Hey everybody! So recently i've been pondering what the 'canon' endings for the Fallout games are. I'm going to disregard Fallout and Fallout 2 as they only have one ultimatum end.
Now remember these are my opinions, these haven't been confirmed by Bethesda or its affiliates, so take these with a grain of salt.
For an ending to be 'canon' seems to follow the trend of the 'Good Karma' route. Using this as a guide we can establish a canon for Fallout 3. Using this method we can establish that the Lone Wanderer wouldn't detonate the Megaton bomb, and wouldn't infect the water with FEV and personally enter the chamber and activate Project Purity. Following this the Lone Wanderer would also proceed to help the Brotherhood eliminate the remaining Enclave soldiers in the Capital Wasteland and continue to assist the people.
For Fallout: New Vegas, I used the same technique and found that the 'canon' end to New Vegas would be assisting the NCR to take Hover Dam and driving Ceaser's Legion out of the area and annexing The Strip and the surrounding communities.
Fallout 4 was a bit tricky however, as there's no Karma system in place. However, I determined the morality of thier actions as if they lived in this reality. For the ending of Fallout 4 I found that the Minutemen ending was, in my theories canon (shocking I know). However, I originally thought that the 3-way of the Minutemen, Brotherhood and the Railroad was canonical, however one Brotherhood radiant quest tipped the balence. The Brotherhood quest where you ask farms to donate a portion of thier crops to the Brotherhood. How? Well the way Tegan asks you to get them implies coaxing them into doing so, which in my opinion would be a problem for the Minutemen. Thus causing them to blow The Prydwen out of the sky. Leaving only the Minutemen and the Railroad as the canon version of the ending.
Now we have Far Harbor, now you could argue that Automatron should also be on here, it doesnt affect anything major. Now for Far Harbor, everybody seemed on edge about the Children of Atom and for good reason! As the Children want to destroy Far Harbor. However, there's the Wild Card: Acadia. Acadia has different outcomes to thier fate, whether it be DiMA getting killed or Tektus being driven out. The 2 other factions, Far Harbor and the Children, just want to kill eachother, so we're gonna leave that as they would both involve killing tons of people. Acadia has an ending where you kill Tektus and replace him with a synth and I have deemed this Far Harbors canonical ending as it would preserve the Children of Atom.
Now for Nuka-World, I had a hard time with this one. Some of you may be thinking 'well the answer is obvious, you kill the raiders' and yep. You're right.
Thanks for reading this and have a good day!
