Plot Holes That Ruin Your Favorite Video Games

At the end of Fallout 3, the player is tasked with a difficult choice. Someone has to enter an irradiated chamber, sacrificing their life to decide the fate of Washington DC's water supply. This task can be carried out by the player, or delegated to one of several companions. One thing's for sure though, whoever enters the chamber will quickly die from radiation poisoning. 

While this is certainly dramatic, it's not the most sensible of conclusions. In the player's travels, they have likely befriended Fawkes, a super mutant who is immune to radiation. If Fawkes is present for this pivotal moment, it seems reasonable to ask her to go enter the code, as she's the only one who won't die from extreme radiation exposure. However, Fawkes says she doesn't want to rob the player of their destiny, and openly refuses to help. 

To rub it in a little more, when one elects to go in place of Fawkes, she says that she wishes she could repay her debt to the player. Apparently, saving the player's life isn't a good way to even the score. 

The lore of Assassin's Creed gets pretty outlandish, as it's eventually revealed that humanity is controlled by alien gods. Luckily for the franchise's heroes, any individual who is a member of the assassins' bloodline is immune to their control.

In the end of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Desmond — who is a descendant of the assassins — finds himself under the control of the goddess Minerva, who forces him to  kill Lucy (another assassin). Considering how big of a plot point this is, it's a little shocking that the other games go to great lengths to suggest that such a feat would be impossible. However, by this point in the franchise, the writers were already so far off the rails that perhaps they just stopped caring about continuity. 

Heavy Rain is a cinematic game released in 2010 by Quantic Dream, that follows the hunt for the elusive Origami Killer. Unfortunately, the writers undercut the story's drama in the game's final scenes. While the game presents players with countless choices, pretty much everything that happens can be seen as a red herring, and the final plot twist is impossible to see coming.

The game begins when the main character Shaun starts having blackouts; each time he comes to, he's holding an origami figure. Obviously, the player is supposed to think that Shaun is the killer. While this turns out not to be the case, the game never bothers to explain what Shaun gets into when he's blacked out. The sole purpose of this character trait is to trick the player, as the Origami Killer turns out to be entirely unrelated to the blackouts. For a game that prioritizes story over mechanics, it's kind of sad that the writers could only achieve a "mystery" by flat-out lying to the players. 

As Guns of the Patriots reaches its climax, there's a scene in which someone must traverse a corridor irradiated with microwaves. Raiden the cyborg could easily do it, yet for some reason this duty is assigned to Snake the human, who will almost certainly die in the process. 

As Snake crawls down the hall, his body literally cooks, and the player is forced to continue on as the character suffers. Snake's robotic protege would have been totally fine, yet Snake is insistent on sacrificing himself. The scene makes no sense, but it comes at the end of a remarkably emotional narrative, so it's still enough to bring the waterworks. 

In Mass Effect 3, the Citadel is the source of all the Reapers' power and knowledge. Conveniently (for humanity, as least), when the Reapers learn that humans have discovered the whereabouts of the Citadel and are going to try to destroy it, they bring the Citadel to the humans.

Up until this point, the Reapers have spent centuries hiding out in deep space, yet they inexplicably decide to bring their most precious space station directly to their arch enemy, who is more than happy to destroy it. For a group of super-intellegent machines, that's some remarkably poor military planning.

While it is the third game to be released in the franchise, Batman: Arkham Origins serves as a prequel to the first two games. Since Bane is unaware of Batman's true identity in Arkham Asylum, it stands to reason that he's also clueless in Arkham Origins. However, this is inexplicably not the case. 

In Origins, Bane discovers Bruce's alter ego, which prompts the villain to bomb the Batcave. However, Batman and Bane have numerous run-ins in both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City (including a temporary, fraught alliance in the latter), but the story gives no indication that Bane knows who the Dark Knight is.  

On an unrelated note, it's a little awkward that Batman wields advanced gadgets in Origins that he doesn't have access to in the other games. While the discontinuity is explained offhandedly — the game essentially says that Bats has access to every tool, but chooses to only bring a select few with him — the whole thing comes off as pathetically slapdash.