Could not agree more about moving the Flame Weapons to Explosives. Do that and make the explosives cheaper. :flamethrower:

Then the skill would be decent.

Then you could take Explosives and Guns and have a very solid Big Guns character. I know because that is how I modded my game!

Fantasy RPGs are my favorite; I'm not sure I see the rational.
(I want it consistent, and with an explanation... but not always one that gets explained.)

I'm open to convincing, if you can explain a realistic reason why. I don't see how training with dynamite fusing, and C4 relates to training with a big kid's supersoaker. I could see overlap with grenades and dynamite if Throwing was still a skill, and the game used it for targeting accuracy. As it is though ~for some bonkers reason... Two guys can lob identical grenades at identical targets, but the one whose an expert in C4 does more damage with his.

@ Gizmo - Grenades, Grenade Rifle, Grenade Launcher, Grenade Machine Gun, The Fat Man - all lob. Just like the Incinerator. Should be explosives. Nothing like direct Hit Scan energy weapons.

The first one relies on hand/eye coordination and upper body strength (and aiming while moving); the others must be guided and swayed into position to be accurate, the Fatman (ideally) has a target 2? miles away (any closer is nuts). The flame weapons don't work like the grenades (not even the incendiary ones). Grenades don't splash you in the wind, and flamers won't bring the house down around you as soon as they fire. They are different ~too different. :shrug:

Being an expert with one, and playing with the other can get you killed (and your teammates with you.)

Ummm what the [censored] are you saying? theres at leat like 30 things added to the game. FO3 was [censored]. Oh and they merged the guns in big guns to other skills and kept the minigun and new LMG in the normal "Guns" skill.

Truly insightful and well thought out anolysis.

LOL, so somehow the Flame Weapons relate more to high tech lasers and super heated plasma fired through some sort of mahnetic system!

And who says that balls of flaming Napalm don't need to be swayed into position. Playstyle wise the Incinerator is just a lower damage Grenade Machine Gun. Go use a Grenade Rifle/Grenade Machine gun and then Gauss/Plasma/Laser Gun and tell me which one the Incinerator plays more like.

I was stating that the Flamethrower is relying on energy to do damage and it does not use delayed detonation projectiles that violently release flammable materials all over the surroudning area like an incendiary grenade. I do not see any way for there to be a short range explosive device that would not harm self as well as target unless its a type of shaped charge that has a controlled blast focal point. in that case they should put in such a device/ammunition. The flame thrower and incinerator could be put in the explosive weapons category and that would be fine, but I was trying to explain why I think they were placed in energy weapons. Since neither uses any kind of explosive mechanism for delivering the chemicals I figure the current location makes sense.

Guns have no real AoE weapon, Energy weapons have limited AoE with some (frontal cone and small radius ranged) or all of the category's weapons (meltdown) and explosives have AoE with every weapon. Perhaps anything with AoE attacks should be placed in explosives skill and remove the meltdown perk.

All they have to do for the 9mm and .22 are put AP rounds in for them. Then they could at least do some damage to armored targets and have everyone pleased, no?

I should use another term than realistic, because buzzwords make forum goers completely overreacting to them. How about "some sort of uniform and logical distribution of physical and chemical properties" to all places, people, objects in a game that is based on a mild departure from reality. It is not like the game is based on a space colony in another galaxy 20,000 years from now. For the sake of suspension of disbelief the weapons have to at least adhere to the "slight deviation" from reality. Could energy weapons exist given the discovery of a stable, compact power source, sure. Could aliens exist and attempt scavenging the planet's resources after witnessing the violent destruction of surface life, sure. However, those are not huge leaps and bounds from the world as we know it and, unless I am mistaken, there are no huge departures from our known "natural laws". A game like Red Alert 3 is based on an alternate reality where all kinds of crazy things are invented.... but that is the premise for the entire game.

I lost my train of thought.... night all!

Nope :shrug:
They should really be a skill of their own... The first game lumped them into Special military weapons ~The Big Guns. But really, the training just wouldn't overlap. Flamethrowers are not similar to rocket launchers, nor Miniguns.

One could rationalize Big Guns as "almost/sort of" military training, while Small Guns were commonplace conventional fire arms (minus sniping rifles).
Still Energy weapons would be uncommon high-end military; but different from conventional heavy weapons training.

Really Plasma and laser should be different skills, as Plasma behaves like a blob of goo and laser is more of an on/off beam weapon (with no recoil, and unique reflection/refraction concerns ~even the choice of darker colored areas of one's target).


I certainly didn't. :shrug:

*Gauss certainly should not be classed as an energy weapon.

Things in New Vegas that aren't in FO3:

Companion wheel
Companion perks
Weapon mods
hardcoe mode
More quests
New factions
Gambling
Traits
Binoculars
Night/Thermal vision
Nightkins
Snow
More Freindly Super-Mutants
More than twice the guns
More joinable factions
Reputation
New drugs
Repair kits
Doctors bags
Unique speach options for low intellegence characters.
Crafting
Poison/Medicine making
Ammo crafting
Disguises
180 quests
Ability to Play-Through as a pacifist
Ability to kill every person in-game except for one.
Iron Sights
Non-Lethal ammo types
Ammo Type Switching
Faction ranking
Advanced power armor
Deeper Main Quest
More choices/endings
Electricity
hokers/Strippers
Stregnth/skill requirments for weapons
More Currencies
Courier Missions
Higher level cap
Vegetation

... Yeah there's more in the last one. :facepalm:

@Gizmo - I am all for Big Guns as a seperate skill. They are really squad support weapons. And they added some really good ones, and boosted the effectiveness up for some - like the Minigun.

But lets be realistic, the devs are not going to create a whole new skill in a patch. Maybe next game. That is why I am really hoping they will move them into explosives.

I am almost willing to bet that there was a seperate Big Guns skill, but it got cut late game development. That is why you run into an incinerator really early game.

@Gurkog - Every weapon realies on energy. Some Kinetic (melee, unarmed, guns), some chemical (explosives, flame) some high tech fusion charge mobo-jumbo (Lasers, Plasma). Really, Energy Weapons are all high tech - they do not really exist today. But Flame Throwers have been around a long time. I seem to even remember the ancient Greeks had Greek Fire which was a crude flame flower. Should go tell those guys they were using Energy Weapons back 2000 years ago.

And Gauss should use Energy Weapons. Is uses magnets to accelerate a round - just like the Plasma Guns. Nothing at all like a normal gun.

Perhaps they should rename Eergy Weapons to Excitied Molecules Weapons?

Big Guns feels a bit silly as a seperate skill for me, as there's so few of them in NV compared to FO3 and, iirc, you can't custom reload any ammo for the former Big Guns guns? That would make it rather boring as well if you specialized in that.

It would seem to be transparent to the user, and functions like a magnetic equivalent of gunpowder; a shotgun is not an 'Energy' weapon ~even though it uses energy to project the slug (same would go for the Gauss bullet no?).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKyGDWeblQw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mobpTrl7cA

I take it as Energy weapons inflict damage with the energy; Gauss weapons just fling a metal bullet same as a rifle in most respects. The Plasma rifle's magnetic aspect is moot to the damaging effects of the plasma on the target.

***Aside: A flamethrower's operation would seem to be unaffected by whether or not the pilot was lit. It really is just a squirt gun, and why I do not believe it belongs with Energy weapons.

It is more the propellent then anything else. But rather then get bogged down, I take a much more simpler view - if it does not exist today, goes pew-pew, is the the stuff of sci-fi then it is an Energy Weapon. Gauss Rifle does not exist today. Plus the care and maintance of a Gauss Rifle is nothing like a 357 Magnum. More like an Energy Weapon.

Same reason why a Flamer does not belong in EW. Very low tech.

@Flea - I used Big Guns a lot in FO3. Trying to think what was cut....

For some reason I can not think of anything(except uniques), but they added a whole bunch - Light Machine Gun, Plasma Caster, Grenade Machine Gun, Grenade Launcher. That would be soo fun to use all those weapons. VATS, who needs it? Head shots - who cares. Just mow em down. :gun:

Indeed. They all are very different, including different safety practices when handling. I've heard that you can break your jaw firing a L.A.W. untrained.

Erm... technically, I could make one in my backyard with a metal tube, some copper wires, as well as some shielded electronics to make sure it fires properly. Granted, I'll be lugging around a powerplant the size of a SUV with current technology, but I can make one. In fact, they have produced experimental versions of coilguns. Only reason we're not seeing them out on the field is the same reasons we don't have laser rifles and powered armor- they require too much power to be mounted on anything smaller than a tank or ship by current levels of technology- but the power gap is closing. Within a few years we'll see Power Armor (hopefully) and by the end of our lives military-grade Lasers and/or Gauss weapons should be available... provided we don't collectively bite it in 2077.

Besides, care for a Gauss Rifle would be drastically different for the care of a Laser Rifle- aside from some basic know-how on how to keep circuit boards working, there's too little overlap.

@Marrs - Alas - still in the realm of Sci Fi. Technically, I understand the basic principals of nuclear fission. Does not mean I can make a working A-Bomb even if I had 20 pds of uranimum. And while your backyard coil gun could achive some massive veliocity like 1 mph, that is not weaponized..

The navy has been working on a rail guin, but even that is a decade off (even though I always wonder when they demo a new weapon it means they have something beter)

thats where your wrong, by that principle you'd have to classify bullet weapons as explosives. The Gauss rifle (As it was meant to be in the universe as the M72) didn't use projected particle or radiation beams or bolts. IT uses good ol' fashion kinetic impact, from a solid metallic slug. Just like conventional small arms. Yeah it used magnets to throw the slug but that was it. The weapons are categorized by method of damage not method of propulsion.

The originals still did it best in this regard. It had separate damage listing for flame, laser, explosive, and plasma along with the "normal" kinetic weapons AKA bullets melee and so forth. Adding "explosive" as an entry instead of throwing was a horrible thing to do. Explosive weapons damage should rely on anything aside from the type and quality of the explosive and the ability of the user to land a good hit. IT should do a set about of damage in a set blast wave. Big guns is the same way, it should have never been cut out. It's where all the heavy weapons should have gone. I would have personally had small guns as the "starting" skill then you could optionally branch out for big guns or energy weapons as the "end game" weapon skill. As each would have viable damage dealers. Then you have high end small guns like the Gauss rifle for those that want to stick with only small guns.

For Melee and unarmed you have the powerfist, and Super sledge. Possible different variants like you see in NV for more variety and differing effects like you get with different ammo in the ranged weapons. I would generally say that you get more criticals, and damage effects when doing h2h then long ranged combat. That brings me to another thing I miss from the originals, the critical hit and failure tables. I really would like to see more from criticals then just X damage.

Gauss Rifle, Flamer and Incinerator were put in EW because of game logic.
That's what works for me. :rolleyes:

Now the problem is: is a Gatling Laser similar in terms of operation compare to a Minigun?

At the moment, weapons are classed by their "ammo", namely battery, gun rounds or (self-propelled) explosive. Flame thrower fuel is more a kind to battery than gun rounds or (self-propelled) explosive.

And as other points out, if you cook your "fire" hot enough, you get Plasma^tm.

Not really the topic is what happened to big guns skill, his first post seems to imply that this makes the game terrible and he prefers fallout 3.
I'd say it's a big leap to bash the entire game on the lack of one skill.


He isn't promoting a realistic simulator. He's trying to find some sort of reasoning for promoting balance and the placement of weapons.
I'd say you are overreacting.


For someone who promoted no combat options, saying that they shouldn't be that important, earlier you sure want a lot of combat skills. The same reasoning applies to laser based and plasma based weapons. Placing a mine isn't the same as a throwing a grenade and grenade launchers handle differently than either. (Which in hindsight you already discussed)
You are left with a veritable list of weapon skills, which are so specialized you probably need to pick another weapon skill to augment, thus leaving less skillpoints for non-combat skills or forcing a someone how doesn't value combat so much to the guns skill, which is wide enough to compete with all the other skills and come out on top.
'Fallout! We've got loads of combat skills.'


True, but guns already has it's BFG sniper in the AMR. Not to mention that Fallout 3 already got it wrong.
It's rather unfortunate. EW could have easily used some classic weapons to fill the gaps and a few gauss weapons might have spruced up the guns. But moving it now would be horribly unbalanced.

To those who complain about people discussing reality/problems with reality, while it's true that one can't seriously and credibly complain too much in the Fallout series, there is a point where a lack of "reality" in the mix would break that http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief Putting unicorns, fair tales, or (in Fallout 2's case, according to some) too many odd pop culture references can do that. In the Fallout world of 50s science and belief in what would occur in future, flying cars, high tech robots, nuclear powered everything, and yet horribly primitive computers and electronics aren't so likely to.

But on the actual topic. Sawyer explained himself a good while before the game was even released that there would be no Big Guns skill. His reasoning, at least based on what I can vaguely remember, was that th decision of what counted for big guns was sort of messy-especially since there was already "Small Guns" for purely conventional weapons and "Energy Weapons" for all energy weapons. So that made the mess of what should be in Big Guns even though there are Energy Weapons, and explosive-type weapons, that would fit in that category as well. Thus, to make it a more simple, clean thing, he/the developers combined Small Guns and Big Guns into just Guns.

Personally, it made a lot of sense to me-I really don't see why anyone would be upset by the change. Unless they're just upset because it's a change.

Well, when i played fallout 3, i never use big guns OR explosives or energy weapons just for the fact that they all lacked the veriety of weapons that i want. Small guns was the only one that had a variety.
they separated big guns so that more categories would have more items. ex: fallout 3 explosives- Grenade, mine. Fallout new vegas explosives- Grenade, frag mine, plasma mine (was energy in FO3), grenade launcher, grenade rifle, grenade machinegun (which if it was in FO3, it would have been a big gun), Missile Launcher, C4, Fat Man. Splittting them added more weapons to many different skills, balance things out. and you must be out of your mind if you think New Vegas doesnt have much to offer.

I did, and I stand by it. Its not the only reason to bash at it, but it is sufficient on it's own IMO.

I said that combat should not be a primary concern. It should be one of three equal solutions to most events in the game. That doesn't mean you can talk your way out of a fight all the time, (but it'd be a nice touch for a PC with exceptional diplomacy skill and stats to manage it once in a while).

As for someone who [seemingly] promoted no combat options... While the above is my opinion, combat just happens to be my personal preference in the game.


I would want specialized weapon skills, and would actually prefer a "Small guns" skill for commonplace civilian weaponry, and a Big Gun:X skill, picked for each Big gun individually; and have the failure rates per use depend on the skill with each heavy weapon. (meaning you could use any Big Gun, but run a weighted risk of critical failure that is lowest with the one you are most skilled with).

Experimental weapons are flaky and sometimes have problems, it takes a trained professional to consciously fix and/or avoid some of those quirks, and to handle it with known best practices that you only get through specialized training.

I think that most people with hand gun experience could examine a minigun for ? an hour and figure out to get it to fire, but they would not have any non-intuitive benefits from formal training, and probably not know how to clear a jammed belt, or be a decent shot with it. :shrug:

Breaking the major weapons down to Energy and Chemical (bullets) makes sense to me. Bullets are bullets, bursts of energy are bursts of energy. Large Guns in the earlier games bugged me as you had to spend time early on building up a skill that you did not use until later on. Or, you ignored the skill until such time as you needed, but by then it was too late. As for them being an end game weapon, the Skill set required would be enough to make that a viable option. Only they did not do that well enough in New Vegas.

As for Flame Throwers, they are both an Energy and a Chemical Weapon, so where do you lump them? Energy is about the only place that makes any sense as a skill that you want to use in the game. They could have created a seperate catagory for that skill, but where would that stop? We could end up having a skill for each gun subtype and I for sure don't want to manage that. The best compromise was to stick them in Energy rather than require a seperate Skill class that would not take any other weapons offered in the game.