Aylaine said:
Half the base weapons in Fallout 3 weren't very good. A few were, but the rest were questionable. ESPECIALLY SNIPER RIFLES.
The problem most people would have in this regard is simply that the draw range (especially on the 360) wasn't long enough to actually get any use out of the scope. Couple that with the very rapid drop off of VATS targeting and the problem becomes even more clear. Finally, the simple fact that the actual sniper rifle was a very rare drop, and the fact that paying a merchant to repair required incurring crippling expenses (not to mention the very fast wear rate) and you had a weapon that was always just about broken that you couldn't use at long range anyhow. This often meant that the hunting rifle was simply a better weapon - more ammunition, more shots in a VATS session, fantastically common for repair purposes and very regularly had a damage per shot quite close to the (potentially) more powerful sniper or regulator rifles.
There are utterly useless weapons in the game however. Most of the melee weapons for example are garbage, and until you get to at LEAST sledgehammer level you aren't going to be doing much damage. Ditto for the hand-to-hand weapons, which required not only dumping lots of skill points but also quite a number of perks simply to make the weapon class remotely viable. While the powerfist worked quite well (and fisto even better) it faces similar problems to the sniper rifle.
The worst offenders in my book are the heavy weapons. The flamer is absolute garbage considering it's weight and range, the minigun is reasonably powerful but the attack sequence is terribly long and you tend to get shot quite a few times, and the gatling laser is much the same except it consumes much more valuable ammunition. The Missile Launcher works fairly well, but the rarity of the ammunition supplies ensures it's often held in reserve (meaning you have to carry that heavy piece of garbage around on the off chance you run into something REALLY nasty) and the FatMan is such tremendous overkill in almost every circumstance that It's difficult to use without harming yourself in the process.