Another thing I found odd about Fallout 4's writing is that when you first encounter Nick Valentine, you meet him in the middle of a showdown with Skinny Malone, a gangster who's written as a habitual opponent of his, someone who he's been playing cops-and-robbers with for years. This is most likely an attempt to shore up the impression of Nick as the Quintessential Noir Detective- you've blundered into the middle of an episode of the Nick Valentine Show, he does stuff like this all the time. But the thing is that Fallout- and east-coast Fallout in particular- is a setting that has a hard time plausibly giving rise to a friendly-enemy cops-and-robbers dynamic, for basically the same reason that Marvel has always had a hard time establishing a persistent rogues gallery for Frank Castle.
