One fan of the Fallout franchise is showing off how the pipe rifle has changed since its original appearance in 1998. While the pipe rifle is one of the most common weapons found in Fallout's most recent games, it used to be a pretty rare find.

The pipe rifle made its first appearance in Fallout 2, the last mainline game made under its original developers before the franchise was acquired by Bethesda. Unlike modern games in the series, the first two mainline Fallout games were presented in isometric views and featured turn-based combat, with each character allotted a certain number of action points each round. While the pipe rifle was likely the first gun that Fallout 2 players came across, it could only be found in two locations reliably, bought in one, and also popped up in a couple of random encounters, but it was nowhere near as common as the version of the weapons in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76.

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Also, as shown in a recent comparison image posted to Reddit by user Artanis137, it's undergone some significant cosmetic changes. While graphics had obviously improved between 1998 and Fallout 4's release in 2015, the newer version of the pipe rifle features a lot more mechanical parts and seems to have been harder to put together, as the original from Fallout 2 was little more than a pipe attached to a wooden stock by three fasteners. While the modern pipe rifle shown in the image also bears a scope, those augments technically don't come standard and can be added or removed thanks to the Fallout 4 weapon crafting system.

Fallout's Pipe Rifle Has Come a Long Way

The functionality of pipe rifles has evolved a lot since their original incarnation, even if they are still among the worst weapons in Fallout. While the pipe rifles in Fallout 4 have a standard magazine size of 12, the version from Fallout 2 was a single-shot rifle that required five action points to fire, all but guaranteeing that players wouldn't be able to fire, reload, and fire again in the same round of combat. Additionally, the original pipe rifle used 10mm ammo, while the ones from the modern games use .38 rounds.

Fallout 2 players reacting to the post had a lot of memories, both good and bad, of finding the pipe rifle. Since Fallout 2 is the only mainline Fallout game to have no vault in its prologue, the player has to rely on melee weapons like spears in the early game, and their quest to find the trader Vic in Klamath leads to his shop, where the pipe rifle can be found for free. Meanwhile, Fallout 4's oversaturation of pipe rifles seems to only elicit negative emotions, as everyone from supermutants and raiders to Diamond City guards seems to be equipped with the worst ranged weapons in the game.

Fallout

Fallout is a franchise built around a series of RPGs set in a post-nuclear world, in which great vaults have been built to shelter parts of humankind. There are six main games, various spin-offs, tabletop games, and a TV series from Amazon Studios.