I actually kinda like Claptrap despite him being designed to be the character to hate. I dunno why, something about the little robot makes me want to protect him considering everything he ever tries to do blows up in his face. He can’t help but hurt those he cares about because he’s such a klutz and I just feel bad for him.
As for favorite villain? That’s kind of a tough one, I tend to enjoy well-written and sympathetic villains that are only the bad guy from circumstance, those that could very well be the hero of the story if it were told from their point of view. However, I will say that I enjoyed Ulysses from Fallout: New Vegas quite a bit.
[spoiler]Something about finally meeting the mysterious courier who you’ve probably thought about since being told that he turned down the package when he saw your name on the list is really satisfying. A man who, to paraphrase his own words, “Walked the same long, lonesome road that you walked.” and who has been to all the places you end up going to in the DLCs searching for answers. He wants a better wasteland, just like you. Depending on how you’ve played your character and the choices you’ve made, it could be that you’re just as cynical as he is. Or maybe, you believe there really IS a better way. A way that he will challenge. He will put you through hell to get to the end of this dusty, irradiated route. You have nobody but a little robot buddy to keep you company. Fallen soldiers, ghoulish and twisted beyond humanity from rage fill the barren roads. It doesn’t matter what side they were on in life, in their suspended death they can only feel pain from just how badly they were irradiated. The radiation is quite literally the only thing keeping them from falling apart. They’re corpses walking on borrowed time. And then you find out that missile silos dot the landscape. You learn exactly why Ulysses is so pissed at you. YOU delivered a package that led to the destruction of a community that YOU built. And he’s been watching you ever since. Silently judging you. Now, obviously the Courier is meant to be your avatar, but learning that they had some backstory before the game threw me for a loop. A lot of the time in open-world RPGs you tend to wonder exactly how your character learned to do all these things. Sure, you can create your own backstory, but I think the fact that what little is canonical about the Courier is something of that magnitude hits the player pretty strongly. The Courier was a leader, not necessarily by choice but because they had the skills needed to keep people safe. And now all those people they cared about are gone. The worst part is that they probably carried that guilt every single day until Benny shot them in the head. Sure, their brain was mostly intact, but who’s to say they didn’t lose those memories like they presumably lost most of their skills?
Then, you finally make it to the end of the road. Ulysses is ready to just wipe the slate clean and start over. The moment of truth comes when you either fight him in one last showdown… or you convince him to stop. If you’ve found all the recordings he left behind, you can convince him not to go down that path of darkness. A man who stood by Caesar’s Legion in its infancy until he couldn’t take the atrocities. A man who saw the destruction of his family, his friends. A man who saw some of himself in you, and then was outraged by the one fatal mistake you made. Someone who has been all over the place and found no good answers. In the end, I think he just wanted someone to stop him. He wanted someone that could make him believe that there can be peace in the wastelands. And if you do convince him that wiping the slate clean isn’t the answer to the problem, you’re rewarded with a pretty badass survival fight. The two Couriers, back-to-back, fighting off hordes of the burned ghouls together. It felt far more satisfying than Liberty Prime shooting lasers, or Martin Septim just curbstomping Mehrunes Dagon. It was just two characters of an equal power level duking it out together to save the Mojave Wasteland. And that shit was fucking rad as hell.[/spoiler]
Also he has a really nice voice :V