Honestly, I think they could possibly scrap them in favor of just unique one of a kind mods for weapons.

pertinent question. In an old topic ideas for Fallout 4 (March ... maybe? should be somewhere here in the forum), I made a suggestion that was as follows:

1) You could build settlements and recruit merchants and they had the best equipment of the game, except for the unique weapons.

2) You could make your own gun and install mods, but however much you customizasse they still would be inferior than unique weapons.

3) You could turn a single weapon and use different skills to it. For example, a rifle (guns), which has a bayonet (melee), one grenade launchers (explosives) and a flamethrower (energy weapons).

Well, it turns out that all this happened =D The exception is precisely the role that unique weapons will play in this world.

I like the idea of ??unique mods parts. Or, they can keep my suggestion, that the unique weapons ALWAYS be superior to everything you build. Of course, for this, they also need to accept mods.

Technically there are unique mod parts. The beam separator and the beam focuser for the Laser Pistol/Rifle was a good example. There are some other example, but those are just some basic ones.

This was an common problem with weapons in TES up to Skyrim, unique weapons had their own enchants and you could put better enchants on other weapons making them better.

Skyrim changed this by nerfing enchants and letting you improve any weapons too 2x damage, again except an few unique.

Fallout NV let you upgrade weapons but not unique ones the unique tend to be good anyway.

Not sure how effective weapon mods will be in FO4 compared with unique weapons. Hopefully normal looking unique can be modified, this was not the case in NV, special looking unique might not but is usually pretty special.

I honestly think they just did away with the unique weapons, mainly because they might be unmoddable. Meaning it would have to trade power for versatility.

Well, we know that the same mods have different appearances based on what weapon you put them on. The 'assault barrel', for example, looked completely different when it was put on the plasma rifle than it did on the laser rifle. Maybe unique weapons are going to be separate base weapons with a different appearance and stats from their common counterparts. Unique mods definitely wouldn't hurt on top of that either.

I'm 80% certain there will be unique items, at LEAST one for each weapon type.

Because they are fun to find.

There's something just satisfying about discovering a unique weapon. I'd be sad to see them replaced by unique spare parts instead.

Todd said there is 50 base weapons in the game (read weapon models), so i think there will be unique weapons with non unique models (well maybe different coloring and different ammo/weapon characteristics), like grenade machine-gun in New Vegas which uses 25mm grenades and Mercy which has a different color and is using 40mm grenades :

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Grenade_machinegun

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Mercy

PS: Anybody knows how many unique weapon models New Vegas had?

They will probably be even more unique in the sense that they cannot modded or are limited in how they can be modded. i'd have no problem with this so long as there is plenty of them that look cool and are powerful.

I don't think there will be unique weapons at all. If there were, I'd be a bit dissapointed as I'm guessing they wouldn't have as many attachments and that just lowers the 50 base weapons down to ~30-40 + some uniques. If they got rid of unique weapons in Skyrim I think I'd cry. Having a unique sword makes me feel pretty special and/or accomplished. Having a unique gun just means I don't get to put as many attachments on it. So personally, I think uniques belong in TeS (moreso than they've been doing) but they're not really needed in Fallout 4.