues, fighting off ghouls thirsty for your blood and chugging rad-away after rad-away. Eventually, you'll get to the terminal you need to and have to make your choice, either way, though for the amount of effort you put in the reward is garbage, 100 exp, and some fame if you doom the trapped people or 150 exp and some kind words later if you save them.

2 Sanctuary

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Building settlements in Fallout 4 can be fun... but it requires so much mindless busy work that the appeal for me is nearly lost, and it's very apparent in the quest Sanctuary

Why the hell do I have to do everything round here? Can't any of you lazy bastards build your own beds? It's not like it's difficult just grab some damn metal and boom, bed. I can't be doing everything I'm supposed to be looking for my son!

I'm not even fully certain what kinda benefit building up settlements really gives, a fancier place to store the crap I don't want to take with me?

Also as a side note, every time Sturges says "Sanctuary is really coming together. I can't take all the credit" I wanna strangle him. YOU DO NOTHING. NOTHING.

1 This Random Siren In The Middle Of Nowhere

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I am a foolish, foolish man. This isn't a quest, it's more... a sudden shocking amount of jackassery caused by your own hands as the butterfly of chaos flaps its wings and hurls you off a cliff.

There exists a raider camp nestled in the shadow of a tower out near the Lyn Woods of Fallout 4, curious as to what goodies may lie at the top of such a tower I snuck in and scaled it. At the top I found a button, curious and miffed there was no loot in the tower I pushed it.

And I unleashed Hell itself as the button was apparently attached to an air raid siren that attracted two high-level death claws into the raider camp, resulting in a four way deathmatch between me, the raiders, and both death claws.

When the dust settled, I was out of ammo and barely alive, and that damn tower still had no treasure.