Ok, so this has been bugging me for some time, the Gauss weapons platform changed several times across the Fallout Games, initially we had the PPK12 Gauss Pistol and the M72 Gauss Rifle, both of German design, while not common they were available in the West Coast, Fast foward 2277 we have this big guy:



From what I could understand from the lore, this specific Gauss Rifle was developed by the Chinese, it was a cool deviation from the traditional weapons and a fine addition to the game. Now, in FO4 and FO76 we have...this thing:



So here's the question: Why bother to introduce a new Gauss rifle if we had one in available in the East Coast already?

What bothers me is that this thing looks like a military prototype yet we don't have any new lore surrounding it, it just...appears out of nowhere and I like "dafuq is this?". Only information I could gather comes from the artbook



Ok, we can obviously see it is different from the one featured in Operation Anchorage, but why?

Not only that, but with FO76 Wastelanders we got the PPK12 Gauss pistol back, and I was really excited because I thought we were going to get the M72 rifle as well, but nope.

So here's my questions:

1. Why introduce a new Gauss platform with no explanation if we already have one?
   
2. Why we see the Chinese Gauss rifle in Fallout New Vegas? Shouldn't we see the M72 rifle instead?
   
3. Why bring back the classic pistol but not the classic rifle?
   

I know it sounds nitpicking and it is, but I genuinely don't understand the reason behind this decisions, also, the whole reason I'm writing this thread is to discuss the gauss rifle platform itself and because I hate FO4's Gauss Rifle. So what you guys think?

While I can't answer this, one thing to note is that they remade the original gauss rifle weapon for Fallout 4's CC. It doesn't have any modders credited under its creation so I presume it's one of the Beth dev-made mods like the Hellfire PA which got used in 76. Obviously CC isn't necassarily canon but that doesn't mean the details can't be. Hellfire PA was never in Fallout 4 canonically but the exact armor model was canon and dev made even.

The description for the mod is "Wielded with deadly effect before the Great War, the Prototype Gauss Rifle uses electromagnetic induction to shoot a projectile at tremendous speed. It is, in essence, a sniper's best friend." So it seems to imply that the original model has been retconned into some sort of prototype which would be made into the rifle from 4, or that this is just a very very similar model to the one used in Anchorage. While some features are expectedly not the same like the ammo change, the model is mostly identical. So take that as you will

Well they did make the Chinese Gauss Rifle into a creation, but feels weird calling it a prototype, if anything, the original should be the prototype.

If they said something like "The americans designed their Gauss Rifle based on Chinese Technology" and then call it "Chinese Gauss Rifle" it would make more sense.

Again, I'm making this argument based on the weapon's appearence, because the "Prototype" Gauss Rifle looks more polished than the orginal Gauss Rifle, but then again, I'm not a weapons engineer, so a weapon may look crude on the outside but it's actually pretty advanced.

themaster96 wrote:

Well they did make the Chinese Gauss Rifle into a creation, but feels weird calling it a prototype, if anything, the original should be the prototype.

If they said something like "The americans designed their Gauss Rifle based on Chinese Technology" and then call it "Chinese Gauss Rifle" it would make more sense.

Again, I'm making this argument based on the weapon's appearence, because the "Prototype" Gauss Rifle looks more polished than the orginal Gauss Rifle, but then again, I'm not a weapons engineer, so a weapon may look crude on the outside but it's actually pretty advanced.

I like the design of the gauss rifle in fo4 and fo3 but i completely agree with you on this . They could've just flipped their names around , i.e : Chinese gauss rifle be the finished product and the fo4 model be the prototype as i think a prototype would be more concerned about functionality and getting things working rather than looking all clean and neat (and the fo3 gauss weapon looks like a more sophisiticated design compared to fo4 ), so it'd fit better as a finished product )

other ways they could explain it is that the fo3 one is a prewar prototype and the fo4 is a post war one made by the brotherhood or the enclave (which is why it looks so crude) or some other faction , or another way is to say that the M72 is the german railgun , the one is fo3 is chinese and the one in fo4 is american made . Again i don't know how much sense this makes but seeing as how they left things largely unexplained , future games or fo76 updates could explain it .

Also about new vegas not having the M72 and instead the ' prototype ' gauss rifle , i think it's largely due to them not having time to recreate assets from the original as they generally used the versions of fo3 for other weapons like the 10mm smg , the hunting rifle , gatling laser ... etc instead of remaking the ones that appeared in the originals

Well you're right, but they did create other weapons, they even created an assault rifle intead of using the old one, like, they knew some weapons were different. Also, I follow the same logic as you, M72 is of german design, FO4 is american and FO3 is Chinese.

Another thing I'd like to add, even though it may make things more confusing, going off of the assumption that the PPK12 and M79 are German made, the fallout 3 and NV rifles are Chinese made, and the 4/76 rifle is American made.

Functionally the German and Chinese rifles are coil guns, whereas the American made one is a railgun

Thats even worse actually, because they're all put under the "Gauss" category, where one is a Railgun, which inquires further Wat.

This is a topic I've wondered about myself several times. One of the questions is easier to answer than the others.

1. Why introduce a new Gauss platform with no explanation if we already have one?

Listen to any promotional video for a Bethesda Game that features Todd Howard talking about that game, and you will hear him talking about the concept of "reinvention." He likes to remake everything with each new title. Usually, this means stripping perks, stats, and spells out of each game to simplify them. For Fallout 3, I think Todd wanted to completely redesign all the weapon and armor aesthetics of Fallout to make them "his" - that is, Bethesda's. Kill the past.

The Plasma rifle, laser rifle, assault rifle, every gun in Fallout 3 looks completely different from their Fallout 1/2 counterparts. Some were retconned later to be parallel designs, but we know with Fallout 3 that these new designs were meant to replace the old ones. For instance, when you hand in a suit of Enclave Power Armor to Protector Casdin, he will call it "Advanced Power Armor Mk. II" - which is the exact name of the power armor used by Enclave soldiers in Fallout 2, despite it looking completely different. The Fallout 3 Enclave Armor was later retconned to be X-02 armor, but I think the point stands: Bethesda wanted to remake the aesthetics of everything in Fallout, including the weapons, and not just port all the classic designs over to 3D.

The chinese Gauss Rifle, the X-02 armor, the plasma rifle's transformation from a giant lawnmower thing into a handheld rifle - all part of Bethesda's attempts to "own" the franchise and make it theirs by replacing the old iconic assets with their own.

In-universe, I think the explanation is very plain. Over time, weapons fall apart and require maintenance. As there has been no factory in operation for over 200 years that can build replacement parts for highly technical weapons like the M72 and PPK12, it's likely that the ability for people to improvise replacement parts ran out and these weapons simply fell into disuse. Thus, you see more ramshackle designs for gauss rifles like Fallout 4's design, because these are attempts to improvise a gauss rifle from the parts that are available in the wasteland, rather than a professionally produced model from a pre-war company.

2. Why we see the Chinese Gauss rifle in Fallout New Vegas? Shouldn't we see the M72 rifle instead?

I think this question is very easy to answer, and it's a practical thing. Obsidian was given only 18 months to make New Vegas, and some corners were cut. Why spend weeks modelling, texturing, animating, and placing a brand new gauss rifle when you can just use the one that's already in the game? The man hours that would have been spent on that can now be spent on making new weapons and armor.

3. Why bring back the classic pistol but not the classic rifle?

Well first of all, the Wastelanders update that brought the PPK12 into FO76 is only a year old, and it remains to be seen that the M72 will never make an appearance in FO76. It could very well be released in a future update.

Having said that, I think this comes down partially to bias. Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are now old enough that many of the people working on dev teams at Bethesda ended up there because they were huge fans of Fallout 1/2/3 back in the day, and their dream was to work on their favorite game. Such people bring with them their own favorites and biases toward or against certain weapons or armors. The artist who made the gauss pistol for FO76 is Joon Choi, and if you look his artstation you will see he is clearly a big fan of gauss and plasma weapons, as he has made many of them. It's likely that the Gauss Pistol was a favorite of his from playing these games back in the day, and now that he's working at Bethesda he had a chance to bring his favorite weapon to life in-game - and voila!

Those are my best explanations for The Gauss Question.

I know bethesda did "reinvent" the franchise, but the Chinese Gauss Rifle is their design, they could have used it, also, they did use previous models, the laser and the plasma rifle are basically the same.

Also, there's a problem with the answer of question 2, following this logic, they should have used the old assault rifle model as well and not make a new one, also, they introduced the P94 plasmas caster and the G86 Glock Plasma AKA Plasma Defender, weapons from previous fallout's, but not the M72 Gauss rifle or the PPk12.

For question 3, man I hope you're right, I' actually think they will, there's this weapon mod for the Gauss pistol that never made into the game, this one:



If you look closely, it does resemble the M72 Gauss Rifle, a bit of redesign and voila. One might wonder that the sole reason they removed this mod from the game is because it resembles a M72 Rifle and they might be planning to bring it back. For the other energy weapons platform, both the laser and the plasma, the weapons starts as a pistol and can be converted into a rifle, maybe they're planning on doing the same here, that's why they removed this mod, or maybe they're going to introduce a the rifle independently altogether.

Ultimately I think the Chinese gauss rifle was used for FNV because of time constraints. However, there are, I think, some other factors at work here. I'm thinking mainly of theming and setting. FNV is set in Vegas and the mojave desert for a reason - its story deals heavily in Americana and is themed around a neo-wild west setting. Weapon-wise, this is realized with many classic "American" weapons like lever-action rifles and revolver that are often associated with the Western setting.

I think the Chinese assault rifle fit into Fallout 3 because that game's setting was in the nation's capital, and pre-war hysteria over Chinese infiltration of the government was a major part of that game's backstory. Sometimes this was reflected in-game like at Mama Dolce's or the sub in Point Lookout. Obsidian probably felt that the Chinese assault rifle and Bethesda's new G3/FNFAL based take on the assault rifle didn't fit their setting, and replaced them with the more M4/M16 inspired assault carbine and marksman carbine. The Gauss rifle doesn't fit into that classic Americana theme given that it's a high-tech future weapon, so it didn't receive the same attention.

It's also worth noting that as Obsidian didn't make Fallout 3, it may not have been known to all the developers that the Fallout 3 Gauss rifle was of Chinese origin. Finally, there is no American produced gauss weapon in the Fallout universe. Fallout 2 explicitly states in the item description for both the M72 gauss rifle and the PPK12 gauss pistol that both are German products.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas are both games that revolve around their settings. Some weapons and armors are important parts of establishing that setting - such as having classic cowboy repeaters and revolvers in a neo-western setting like New Vegas - while other weapons and armors are not as important to the setting. For a weapon like Gauss which isn't intrinsically tied to its game setting in the way that say, the Chinese assault rifle is to FO3 or the lever action rifles are to FNV, I think it was an easy development decision to just use the existing asset that worked just fine, and using the man hours that would have been spent making a new gauss rifle to instead make more weapons to help establish the setting, like revolvers, etc.

Simply put, some weapons were seen as more important to the setting of the game than others, and those like the gauss rifle that were seen as less important were de-prioritized over other weapons.

As for what you say on the P94 and the Plasma defender returning to FNV - well I think this is more of what I said in my answer to question 3. Developers have their own biases and favorites. We know that the .223 pistol from Fallout 2 was a favorite of J E Sawyer, the lead dev on New Vegas, and that gun made its way into New Vegas. It's likely that other devs on the team couldn't resist the opportunity to take some of their favorite guns from Fallout 2, a game some of those devs worked on 10 years earlier, and realize them in full 3D. So, devs took their favorite guns from Fallout 2 and put them into Fallout New Vegas. Just as Joon Choi did with the Gauss Pistol for Fallout 76.

Obsidian did make a minor, but imo needed tweak to the gauss rifle, they added a buttstock to it

Sarcasm wrote:

Ultimately I think the Chinese gauss rifle was used for FNV because of time constraints. However, there are, I think, some other factors at work here. I'm thinking mainly of theming and setting. FNV is set in Vegas and the mojave desert for a reason - its story deals heavily in Americana and is themed around a neo-wild west setting. Weapon-wise, this is realized with many classic "American" weapons like lever-action rifles and revolver that are often associated with the Western setting.

I think the Chinese assault rifle fit into Fallout 3 because that game's setting was in the nation's capital, and pre-war hysteria over Chinese infiltration of the government was a major part of that game's backstory. Sometimes this was reflected in-game like at Mama Dolce's or the sub in Point Lookout. Obsidian probably felt that the Chinese assault rifle and Bethesda's new G3/FNFAL based take on the assault rifle didn't fit their setting, and replaced them with the more M4/M16 inspired assault carbine and marksman carbine. The Gauss rifle doesn't fit into that classic Americana theme given that it's a high-tech future weapon, so it didn't receive the same attention.

It's also worth noting that as Obsidian didn't make Fallout 3, it may not have been known to all the developers that the Fallout 3 Gauss rifle was of Chinese origin. Finally, there is no American produced gauss weapon in the Fallout universe. Fallout 2 explicitly states in the item description for both the M72 gauss rifle and the PPK12 gauss pistol that both are German products.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas are both games that revolve around their settings. Some weapons and armors are important parts of establishing that setting - such as having classic cowboy repeaters and revolvers in a neo-western setting like New Vegas - while other weapons and armors are not as important to the setting. For a weapon like Gauss which isn't intrinsically tied to its game setting in the way that say, the Chinese assault rifle is to FO3 or the lever action rifles are to FNV, I think it was an easy development decision to just use the existing asset that worked just fine, and using the man hours that would have been spent making a new gauss rifle to instead make more weapons to help establish the setting, like revolvers, etc.

Simply put, some weapons were seen as more important to the setting of the game than others, and those like the gauss rifle that were seen as less important were de-prioritized over other weapons.

As for what you say on the P94 and the Plasma defender returning to FNV - well I think this is more of what I said in my answer to question 3. Developers have their own biases and favorites. We know that the .223 pistol from Fallout 2 was a favorite of J E Sawyer, the lead dev on New Vegas, and that gun made its way into New Vegas. It's likely that other devs on the team couldn't resist the opportunity to take some of their favorite guns from Fallout 2, a game some of those devs worked on 10 years earlier, and realize them in full 3D. So, devs took their favorite guns from Fallout 2 and put them into Fallout New Vegas. Just as Joon Choi did with the Gauss Pistol for Fallout 76.

That actually explains a lot, still, I would prefer the M72 Gauss rifle, guess this on me, my own Bias. Tbh I like the chinese Gauss design, the one I don't like is FO4's, looks like a bunch of scrap metal put together, and again, they could have provided beter lore for it, but I guess that doesn't fir the KISS principle, more lore means more complexity. I really don't like this KISS initiative, it's probably the main reason FO4 turned out so shallow, Far Harbor on the other hand, is a masterpiece.