The Fallout series has always explored a broad range of topics. Depending on the stats of your character, you could make a good character who strives to protect every settlement or go a bit crazy and make a pure evil troublemaker. No matter how you decide to play, you’re offered several choices that may test your morality, and at worse, your intelligence.

Since Bethesda Studios purchased the rights to the Fallout series from Interplay, fans have complained about some of the storylines and gameplay options. There are some details of the Fallout world that were ignored or completely changed. The developer created choices that are too easy to discover the right and wrong choices. Other times, you make the most reasonable decision to save everything and everyone, but due to the strict script, you’re often pushed into a specific direction that doesn’t make sense.

Bethesda tried their best to make the Fallout series more accessible to everyone by changing the gameplay from isometric to 3D. Unfortunately, some of the story elements and world-building fell behind. It’s understandable some changes were made from Black Isle Studios' original series, but Bethesda went too far in some cases.

Our list compiles some of the worst moments in the Fallout series that have insulted our intelligence. Just a warning: there are some significant spoilers within for the main series.

20 Masquerading As Good Guys (Maybe)

Fallout 3’s Brotherhood of Steel was critiqued for not being like their West Coast variant. Instead of hoarding technology, Elder Lyons wants his group to help the people of the Capital Wasteland. The group spends most of the time hanging out with Three Dog at the Galaxy News radio station and spreading anti-Enclave propaganda.

If the Brotherhood wanted to help, they would take a more active role by protecting settlements or replenishing food sources by rebuilding farmland. We’re led to believe that the BoS is a force of good, but they’re not doing much to help others. The Lone Wanderer has to do everything the Brotherhood will not to seem more god-like. It makes them look bad to make you look better for the sake of the story.

19 Why Didn't They Care About Anyone Else?

Fallout 4 makes your character’s role clear: you are the only survivor of Vault 111 and on a quest to find your kidnapped son. The Sole Survivor is forced into the vast Commonwealth. To raise your chances of survival, you must recruit people and factions to help you on your quest. The people inside the vault could have been the first to help you. When you do find your son, you’ll be told that they were killed on purpose. You were left alive, just in case there needed to be another specimen for Synth experimentation. There was little reason for only you to survive. The other people were exposed to the same amount of radiation as the Sole Survivor. Father’s logic behind letting only you survive makes little sense.

18 Somehow Undisturbed For Centuries

When the bombs fell over America, there were mass casualties. War never changes and innocent people will lose their lives. As you travel along the Capital Wasteland and Commonwealth, you’ll see skeletons in both open and closed areas. Of course, this is a sad sight to witness until you think about what's happening. Many of these skeletons are wearing pre-war clothing in perfect condition. The human remains are also in places which are now inhabited by survivors of the war. It makes you wonder why the survivors didn’t bury or discard these bones after moving in. If the bones were placed outside, wild dogs or some other monster would have likely devoured the remains. There’s no reason why skeletons should litter the region, except to make us feel sad.

17 Tracking The Tracks

Vehicles were a travel option in the first two Fallout games but were removed after Bethesda purchased the property. You may see remnants of roads and cars scattered across the Capital Wasteland and Commonwealth, but they’re only decorations. Even in the prologue of Fallout 4 where your family is racing to Vault 111, you must run and don’t have the option to drive.

Centuries later your travels will be restricted to going on foot. You can ride on planes and trains, but don’t have the option to drive them. Someone is racing around the dirt and grassy areas of the Commonwealth. Look closely during your travels, and you’ll see tire tracks. These tracks are only made by vehicles, but we never find out who. If these tracks were pre-war, they would have faded in 200 years' time.

16 You'll Never Be Smart Enough

Part of the roleplaying aspect of the Fallout series is setting up your stats. Unfortunately, in Fallout 4, you’re forced to use the backstory of Nate, a former Soldier, or Nora, a lawyer. Both are reasonably intelligent people, and your stats can be further increased as you play the game. Though you have a set past, you can still create a wide range of characters that specialize in different fields.

Sooner or later, you’ll meet the Institute, who are composed of brilliant Scientists. If you enter, they will question your intelligence, even though you're a genius. It's reasonable their leader inherited his genius from you. The Sole Survivor can reach Level 10 Intelligence and reach maximum star levels in Scientist and Nuclear Physicist, but the Institute scientists will never respect you.

15 Essentially Indestructible

The Pip-Boy is vital to your survival in the Fallout series. It’s a durable computer that can be worn on your wrist. It helps you in combat with VATS, can manage your weapons and medical inventory, and manages your map. In Fallout 4, you can use the Pip-Boy to remotely open any Vault door. The programming remains unexplained. There’s no information on how the Pip-Boy can survive for centuries without ever needing to be recharged or maintained. In battle, the Pip-Boy can’t be shot or destroyed off your arm. It has become the most powerful item in the Fallout series, which breaks some suspension of belief. Gamers are expected just to accept the fact that the Pip-Boy is unbreakable.

14 There's Been A Miscommunication...

When you first meet Robert Joseph MacCready in Goodneighbor, he can be hired for a small sum of caps. He will slowly begin to trust you more, especially after helping save his sick son. Like the other companions, he will give you a small token of his appreciation. McCready will give you a wooden soldier toy which was made by his late wife, Lucy. Lucy made the toy for him, believing his lie that he was a soldier after they first met. The toy can be deconstructed into crafting parts, but not for wood. Look closer at his precious memento, and you'll discover it will give you one piece of ceramic. Either a developer and writer didn't see eye-to-eye, or this was a complete oversight, but a wooden toy should not be broken down into a piece of ceramic.

13 A Place Where Everybody Knows Your Name

As the Sole Survivor, few people know about you until you begin to do good or bad things around the Commonwealth. Travis will comment on your achievements on Diamond City Radio. Of course, you have been in a vault for the past two centuries, so you aren’t familiar with the settlers, either. For most NPCs, the Sole Survivor already knows their name. There is little exploration that's needed to find a person. You already know everyone’s identity. The only people you may be forced to have a lengthy introduction with are characters that are important to specific storylines. For a person who’s been isolated for years, the Sole Survivor shouldn’t know anyone. The single exception is the Vault-Tec Representative you find in Goodneighbor who's still wearing his same outfit from the day the bombs fell.

12 A Sneaky Way To Do A Fetch Quest

In Fallout: New Vegas, Private Sexton in Camp Forlorn Hope will ask for your help in "An Ear to the Ground." He wants you to bring him back Legion ears. These body parts can be looted from the corpses of the Legion. It makes you wonder what makes Legion ears so unique. They're all the same item with no unique characteristics. There's no proof that these belonged to Legion members in the first place. The quest depends on you being an honest person. Though collecting NCR dog tags is a similar quest, these items include identifying information belonging to that person, making honesty more vital to completing the quest. The side quest is unfortunately just a fetch quests to gather thirty ears to make the camp respect you. Luckily, it's not a mandatory quest and the headaches can be avoided.

11 The Minutemen’s Unimpressive Storyline

Play any of the faction routes in Fallout 4, and you know there are almost an unlimited amount of radiant quests. These quests range from finding materials to setting up weathervanes. Research the Minutemen, and you’ll most likely read complaints about Preston Garvey always having a new settlement to save. The Railroad and Brotherhood of Steel storylines attempt to make things interesting, but the Minutemen quests have the same formula. You may think you’ll have a new mission to complete if you meet a differently dressed NPC or a settler with a different gender, but the script is always the same. Gamers long figured out that even with different looking NPCs, the Minutemen quests are the same, no matter how many times you complete them.

10 Father’s Questionable Intelligence

The Sole Survivor’s son, Shaun, is now known as Father, leader of the Institute. His intelligence has impressed all of the human residents of the scientific haven. He can even remotely keep you alive while in cryogenic sleep, but kill the other residents of Vault 111.

Shaun and his followers can accomplish remotely keeping you alive for 200 years but are unable to track down their rogue synths. It seems doubtful it's due to a lack of technology or materials. Have you seen the massive Institute with flowing water and glass stairs? With all of the technology they’ve developed to transport people to a specific location in the Commonwealth, they can’t even track down their missing property. The writers attempt to impress us with a god-like figure, but he lacks basic tracking abilities.

9 Changing The Rules Four Games In

It was determined in Fallout 1 that ghouls do not need food or water as regularly as humans. If you are unable to fix the water pump in the ghoul city of Necropolis, you will receive the bad ending for this sewer habitat. All of the residents will die from a lack of drinking water. Since these ghouls were much friendlier to the Vault Dweller than other human settlements, this can be a horrible ending.

Fallout 4 changes the lore in “Kid in a Fridge” by stating ghouls can live for centuries without food or water. A lack of water is what wiped out an entire settlement. This quest left fans confused and the dismissive reply on Twitter from Pete Hines stating "not interested in discussing how realistic things are in an alternate universe post-apocalyptic game with talking mutants and ghouls" didn't help resolve things.

8 They Really Shouldn't Have Survived This Long

In Fallout and real life, you need food and water to survive. In the Capital Wasteland, James is trying to solve the lack of drinking water with Project Purity. There are boxes and cans of food lying around, but there are no working factories that can produce more. Relying on fresh food sounds great until you realize that most of the land is brown. There’s little fertile farmland to make farms. Rivet City was experimenting with lab-grown food, but it’s not enough to feed everyone in the Wasteland. Though their West Coast variants are doing well and rebuilding their cities, the people on the East Coast are falling behind. The settlers on the East Coast should not be alive due to the lack of food in the area.

7 Is VATS All In Your Head?

When the Sole Survivor awakens from centuries of cryogenic sleep, they try to escape. Several Radroaches are blocking your escape from Vault 111. These creatures aren’t difficult to defeat, but some may get overwhelmed by the amount scattered around the hallways of the vault. You might search every room, hoping to find a Pip-Boy to access your inventory, but you don't find it until you're leaving. But, even without the wrist device, you’ll find you have access to an important battle function early: VATS. This targeting system has no way of working without the use of a Pip-Boy. It’s not a change of lore because Bethesda’s previous Fallout release, you cannot use VATS until after you receive a Pip-Boy for your 10th birthday. Unfortunately, this is just one more oversight in Fallout 4.

6 It's Hard To Believe Nobody Wanted To Fix This

The Capital Wasteland has a severe issue: there is little clean drinking water. Most of the settlers are content with drinking the dirty, irradiated water. The Lone Wanderer’s father, James, was working on a solution to this problem with his wife Catherine and Dr. Madison Li. Dr. Li refused to work on the project after Catherine died, which left James to continue on the project alone. But James didn’t have to work alone. He wasn’t the only talented scientist in the region. Though there were people who helped him travel around the Capital Wasteland, no one else offered to use their Scientific expertise to help James. James could have brought life to this project much earlier if more capable scientific minds were written into the game.

5 There Must Be An Expiration Date

Walk around any location in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and 4, and you’ll discover many unopened boxes and cans of food. Cram, Sugar Bombs, and Nuka Cola remain intact and edible, but you might face a small hit of radiation poisoning from consuming it. Processed food can last longer thanks to the chemicals companies add to food. However, there’s no in-game reason on why food should last as long as does in the Fallout universe. The settlers nor your character even face food poisoning from eating centuries-old food, and instead, they can regain health points. Food is also vital for Survival Mode, but eating stale food has few lasting consequences. The packaged food of Fallout seems more like decorations to emphasize the 1950s world setting instead of making sense.

4 Can't You Just Reach In?

There are several abandoned buildings scattered across the Capital Wasteland and the Commonwealth. You’ll be forced to enter them, sometimes repeatedly, to complete various side quests. Most of the doors are still standing firm after the bombs fell. You can use your lockpick skill to enter a room if your skills are high enough. But, some locked doors make you raise an eyebrow. Some doors are broken in half or have glass that can be easily broken. These doors still require you to lockpick them to gain access. If your skill isn't high enough, you can end up breaking the lock. Of course, you can't kick or shoot down the broken door, your only chance at accessing the treasure behind the barrier is gone.

3 Trying To Make You Doubt Your Humanity

In Fallout 3 and 4, you’ll learn that Synths could have replaced anyone around you. There are ways to distinguish Synths from humans. In the Far Harbor expansion pack, DiMA will begin to question your humanity. He will ask the Sole Survivor about their first memory. The survivor will only state memories from their time in in Vault 113. DiMA then tries to manipulate you into believing you’re a Synth.

Most gamers will immediately wonder why these questions are being asked. If you’re playing according to the set backgrounds of the Sole Survivors, you know that you’re human. You recognize the Silver Shroud from your younger days and can tell the Brotherhood of Steel doctor about how you were dared to seduce a “monstrous” looking man in college. Bethesda wants you to question your humanity, but they’d already answered it for you.

2 You'd Think He Would Have More Sympathy For This

Vault 81 is home to some friendly Vault Dwellers who accept the Sole Survivor quickly. Within your first few minutes in the Vault, you'll hear that one of the younger residents, Austin, has fallen gravely ill. After some unauthorized exploring in the Secret Vault area, he was bitten by a lab mole rat. If you have a follower with you, they can help you explore the Secret Vault for the cure. Most gamers will return the cure to the doctors quickly. MacCready, one of your followers, will dislike your action.

MacCready's disapproval is unclear and goes against his character. He has a sick son as well. Austin's cure can't be used on his son, which is why there's an additional side quest to help him find a specific antidote. MacCready should like or love your action, if he's true to character.

1 When Followers Don't Step Up

The original ending to Fallout 3 was one of the biggest insults to gamers. The Lone Wanderer and Sarah Lyons return to the site of Project Purity to turn on the water purifier. The control chamber is pulsing with radiation, and it would mean almost immediate death for humans. There could be no human sacrifices at all if Charon, a ghoul, or Fawkes, a Super Mutant are your companions. These two creatures are unaffected by radiation and can easily get the purifier working. Both will refuse to enter the chamber to press the button. Fawkes will tell you it’s your destiny to enter that chamber or send Sarah in your place. There are so many reasonable ways to save everyone and start-up Project Purity, but Bethesda wanted to force a particular path upon us.