Something funny I noticed in Fallout New Vegas.

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Arin Matthews

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Fallout New Vegas has a large selection of cool weapons but no Tommy Gun.
 
And you point is ?

PS: Is there a minimum lenght for the first message of a thread ?
 
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I never really liked the Tommy Gun in Fallout 2. Or, rather, I didn't really like the addition of so many real world weapons in Fallout 2. Also, what Lexx said.
 
Yeah, me neither. Fo2 was going overboard with the choice of all the real world weapons.
 
Not as overboard as Tactics, but still way too much.
I guess that's one of the things Fallout 3 did good, not adding stupid real world weaponry.
 
Well, if we want to be technical...
The .44 machine gun is a Thompson with no drum barrel, so, in essence, the physical tommy gun is there.
But not the specific "gangster" style one we all know.
 
Offtopic, but is this Arin guy a troll?

He's opened several one sentence threads and most of his posts are bait for troll discussions, then there is that whole Fallout 3 fiasco....I'm fairly certain he's here to spam and start arguments.


Ontopic:

The Tommy Gun would be well outdated by 2077, and we do have the Laser RCW,which is an Energy Weapon version of the Tommy Gun.
 
The funny thing is, when you step back and take a look, a lot of Arin's threads have managed to open up a decent line of discussion (and honestly, I've been thoroughly surprised and impressed lately by how willing the community has been to take the high road when they think someone's trolling). This one in particular probably would have been vatted if it'd been noticed before garnering so many responses though, yes.

On-topic, as Lexx says, the .45 SMG from Honest Hearts is kind of a dead ringer for a Tommy Gun, especially when fitted with the compensator and drum magazine add-ons. I'm sure the devs knew that it would harken back to the Fallout 2 classic, whether it was intended to or not. To get irritatingly technical, the NV version was actually more in the original spirit of Fallout than 2's, as it was a fictional weapon inspired by the real thing rather than a real-world Thompson.
 
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Alright, I gotta know; why do people have a problem with real world weaponry? I *love* the idea of my char using a weapon that actually exists irl. I think the FO series as a whole has done a nice job blending real weapons with fictional ones, and I personally don't see the issue there.

I only have the vanilla version of New Vegas--nice to know we get a .45 submachine gun in the DLC--although I've always been an energy weapon kinda girl myself ;)
 
It boils down to taste and tradition, I think, and as stodgy as the die-hard old fans can be, most I've had this discussion with chalk it up more to the former than the latter. The design of F1's guns was inspired more by pulp than by any sort of weapon enthusiasm, and it helped lend to the comic-serial, divergent-timeline feel of things. With so much setting dilution having taken place in the franchise, a lot of people are wary of anything that makes Fallout feel more like it could be our ruined future rather than its own ruined future, no matter how small or seemingly innocuous.

For my part, I didn't have much of a problem when more realistic weapons started showing up (and even as early as late-game F2, we were getting what were essentially modern real-world prototypes dropped into the game under slightly different names). My issue is simply with the sheer number of redundant weapons (and as of F3 and beyond, the profusion of uniques). An endless menu of combat options and niggling weapon stat details were never what the series was intended to be about. I couldn't care less whether I'm blowing some guy's face off with a fictional pistol or something straight from the Springfield Armory catalogue, as long as the opportunities I get to leave it in my holster and use my words or my wits are just as frequent and robust.
 
Yamu said:
It boils down to taste and tradition, I think, and as stodgy as the die-hard old fans can be, most I've had this discussion with chalk it up more to the former than the latter. The design of F1's guns was inspired more by pulp than by any sort of weapon enthusiasm, and it helped lend to the comic-serial, divergent-timeline feel of things. With so much setting dilution having taken place in the franchise, a lot of people are wary of anything that makes Fallout feel more like it could be our ruined future rather than its own ruined future, no matter how small or seemingly innocuous.

For my part, I didn't have much of a problem when more realistic weapons started showing up (and even as early as late-game F2, we were getting what were essentially modern real-world prototypes dropped into the game under slightly different names). My issue is simply with the sheer number of redundant weapons (and as of F3 and beyond, the profusion of uniques). An endless menu of combat options and niggling weapon stat details were never what the series was intended to be about. I couldn't care less whether I'm blowing some guy's face off with a fictional pistol or something straight from the Springfield Armory catalogue, as long as the opportunities I get to leave it in my holster and use my words or my wits are just as frequent and robust.
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Fair enough, I can see why that might upset some people. I've always been curious because NMA isn't the first place I've seen people discussing that whole topic. And, on the topic of guns, I will say what I have a HUGE problem with, and this spans every FO game they've made; there's such a wide variety to choose from, and yet, surprisingly few *useful* ones. The .32 pistol in FO3 comes to mind--the gatling guns in FO2, 3, and New Vegas (by the time you can get these and keep up with the ammo they eat, you already have better options), grenades which have always been useless (this was much improved in FO3 and New Vegas, but even so, you have better options--most mid-late game guns will kill better than grenades anyway), the pistol laser weapons (Plasma pistol, laser pistol, etc.)...I could go on.

I'd like to see some motivation for using "off the beaten path" guns, if you get what I'm saying. For example, why use a laser pistol, when I can pull out a .44 and do more damage and have little to no noticeable difference in accuracy? On top of that, is the fact that EW ammo has always been harder to find/more expensive in Fallout games, making them spendy to invest in. Even later on in games, in Fallout 2 the Gausse Rifle is arguably better than just about any energy weapon in the game (although the Pulse Rifle is probably just as good). It would be nice to have good reason to use some of the guns that were left pretty useless in the games.
 
I agree, and like you say, it's always been an issue. It's tough to find the right balance with energy weapons (and Big Guns, for that matter, though I think NV fixed that pretty handily by doing away with them as a separate category)-- you either go for realism (energy weapons were new, rare, and exotic when the bombs dropped and are going to be hard to find and keep loaded) or balance and playability (there's an easily obtainable EW analogue for almost every gun and their light-speed energy bolts may or may not be any more effective than a cheap .22 cartridge).

As for the other weapon problems, it would definitely be nice to have more weapons seem like viable choices if there are going to be so many in the same class laying around. It seems some of the more useless weapons exist (especially in the newer games) mainly for the mooks, though, and the difficulty curve would be a lot steeper if all those raiders were armed with the sorts of things the player got to tote around (though many would welcome the challenge). The economy, too, might be even tougher to balance if every kill yielded up loot that was actually worth a damn.

As to the "outlier" weapons like grenades and big guns, I think we've been seeing a trend lately more towards making them competitive options, even if they obviously represent a very specialized kind of play experience. Rolling throwing into explosives and melee and doing away with Big Guns really helped-- they're still situational tools or expensive mid-game specialties, but the skill points you spend for them have more uses overall so it doesn't chafe.
 
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While I prefer Fallout 3 to New Vegas, I am SO DAMN GLAD they merged the big guns and small guns skills. It never really made a lot of sense anyway, because comparatively speaking, there were only a few "big guns" anyway. I agree that the merger of those two weapon classes brought a lot of balance to the game in New Vegas--and adding in new "gun" explosive weapons like the grenade launcher was a *very* nice touch. And I do see your point, a lot of those weapons are specialty weapons, some used by sneaky characters for instance (the silenced 10mm, for example, which does less damage then a standard 10mm if I remember right). This would be a huge plus, if those specialties really gave an edge over a "jack of all trades" character, or some advantage. But I can play a stealth character who uses a friggin rocket launcher or fatman and be just as well off as the "ninja" using the silenced 10mm (or in the DLC for FO3, the silenced AR you could get, the Infiltrator)--hell, probably better off.

But yeah, balance was definitely achieved by merging big guns and small guns. I also think sneak and steal could be merged too!
 
FOvet said:
I also think sneak and steal could be merged too!
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Sneak and Steal were merged in F3 which actually makes very little sense, one is a skill of staying out of sight and the other one is reaching your hand in their pocket and taking their stuff without them noticing.
 
FOvet said:
While I prefer Fallout 3 to New Vegas, I am SO DAMN GLAD they merged the big guns and small guns skills. It never really made a lot of sense anyway, because comparatively speaking, there were only a few "big guns" anyway.
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Well, if we don't count uniques, in FO2 and FO3 (vanilla) there are actually more Big Guns than Energy Weapons. Especially in the latter (4 'main' Energy Weapons vs 6 'main' Big Guns).
 
Personally, I would have done FO3 / FO:NV / would do Fallout 4 differently. I don't like "energy weapons" as a skill when the in-game lore suggests there is no more skill required to shoot a laser than a kinetic gun. In fact, since lasers are designed as having little to no recoil it should be EASIER to use them than kinetic weapons!

So, I would have four weapon skills: melee (including unarmed), small arms (pistols), assault weapons (two handed guns, such as rifles or shotguns) and heavy weapons (miniguns, flamers, missile launchers, etc). Energy weapons would just be better, but rarer versions of the above.

I think I'd also tweak repair so it isn't just "higher repair = better repairs", but that items require a certain repair level to restore above, say, 75%. Energy weapons would universally require very high repair, while more basic weapons require very little repair skill to keep in top shape. Weapons like the nailboard or some "ad-hoc" guns would be prime examples of "repair 10" requirements. Kinetic guns would cap out somewhere around 50-60, with lasers 70-80 and plasma 80-90. 100 is for weird stuff like alien weapons.
 
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Ooh, how about we let the useless Science skill govern Energy weapons? We won't need the EW skill anymore.
 
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Actually, having Science being the primary skill to maintain / repair energy weapons could be a nice idea.

Science then becomes essential for hackers and EW-users (to keep the guns in good order) as well as other "techie" stuff. "Repair" becomes about more mundane stuff (repairing machinery, maintaining normal guns, etc).
 
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