All 4 Fallout Factions, Explained

Amazon Prime’s “Fallout” unfolds Vault-Tec Corporation’s true horrors at the same pace it reveals the terrors of the Vaults themselves. When the “Fallout” series exits the Vault for the first time, Lucy (Ella Purnell) thinks the giant shelter offers the best possible way of life in ...-apocalypse. By the time the show ends, the seemingly benevolent Vault-Tec is fully revealed as a shameless capitalist venture that created the Vaults to outlast the competition, sold them to various interested parties to use for human experiments, and is very heavily implied to have deliberately caused the nuclear apocalypse. What’s more, Cooper Howard’s — played by Walton Goggins, who’s unrecognizable as a ghoul — wife (Frances Turner) is in on the company’s very worst plans in the show’s 2077 timeline. 

In the games, Vault-Tec is a similar enterprise, though the evil Vault experiments aren’t entirely of their own doing. Instead, the corporation is simply an oppressive business with a big PR budget, and a shadowy secret society of government higher-ups known as the Enclave is responsible for turning the Vaults into experimental horror. Likewise, the game version of the apocalypse is caused by the Great War between the United States and China, and Vault-Tec has nothing to do with it. As such, the Vault-Tec Corporation of the show is actually even worse than the one in the games.

For those in the know, that is. While the majority of the people seem to be aware of the Vaults, they tend to consider the people in them clueless at best and doomed at worst. Along with her inexperience, this is a significant problem for Lucy, who tends to be treated as a joke by most other characters until she learns the ways of survival herself.