As anyone who has played both incarnations of the Fallout..or just looked at the wiki articles and compared pictures can tell you, something went very wrong(or very right, depending on which look you prefer) in the design concepts for Fallout 3, and this stuck in New Vegas. Compare a plasma rifle from the first two and a plasma rifle in the last two games. What I don't understand is..why?
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Plasma_rifle
As you can see, it remained consistent in Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics. (Fallout:Brotherhood of Steel never ever existed and lets not talk about it), and then suddenly in Fallout 3, it's design radically changed. It was justified in cannon as the weapons on the east coast are from a different military supplier than on the West Coast, but then this is completely thrown out the window with New Vegas, a small portion of which is actually on the same area of land as in the First games, with armor and equipment previously used and abused by groups such as The Unity, NCR, Enclave, and Brotherhood. If the Midwest has the same weapon's supplier as California, why the hell would Vegas have guns from Washington and nothing from the West Coast? I personally think this is just laziness on their part as newly created models look the same as the originals yet the reused weapons are just copied from the Fallout 3 folder to the New Vegas folder. And for crying out loud, the old plasma rifle just looked amazing.
Weapons like the assault rifle can be justified because the looks were simply taken from 2D to 3D and given additional details, aside from the 10mm which is again am Eastern brand. Also, still no Desert Eagle? Shame on Obsidian, though at least New Vegas unscoped the .44 magnum, which I will say was my longest lasting weapon in F2.

Now onto armor, this isn't so much of a "brand" issue, but merely one of general appearance and how it's used in the newer games.

We all have our separate opinions on whether or not this armor is horrifically ugly, kinda meh, or the most beautiful thing to come to the wasteland, but the Enclave armor in 3 still majorly irks me. Now you can excuse it as "Well they salvaged T-45d and painted it black". This might make sense if you want to justify its stats which are much lower than advanced power armor should be, but ...why do they look like steam-powered batman? Where did those helmets come from? Why does the body look "rule of cool-ified", why is it so clunky, and where did the Enclave leave all their older, better suits?(apparently in New Vegas). Now, I'm of the opinion that NV should just completely retcon Fallout 3's Enclave armor and say it never happened, because whatever you think of it's looks, it came out of nowhere with no basis in lore. If you read quests or just listened to Sulik, the specific purpose of the appearance of Enclave armor is to look like "Bugs that walk on two feet" to "[Scare] the locals" away from their mysterious plans. Well, I guess the Enclave in 3 are joke anyway, so you can't take them as seriously as before.

Okay, enough about that specific piece of armor. Now about the general "bulkiness" of power armor. If you ever played the first 2 games(Tactics is an exception, they made the same mistake), you'd notice that the sprite for power armor is significantly larger than the other sprites for characters You don't wear power armor, you climb inside of it. It's not a superman outfit, it's an exoskeleton, a man sized tank and it is by no means "plate armor". Plate armor is worn, and has a mail underlay to protect the joints which are otherwise unarmored. Power armor, as it's name implies, is powered by electricity to move around, the user does not simply walk in^{to Mordor} it like a coat of plates. If you take a look at even the bulkiest armor in the game, advanced power armor/Remnant armor it seems to fit snugly to the wearers body, getting thinner at the waist, which is not what it looked like in the other games.

Most of these issues I'm okay with being in Fallout 3, but I'm miffed that the mistakes are being continued into New Vegas and likely future games.

For the armor I guess it's cause of Gamebryo. It's crap at models. :shrug:
On the weapons: They will never make sense again.
That simple.

Incinerator, Plasma Rifle (Fo3), Tesla Cannon, none of them has any reason to be in Vegas, yet, they are.
So why?
Simple again: Cause new game automatically means we need MOAR stuff.
If it's there, why not re-use it?
But that makes my mind boggle though.
Why oh why wasn't Infiltrator brought back? It's in Mick and Ralphs on the wall, but you can't "use" it.

So on the weapons...
I have no idea.
They bring "some" weapons from FO3 even though "some" of them makes no sense but why not bring them all back?
It'd be like creating L4D3 and excluding Hunter, Spitter, Explosive Ammo, Adrenaline, AK and Hunting Rifle.
If they're going to bring weapons from one game that really make no sense in being in this game then at least do it properly and bring "all" weapons back.

But I'd rather stick true to the lore so I wish the weapons that don't make sense to just vanish.

And on that note, why not bring back the weapons from FO2?
Either they're held back for DLC material.
Either it's "super complicated!" for some reason (Which I doubt, but due to their naming of guns (That Gun, This Machine) it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't bring them back cause they can't think of any good names -_- )
Or Obsidian simply "don't want to".

Here's the long and the short of it:


The power armor that the Enclave uses in Fallout 3 was made the way that it was because Bethesda wanted to change the 'image' of it a bit. Rather than the 'buglike' look that it had before... which no doubt was intimidating... the armor in Fallout 3 was specifically made in order to fit the reference of 'Black Devil Armor'.

Now, mind you, Obsidian brought the good 'ole classic back... so there's hope for BOTH existing... which I'm -fine- with (because I live for variety).

My concern is LEATHER armor. There seems to have been some sort of a mixup... because what I see being called 'leather armor' looks an awful lot like a 'Leather Jacket'...

... which most definitely was not the motorcycle-football leather armor (you know what I'm talking about) from Fallouts 1 and 2.

That's what I miss. Gimme a Leather jacket and pants... then give me the REAL leather armor...

... don't half-ass it like this and act like everything's fine! Curse you, BethesdaSidian!



Right... weapons:


The weapons are -all- screwed up. And there's so many of them. And throughout the series'... there's always been so many of them.

I don't even care about it... I have the Classic Fallout Weapons mod...

That's about the closest we'll ever get to weapons making sense. (Pipe Rifle! Pipe Wrench! Pied Piper!)


And lastly...

... actually, I forgot what this part was.

Oh well.


-Cheres!

-Cheeps!

-Chewts!

-Time for Bed!

Well as far as the Plasma Rifles are concerned in all fairness the have ret-conned that REPCONN, under RobCo's ownership, designed and manufactured the Urban Plasma Rifle, based on stolen Poseidon Energy research too no less; if Gannon's quick back track is anything to go on then they were purpose built for the Enclave which he stops just before saying, pauses and just says the government. The Telsa Cannon too, if it wasn't before, was shown to be a pre-war weapon based on the cover of Future Weapons Today, also the crashed Enclave Vertbird near Searchlight Airport has one so the Enclave did use it.

Gauss Rifles will never be the same :sadvaultboy:

I miss the M72 Gauss rifle.

Leather Jacket is the Leather Armor in FO3/NV

Totally missing the original Leather Armor,

Yes! Yes yes yes! This!

Leather Armor should be the Leather ARMOR... not an overly-glorified jacket with armor on it!

I want the plain old Leather Jacket... and I want Leather ARMOR to be ARMOR again! The fact that it was designed based on football and high-contact sports gear was what helped make it actually -look- like armor. This leather jacket business just ain't cutting it for me...

Not to mention the wonky vault cargo pants instead of skin tight suits.

The weapons are different models. The plasma rifle in Fallout 3 is not the Winchester P94 Plasma Rifle (which actually appears in New Vegas as a unique weapon), the laser rifle and laser pistol are not the Wattz laser weapons etc. Bethesda didn't actually change the aesthetic appearance of any of the weapons, they just decided to include different models in Fallout 3 and many of these alternate models were used for the sake of convenience in New Vegas.



I think the biggest problems with the Fallout 3 Enclave armor are that it doesn't look like it belongs in the Fallout world due to its lack of a retro appearance, and that it makes the Enclave look like generic bad guys because it really does look like a devil suit. This seems counter productive in Fallout 3 since they're trying to convince the locals of their "noble intentions".

I also don't really like aesthetic retcons. Generally such dramatic changes in pre-existing artistic designs are pointless and unnecessary.



I miss the Leather Armor too; I see no good reason for its absence in Fallout 3, let alone New Vegas. There's nothing wrong with the Leather Jacket per se, but it's not armor and I wish FO3 and NV wouldn't refer to it as such. Anyway if Obsidian brought back the original Combat Armor why did they leave the Leather Armor out?