FO3 did have some decent guns, like the Assault Rifle and the Chinese Assault Rifle.
I hated that Combat Shotty, tho. Its literally a Ppsh with a drum that is too far to work properly, should be way closer to the trigger.
Also always annoyed that we got a glorified Ppsh to replace the ORIGINAL Combat Shotgun, which was a beautiful chromed bullpulp sci-fi looking shotgun.
Also... am I the only one who hates Bethesda's Laser Pistol and Rifle designs? They look like fucking bricks. FO1/FO2 energy weapons had futuristic pulpish look, their laser guns look like laser bricks, more like those stupid 2000s Futuristic FPS blocky guns than something fitting Fallout.
The only good thing about Bethesda re: guns is that they went back to the classic retro guns idea where FO2 and FOT lost the plot and featured a bunch of real-world guns that had nothing to do with Fallout and were often mechanically bad. FN-FAL in FO2 is absolute top kekus - FN-FAL as a low-powered rifle discharging half its magazine in a burst? If you dump half a mag of 7,62x51mm NATO into someone, unless they have fucking Powered Armor, they will be fucking disintegrated and buried in a match box. Assuming you managed to dump half a mag without the recoil breaking your shoulder and making your shots go so wild the entire city gets holes.
So Bethesda went back to basics, but didn't know how to make proper guns. FNV was literally "Here's how it's done retards".
All progression has been streamlined to number gets bigger.
This is not just the gun progression, but also how they do difficulty. HP/DMG number gets bigger, the end.
Cue Fallout 3 endgame being an HP bloat fest.
Their armor mechanics are shit too, they only do DR, whereas FNV uses based DT.
Its a pity FNV went with minimal 5 dmg mechanic instead of going with the Van Buren concept of using Fatigue, and resisted damage going into fatigue. That could have simulated it far better while not making high-level armor completely invincible and still giving us and the enemies bulletproof armor moments.