Aram

The anger tears me up inside!

Personally I'm about to put you on ignore because you're such a whiny dip****. You also use no punctuation and every third word you say is "lulz" so don't whine at people about how they post.

Eh, I've played more than a few games with writing on par with at least your better than average film--and not just RPGs. There are enough that when a game isn't up to snuff, one tends to notice it. I'm as sick of Fallout 3 ranting as anyone, but I have to say that the writing in Fallout 3 was a noticeable step down from 1 & 2, and the biggest disappointment for me personally. I see good dialogue writing in an RPG as when it actually feels like you're handling a real conversation, rather than just working your way through dialogue options until the responses start to loop, and you find the options that either trigger "walk away" or "attack." The best game I ever played for this was Planescape--the talk with Ravel and others are simply great. Fallout was the beginning of good dialogue trees in games, at least for me--an art which evolved through Black Isle into Planescape. Fallout 2 was even better in many ways though the constant pop culture references, silliness, bugginess, unfinished feel, and obvious breaking of the fourth wall, in my opinion, made it inferior. Fallout 3 was a step down even from the original and certainly from what other RPGs since have established for us.

da fug? It's just a bigger rocket launcher.

The Grease gun relates to a specific time when weapons had to be churned out in mass using metal recycled from your mother's frying pans she donated at Uncle Sam's last steel drive, stamped together for $5 to very loose specifications, thrown in a pile, and sent to the front to be shot until it rattled itself apart. The only thing that mattered was that it worked, and for the most part it did, in the role it filled. It wasn't nearly as useful as a rifle--no SMG is outside of very close range. I'm not saying it's a great weapon even by the standards of its day, or that it should be anywhere near a military arsenal of today. It belongs in Fallout because the Fallout timeline emulates its era and it offers an explanation for why there are so many floating around and ready to be snatched from armories because they're not on the super tech front line. It also makes sense that they would still be working (maybe) in the wasteland, in the hands of filthy raiders and dirt farmers, because for all their faults they were very reliable and could work with all manner of dirt and crap in them. And despite all of its many faults, you can not tell me it does not offer more firepower than a standard GI pistol. I don't care how bad you personally are at firing it. The Thompson is everything the Grease gun is not. It relates to a different era, the twenties and thirties, when submachine-guns were purchased by the highest bidder instead of the lowest. The very early Thompsons, especially the 1921 vintage built by Colt, were pieces of mechanical artistry. They had the look and feel of something extremely well built by someone who knew how to build guns, with a finish and wood quality on par with the finest sporting weapons of the day. A comparable weapon would be other prewar weapons such as the Steyr-Solothurn or the like, rather than any of the subguns devised during or after the war. World War 2 basically changed the way the submachine-gun was built in horrible way, a shift it didn't recover from until very recently. The only modern submachine-guns built with as much care and skill as those early Thompsons is, say, a Heckler & Koch or similar. Comparing a Thompson to a Grease gun is like comparing a Packard to a Jeep. The former is much too overbuilt, unwieldy, and expensive for a military to consider for grand scale production, but you know which one you'd rather have.

If you are going to single shot it, what's the point? The increased accuracy/velocity of a full size weapon and the option of full auto in a pinch. All I said was that it's not less accurate than a pistol. I guarantee you can shoot it more accurately full auto than a pistol converted to full auto.

Quoting myself! loool

Maybe not a Barrett, but definitely a big bore "antitank" rifle in the spirit of those fielded by various European countries in WW2. Hell, the Germans had one as early as WW1. I believe the Bozar was originally intended as a big sniper rifle as evidenced by its description, but somewhere it was changed to a machinegun.

It's possible to fire single shots with an M3 with proper trigger discipline. If it's put together competently, a full size SMG is going to put lead on target better than a pistol. That is, if the shooter can.

I don't think that's quite right.

I like it because it's actually based on one of those ridiculous things of the Cold War era, and in a game of portable miniguns and power armor there's no reason it doesn't fit the setting. I would rather it had been some kind of a one time deal though, like the only way to defeat a particularly powerful boss. As it was it was just a way to one shot the one or two enemies I couldn't take out with a single round of vats, and the novelty faded quickly because it usually had no discernible effect on the environments.

If you could scrap a weapon for its one or two superior parts to permanently raise the stats of another, I would be much more willing to accept that than that you have to inevitably scrap four or five per battle just to keep your weapon maintained.

Hah. Some people still are. The .223 and the AR-15 are a late 50s development, actually. The heyday of 7.62mm battle rifles was the 50s. I can believe both of those, in some strange primitive-but-simultaneously-advanced form. The Vulcan gun which the minigun is the "mini" version of was also developed in the fifties, the mini version in the early sixties which were not unlike the fifties at all. I'm not particularly offended by the miniguns in Fallout because I can believe they would scale them down for use with power armor. They actually fit the setting very well. They should just be the end all be all of gunpowder weapons, should require power armor or very high strength, and ammo should not be nearly as available for them as it is. I could believe their feasibility in FO3 because based on their damage output I assumed their were firing something like a .22 short cartridge.

It still screams a bit too much of plastic, unwieldy 1980s guns like the Tec-9--fashioned more like they wanted to appeal to Hollywood action heroes than real shooters or soldiers--than something from the 50s.

I think 10mm recoil is even worse than .45 ACP. Then again, you carry around miniguns in Fallout so... I always assumed that the Fallout 10mm is different than the real world 10mm Auto--some other fictional animal entirely. Otherwise it's another anachronism as the 10mm Auto is a decidedly 1980s bit of gun curio. Of course the Desert Eagle is like the second most common hand gun in there, so who knows.

FO2 had the M3. And it used the one handed sub-machine firing animation of the 10mm. WHich always bugged me a little. I've never fired an M3 myself, but I find it difficult to imagine it could be fired accurately with one hand. The 10mm submachine-gun in Fallout was described as a "Heckler and Koch MP9" which always seemed ill fitting to the setting to me. MP9 suggests it's an evolution of the MP5 which simply doesn't fit the quasi-50s setting. Hell, the company Heckler & Koch doesn't fit the setting very well if you ask me. I would have liked to see a submachine-gun clearly inspired by such trashy garbage SMGs of the 50s as the M3, maybe made a little esoteric and futuristic looking, with a generic military designation devoid of anachronistic company namedropping. I also disliked the looks of the 10mm pistol and .223 rifle. They were both pop culture references which we all know grew like a fungus for the sequel.

I've actually changed my stance on this and think that fictional or genericized quasi-futuristic weapons do make more sense for the setting, but I can think of a few real world, 1950s weapons that just belong in Fallout. The M3 Grease gun is one of them. It's junky enough that repairs and replacement parts could conceivably be assembled from wasteland scrap, and all of the cleaning gear is actually built into the gun--the stock becomes a cleaning rod and and oil reservoir is hidden in the grip. Plus it's in this picture: [hide][/hide]

The worst case I can think of is the case of killing Harold. You're approached by two people, one wants you to make the forest stop growing so it remains isolated and the other wants it to grow faster which runs the risk of people finding and exploiting it. It makes absolutely no difference which you choose. We couldn't come back shortly later and see the consequences. The reward wasn't different. A simple ending screen telling you the consequences would have sufficed, but we got nothing. What was even the point?

The lack of the ending screens with Ron Pearlman narrating, one of Fallout's most remarkable trademarks, was loathsome.

I know a guy who makes his own suppressors in his machine shop. It's definitely doable--probably one of few useful things a person would really be able to make in a wasteland out of scrap metal. Also, for chrissakes, reloading needs to be in the game. Even if it's some kind of half-assed nonsensical deal like the ammo press in The Pitt. It doesn't make sense that all this ammo is just sitting around 200 years later.

I ordered 300 rounds of surplus 8mm Mauser and UPS left it on my doorstep with no signature w00t. Have you tried one of those Swiss straight-pull rifles? They're pretty tyte. Don't know if they're as cheap as they were a while ago though.

J.E., I remember that your avatar on the old board for a while was a couple of 40mm grenades. Are you aware of the existence of this monstrosity? http://www.autoweapons.com/photos06/nov/pump40.html

and you need to stop making assumptions about the state of mind of posters near you. i'm calm as hell. just got my amp head fixed, and am now drinking bourbon and listening to Ghost who i'm about to see in about an hour and a half. that doesn't, however, mean that i'm going to change the way i postspeak for you. (also, the Kinks are one of my favorite bands of all time...but hardly what i'd suggest to someone in order to calm them down. Stars of the Lid would have been a nicer reference. i'll pretend you said that.) Cosmic.

You need to calm down dude. Smoke a bowl and listen to some Kinks or something. Can we talk about guns again?

How you think about how Obsidian should think about how they make the next Fallout game will dictate how the rest of your life will happen. It is the most important philosophical question you will ever ask yourself.