So we've heard tons about the multitude of guns present in New Vegas, but very little about energy weapons. I'm starting to get a little worried, as it would svck to have 40+ guns and 5 energy weapons. Fallout 3 had a similar deal, with only about 4 energy weapons plus a few uniques, and two of the lower level guns (laser and plasma pistol) were all but useless later, with absolutely no reason to use the laser pistol once you had a plasma pistol.

Any thoughts? Will we be seeing at least half the number of energy weapons as bullet weapons?

Here's hoping for more variety

im sure there will be more "bullet" weapons then energy weapons. but energy weapons are going to be much more powerful then small guns.

there has already been more then 5 energy weapons confirmed

Pistols-
Plasma defender
Plasma pistol

Rifles-
Laser riflle
Shotguns-
Multiplas rifle
Tri-beam laser rifle

Heavy Weapons-
Flamer
Gatling laser
Plasma caster
Portable laser beacon

im sure more are on the way. like the plasma rifle and laser pistol

theres probably going to be more energy weapons, but they havent been revealed yet.

SpEcTrE has shown a good list. Also I am sure there will be unique energy weapons as well. Like the Solar Scorcher and Alien Blaster (classic one with normal power cells.)

If they add Solar Scorcher, I really hope they make the player work really hard to get it.
In Fallout 2 it was a random encounter find (iirc), and really hard to get at that. I remember doing 0 damage but everyone still died due to some form of internal damage. :laugh:

I hope so as well. It would svck if it's right there at Helios One.

Well it would have to make sense too I guess. I mean, not everyone has the resources/blueprints/science skill to create new EW's.
But there's a crap load of stuff that can be done since we have pulse, laser, plasma, fire, other? (I wanna say acid, lightning and black materia (black hole thing, like that rifle in Red Faction Guerilla that dissolves buildings and people.))
So it's just up to their imagination, lore and basic logic.

But the list already looks great and I'm sure there's a lot more that they haven't announced.

There are certainly more than initially suggested in my post, but I don't really count the laser array or whatever that platform weapon is.

Even with some of the added weapons, the list is quite sad looking for energy weapon players as compared to other gun users.

Not really complaining, just wanted to see if maybe I had missed some info out there.

Nor do I. It (the Archimedes II platform) is just one of the (rather unnecessery, imo) BFGs of this game. The solar scorcher was a pistol in F2.

Energy weapons should by their very nature be rare, if you want to go by lore. They are infinitely more complex than mechanical weapons that fire bullets, so the chance of something going wrong over time is greater, and while the manufacture of new bullets isn't rocket science, creating new energy packs or batteries certainly would be.

Now that I have been something of a spoil sport, I have to say that I love energy weapons. (Just not the alien ones, Don't speak to me of MZ.) They did seem to be pathetically rare in FO3, so I hope if the Energy Weapons skill is still in New Vegas, that they have more types of energy weapon and they are more common, especially towards the start of the game. If they are done the same way as in FO3, I think the Energy Weapons skill should be done away with like the Big Guns skill, and instead a combination of the Science and Firearms skill should be used to determine effectiveness.

In FO3, the Energy Weapon skill, much like Big Guns, was a waste for much of the game. Of course, I guess in New Vegas there would now be a danger of Firearms being a necessary skill to tag if they rolled Energy Weapons into it as well.

I personally like the idea of energy weapons being somewhat special, and highly effective under normal circumstances, be straight-up game-changing deadly if you have a high Energy Weapon skill. That would balance out the rarity of the weapons like in FO3, but make the Energy Weapon skill a worth-while investment. As it was, Big Guns and Energy Weapons couldn't compete with the Small Arms skill for damage-per-second and sneak criticals, especially once the ubiquity of Small Arms weapons and ammo was taken into account.

Yeah, totally agree.

Understand that having powerful, very complicated, supposidly rare guns around all the time would be a bit hard to explain, but hell, why make it a skill if everyone will need to end up using other guns for 75% of the game?

Seems like "small guns" people will have more weapons to choose from than they could ever use, and the same is not really true for energy weapons.

Maybe they'll end up throwing in waaaaaaay more uniques for energy weapons.

Did an energy weapons only character in fallout 3, and it was just fine to play with, but found myself only really using the unique plasma rifle and once in a blue moon the wazer wifle; even more rare, if facing really really weak enemies, I would break out the plasma pistol.

Yup

If you go by that reasoning, normal guns leave even less room for different types, after all, you just have guns that shoot bullets. They can shoot bullets of different types, they can shoot faster, and be more accurate, and such, but they're still shooting bullets. If the designers aren't going to do energy weapons outside of your standard plasma, laser, and such, they could always just, oh, maybe add DIFFERENT KINDS of laser weapons and plasma weapons in the game. Because you know, it's possible for more than one model of laser-based or plasma based rifle or pistol type weapon to exist in the same universe... After all, in Fallout 3, we had two assault rifles, not counting unique ones, which functioned pretty much the same way but had different stacks, and for pistols, we got many more options. There's no reason we couldn't have more than one type of laser rifle or laser pistol too, or for a bit more variety, how about a laser sniper rifle? I'd imagine lasers would be good for that, considering that you wouldn't have to worry about things like the wind or bullet drop messing up your aim at long ranges. Or maybe some sort of automatic plasma weapon or something, not only would things like that add more variety to energy weapons, it could also allow them to cover certain niches that they did not in Fallout 3 (Well, Operation Anchorage added the Gauss rifle to serve as an energy sniper rifle, but it made absolutely no sense for it to be an energy weapon since it doesn't shoot lasers or plasma or anything like that, it shoots a solid projectile, you know, kind of like what the 10mm pistol or assault rifles shoot, only the bullet is propelled by electromagnetic coils rather than exploding gun powder, but if that allows it to qualify as an energy weapon, then really, ANY gun should count as an energy weapon.)

But we do know that there will be more types of energy weapons than in Fallout 3, at least a couple ones that weren't in Fallout 3 have been confirmed, still, I expect that players who focus on energy weapons will have less options than players using guns, so I hope that energy weapons will get some advantage to make up for this, like say, being more powerful than their normal counterparts, not to the point of being unbalancing, but enough that you would actually have a reason to consider sacrificing options for the sake of energy weapons, it makes sense to give them some advantage anyway, after all, people wouldn't bother making energy weapons if they didn't have some sort of benefit. I don't think "because it's cool" is reason enough for the military or any other such group to invest in such weapons.

similarly, I don't know if/how they plan on implementing special ammo and hand loads with energy weapons, which takes out another degree of possible variety.

I'm assuming they'll have the same/similar weapon mods, however.

if the solar scorcher was in game.(which i hope it is)

it should only be useable during the day. have infinate ammo, but you could not reload. you had to wait for the gun to recharge. like AP points but slower. oh and it should set them on fire

That's actually a pretty clever idea for an energy weapon, and certain would solve the rare ammo issue of a unique weapon, as well as preventing a player from spamming an ultra powerful weapon. Say you only got 20 shots on a full charge and the charges only replenished while you were outside during the day. Set the rate of recharge to where a full day outside would make you go from 0-20 charges, and you're set.

I hope rare weapons like this are difficult to find random encounters, like the Alien Blaster in FO2. That made it special and exciting to get on a playthrough, instead of something mundane that could be acquired every character if you knew where to look.

I don't understand your post.
I didn't say that we DON'T have many options for EW I said we DO have many options for them.

And dude, again, hit the enter button a couple of times.

[edit]
edited my previous post a little.

Any ideas if/how this is going to be implemented (special rounds/hand loads)

Maybe a developer could chime in, because with far fewer weapons to begin with, then adding in no special round abilities, energy weapons looks to be quite deep in the hole when compared to their bullet weapon counterparts.

To answer your question I do know that there are different rounds you can use for some energy weapons
(by the way these aren't the actual names of the rounds these are just stupid ones I made up cause I just can't remember them)
There is the basic round that does standard damage
The overcharged round which does more damage but degrades your weapon faster
and the undercharged round which does less damage but the weapon degrades slower

These are confirmed.....but please don't ask for the link cause I really don't feel like looking for it
I promise that they are confirmed

Consider that Energy Weapons are a fairly new development made just prior to the FO universe Big Bang and it really makes sense that there should be less EWs available. EWs are mentioned for about 10 years prior to the Bombs and actual projectile weapons had been around several hundred years prior to that.

What you think should be provided to satisfy your gaming jones should not override logic applied to the canon of the game universe.

Another issue would be availablity before the bombs and capibility of manufacture and maintenance afterward. I doubt you could go down to Wal-Mart and buy a Laser Rifle before the bombs dropped (EWs were purely military grade weapons), but any citizen might own a Hunting Rifle or a .32 pistol. Also, keeping a Laser Rifle working (not to mention a stock of the ammo) would be many times more difficult than standard firearms and ammo (I'm sitting within 30 feet of several ammo reloading stations right now).

If I'm right about what I think I remember about the Fallout timeline, they were only just putting energy weapons (laser & Plasma) into general use for the army when the war happened which would limit just how many types we would have available in Fallout by the time our character appeared on the scene.

I admit I could be misremembering this particular aspect of the timeline, but it's still a possible viable reason why there are not all that many different energy weapons available ingame.

Before the bombs, you probably could walk into "Wal-Mart" and purchase a laser weapon. Specifically, you could purchase the civilian-grade Wattz series. They were noticably absent from Bethesda's version of Fallout, though.
Also, i'm positive the reason why theyre rare isn't because few were made, its because the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave scavenge/purchase/steal them all.

:shrug: To me, energy weapons are to Star Warsy for my tastes, they look cool and I like their skin, but the EWs are a bit to uh, Sci-Fi for my personal use, I prefer conventional bullets, the way they sound when they fire off just feels so.....palpable,

I prefer Energy Weapons to regular old guns. There's just something satisfying about disintegrating an enemy that insists on using antiquated weaponry. Laser Rifles are powerful and extremely accurate, and even Laser Pistols are a priceless commodity to have at the beginning of the game. I can't wait to see what kind of mods they're going to have. Hopefully there'll be a full auto mod for the Laser Pistol/Rifle. Considering how Energy Weapons were circulating around the civilian market be the time the war broke out, they shouldn't be rare at all.

BrotherGrimm is right. I posted long ago much the same thing.

2066

"Summer: Adding further insult to the Sino-American relations, the first crude fusion cell is unveiled, one of the results of the Power Armor project. Devices designed for the fusion cell begin to be manufactured. Incorporating fusion power into the general U.S. infrastructure begins, but the process is too slow to supply power to the regions that need it. Nearly eleven years later, few sections of the United States were supplied with fusion power."

Since the Great War was October 23, 2077 that only gives less then 11 years for Lazer/Plasma weapons. Stands to reason that there should only be a few types.

Also: seeing as how civilians were only able to get their hands on low powered Wattz lazer weapons, the usa did not have the material to make enough for civilian use. Also backed up by the whole point of the Great War "to many humans not enough resources to go around."