Lack of "modern" weapons & armour

I'd say Marksman Carbine is quite advanced on it's own.

 

We don’t really know how old a lot of the weapons are. The AK-112 is from the early 21st century at least.

 

Developer ineptness; misunderstanding of the world setting [possibly deliberate, for marketing reasons].

The series setting is a 1950's era expectation of the future; Bethesda presents a future obsessed with the 1950's—quite a significant difference, but also more difficult to impart on the consumer. There were professional game reviewers that thought FO3 was set in an alternate 1950's.

 

By 2025, Britain will be equipped with tanks firing laser beams that never need ammo replenishing! I think Boris Johnson and the British military were into C+C more so than Fallout that liked Bozars and plasma weapons

 

I think Fallout should have been using a system that Van Buren would implemented. Energy weapons and ballistics are one and the same skill. But energy weapons are just the future, better tier ones.

You can only improve ballistic guns so much but the firepower curve will remain rather flat. Otherwise you just use more polymer, ceramic, super alloy to improve them. See the problem?

The only complain I got is just why only USA had the monopoly of energy weapons. Sure German company develop one or two (Plasma Defender by H&K). Otherwise no one else, except if you count China in Anchorage DLC.

 

Energy weapons have no recoil, and no fall off, and are unaffected by wind. It's an entirely different skill; one that gives no competency with ballistic weapons (which contend with gravity and resistance), and skill in the latter gives no familiarity with energy weapon use and maintenance.

Simplicity of theme. "The fifties, but in the future" rather than "The future anticipated by the 1950s" (and all that that entails). A simpler elevator pitch.

 

Any viable energy weapon would require ungodly amounts of energy to run. The US, even if it hadn't broken its dependency on oil fully by 2077 despite Bethesda depictions, had been the only country to succesfully develop the technology to allow such quantities of energy to be generated, and in man-portable sizes.

 

I mean laser trope is pretty common for "futuristic" weapons.
Skill = damage is just somewhat of a lazy approach to balance everything around RPG element imo(they probably didn't want players to feel like missing literally every shot and getting pummeled at low lvl).

 

Well, a crime family suddenly making other big crime gangs go panic once the former got access to good enough laser pistol. So even laser should be game changer enough compared to lots of ballistic gun.

 

And people still wonder why Imperial Guardsmen are issued with Lasgun instead of Melta or Vortex guns. Bruh, if you got Laser battery that can be recharged by putting it near a campfire, that's just huge net positive in logistic department.

That said, MF Breeder guns would be priceless. Especially if you can have multiple MF Breeder per gun.

 

(Excepting pure luck) skill is the difference between a head shot that strikes an eye, instead of hitting an earlobe; with the damage being commensurate.

 

I know Oblivion used use = experience, advancement. In reality this seems to make sense but in game bouncing around like a rabbit and sneaking about increased those stats.

Unless you gambled and put points into energy weapons at the start of Fallout, then won an early random encounter to gain an energy weapon, it made sense to start with small guns.

The principles in Mass Effect1 were that of a tiny particle or shard accelerated to hyper sonic speeds by using an internal accelerator like a mini CERN were the weapons of the day.

In later games, ammo had to be found, which I thought was weird.
In Fallout 2, I liked the bozar.
I had never bothered thinking were the weapons wrong for the time frame, I just shot things with various weapons and enjoyed it tremendously.

 

You are mostly describing laser, but even laser is affected by humidity. But something like plasma is pretty much not that far from how a bullet would behave, albeit more vulnerable i think.

In fact that would only make laser being the special energy weapons that doesn't require that much skill. Kinda like the first laser pistol you acquire in FNV?

Maybe energy weapons use should be paired with guns + science or/and repair skill?

 

Bullets don't reflect off of chrome, nor refract through glass. As for plasma, while it might be little plasma blob bullets, I'd expect the user to need specialized [electrical] knowledge to adjust it for accurate range or even damage at range that conventional firearms skill just doesn't cover.