Mojave Raiders

Mojave Raiders

Requirements:

Gun Runners' Arsenal

Description

Mojave Raiders is part-two in my trilogy of mods for populating the Mojave wastes; and, as you can see, I'm as imaginative as ever with the naming. Unlike Mojave Wildlife, this mod is more of an overhaul of New Vegas's rather lacklustre raider-types, fixing what I consider to be one of the major unsolved balance and progression issues the game still has. This is in addition to hand-placing many more raiders for you to encounter on your travels through the wastes.

Raiders in New Vegas were done rather poorly in my opinion. Firstly, have you ever read some of the lore regarding the Vipers or Jackals? They're meant to be spear-wielding tribals with an aptitude for poisons and the like, but New Vegas reduces them to typical gun-toting outlaws. They're even dressed in standard wastelander attire, making them look more like your average Freeside street thug than legendary tribesmen. Also, Obsidian clearly planned to develop the two raider gangs more than they did (the same can be said for much of New Vegas). The raider weapon and armour leveled lists contain many items which have level requirements higher than the maximum levels of any raiders you can encounter, hence they never appear in-game. This explains the relatively small pool of weapons they have in vanilla, which is a shame since looting raiders is likely how you obtain most of your equipment, especially early-game. This would have been a great way to introduce the player to New Vegas's expanded arsenal as they level up and progress through the equipment tiers.

This leads me on to my next major gripe. Raiders are easy fodder—they're meant to be—but this also means they're a really easy source of items. In vanilla, Vipers, Jackals, and Powder Gangers have quite a plethora of loot; they each have a chance of food, drinks, chems, and clutter—and these are all common drops too. This is one of the reasons, I realised, why the player accumulates so much of these items by the time they reach Novac, and it really hurts the early game balance. It seems Joshua Sawyer realised this too, which prompted him to remove all food, drinks, and chems from Powder Gangers in his mod. I noticed this when working on JSawyer Ultimate Edition, and I'm guessing he took one look at the other raiders, saw how many there were to edit, and was like "Nope!". Fiends and Great Khans (they're technically raiders too) don't suffer from this loot problem; they use the same system as Fallout 3, where raiders rarely drop a 'death item' and carry an uncommon 'raider loot' item, which can be caps, clutter, chems, food, extra ammo, etc and provides enough variety whilst keeping stuff more balanced. Funnily enough, some of the other