Fallout 2 Story Explained: Plot and Endings

Fallout 2 came out in 1998, made by Black Isle Studios. It's set in 2241 in northern California, 80 years after the first game. The Vault Dweller's grandchild goes looking for a machine to save a starving village and finds the last remnant of the pre-war American government planning to finish what the bombs started. This page covers the whole plot and the ending, so it has full spoilers. (Fallout 2)

Before the story begins#

After being exiled from Vault 13 at the end of Fallout, the Vault Dweller travelled north with a few companions and founded a tribal village called Arroyo. The Vault Dweller had a child, who became the village elder, and later left Arroyo, leaving behind a set of memoirs. (Fallout; Fallout 2)

The wider world had changed a lot. Shady Sands had grown into the New California Republic, a real government spreading north under President Tandi, the girl the Vault Dweller once rescued from raiders. Vault City, built around Vault 8, was rich and closed to outsiders. New Reno was a city of crime families selling a new drug called jet. And far off the coast, the Enclave, descended from the pre-war US government, had been waiting out the decades with the best technology on the continent. (Fallout 2)

Arroyo and the GECK#

In 2241 Arroyo suffered the worst drought anyone remembered. Crops failed and people got sick. The elder, the Vault Dweller's child, turned to her own child, the Chosen One. After passing a test in the Temple of Trials, the Chosen One was given the Vault Dweller's old jumpsuit, a Pip-Boy 2000 and a Vault 13 water flask, and was sent to find a Garden of Eden Creation Kit. A GECK could turn wasteland into farmland, and the village believed one waited in the "Vault of the Holy Thirteen", the vault their founder came from. (Fallout 2)

Nobody knew where Vault 13 was. The only lead was a trader named Vic, who had sold the village its flask. The trail led north to Klamath, a trapping town, where the Chosen One met Sulik, a tribal warrior who joined them, and then to the Den, where Vic was being held by slavers. Once freed, Vic pointed the Chosen One east to Vault City, where he traded. (Fallout 2)

Across northern California#

The search for Vault 13 pulled the Chosen One through every power in the region. Vault City's citizens looked down on outsiders and were in a dispute with Gecko, a nearby town of ghouls who ran an old nuclear power plant. In Broken Hills, humans, ghouls and super mutants lived together under a mutant sheriff named Marcus, a former soldier of the Master's army, who could join the Chosen One. (Fallout 2)

New Reno was ruled by four crime families, the Mordinos, Bishops, Salvatores and Wrights, and the Chosen One could work for any of them. The jet trade led to a scientist named Myron, the drug's creator. Further south was the NCR itself, with its capital at Shady Sands, and Vault 15, now home to squatters. (Fallout 2)

Signs of the Enclave kept turning up. Men in black advanced power armour appeared on the roads. The Salvatores in New Reno were buying laser weapons from them. And the Brotherhood of Steel in San Francisco, who were watching the Enclave closely, wanted someone to steal vertibird plans from an Enclave base called Navarro. (Fallout 2)

Vault 13#

When the Chosen One found Vault 13, it wasn't what the stories promised. Most of the original human dwellers were gone. In their place lived intelligent, talking deathclaws, led by one named Gruthar, along with a few humans they had taken in. The deathclaws had been bred by the Enclave. They weren't hostile, and the GECK was still in the vault's stores. The Chosen One took it. (Fallout 2)

The vault also held the navigation computer parts for an old oil tanker, the PMV Valdez, docked in San Francisco. That mattered later. (Fallout 2)

Arroyo taken and the oil rig#

The Chosen One came home with the GECK and found Arroyo burned. Enclave soldiers had come by vertibird and carried off most of the villagers. The Vault 13 dwellers had been taken the same way. Both groups were prisoners on the Enclave's headquarters, an oil rig 175 miles off the coast. (Fallout 2)

The only way there was the PMV Valdez. In San Francisco, home to the Shi and to the Hubologist cult, the Chosen One refuelled the tanker and refitted its navigation computer with the parts from Vault 13. The ship's access key was held at Navarro, and with help from Captain A. Ron Meyers, an Enclave deserter living aboard the tanker, the ship sailed for the rig. (Fallout 2)

The ending explained#

On the rig, the Chosen One found out why the prisoners had been taken. The Enclave's scientists, under Dr. Charles Curling, had turned the Forced Evolutionary Virus into an airborne toxin called FEV Curling-13. It killed anyone with mutated DNA. Since almost everyone on the surface had been changed by radiation over 160 years, it would have wiped out nearly all life outside the Enclave. The people of Vault 13, sealed away since the war, and the people of Arroyo were test subjects. (Fallout 2)

President Dick Richardson defended the plan as the only way to bring back the real United States. The Chosen One killed him, freed the prisoners and sabotaged the rig's reactor computer, setting off a meltdown. At the dock, the last thing between them and the tanker was Frank Horrigan, a Secret Service agent the Enclave had turned into a giant super mutant and locked into custom power armour. The Chosen One killed him, got everyone aboard and sailed off as the rig blew up. (Fallout 2)

Every version of the ending is the same at its centre: the people of Arroyo and Vault 13 settle together and use the GECK to build a new Arroyo. The ending slides for the other towns, such as which family runs New Reno, Vault City's fate and Gecko's, depend on what the Chosen One did there. (Fallout 2)

The ending says something the first game hinted at. The Enclave saw itself as the rightful heir to America, but it was willing to kill everyone else on the continent to claim it. The tribals and vault dwellers it treated as lab animals were the ones who survived. (Fallout 2)

What later games treat as canon#

Fallout: New Vegas confirms the main ending through Marcus, who remembers travelling with the tribal from Arroyo, finding the GECK and blowing up an oil rig. It also confirms a male Chosen One, Tandi's presidency, and the NCR taking out Navarro after the rig fell. (Fallout: New Vegas)

Some Enclave survivors went east. In Fallout 3, the computer President John Henry Eden revives Richardson's plan in the Capital Wasteland, using a new FEV strain and the water of Project Purity. (Fallout 3)

What it sets up#

Fallout 2 ends the West Coast story for the first two games. The NCR keeps growing, the Enclave is broken on the West Coast, and the Brotherhood carries on. The next game moves the series to Washington, D.C. For how the games fit together, see the Fallout timeline and the Fallout story explained. (Fallout 3)