На вопросы моддеров про Нью-Вегас отвечает J.E. Sawyer
Q: Energy weapons too weak?A: First, let me get this out of the way: I do not believe that it should be a design goal to make one skill better than another. While it's impossible to perfectly balance all skills, I don't think that Unarmed should be designed with the goal of being inferior to Guns, or that Energy Weapons should be designed with the goal of being inferior to Explosives. I believe the goal should be to make the weapon skills (specifically, in this case) distinct but comparable in overall utility. This means that
I think Energy Weapons should not be inherently better than Guns and I don't think that someone who focuses in Unarmed should drop dead in every open fight because it would be realistic to do so.Другими словами: мы хотим чтобы люди, которые приходят на перестрелку с ножами, не чувствовали себя ущербно и имели те же возможности что и стрелки 
Т.е. речь идет о балансе по принципу "если у нас в системе есть такой навык, его необходимо задействовать". Интересно, а много людей играет в ФНВ как в Обливион...The goal with Energy Weapons was ultimately to make them "outside the boundaries" of Guns. By that I mean that Laser Weapons would tend to be more accurate, faster firing, and lower DAM (usually, not not always) with higher DPS than its equivalent gun. Conversely, Plasma Weapons would tend to be slower firing and higher DAM. There are some cases where this isn't true, the most notable example being the Cowboy Repeater and Plasma Rifle, both of which are considered "tier 2" weapons for their classes. When balancing some of the Guns toward the end of the project, I did bump the Cowboy Repeater up relative to other Guns but did not bump up the Plasma Rifle, which is an oversight that I regret. The Plasma Rifle does have a much faster reload rate than the Cowboy Repeater, but it should also do a higher base damage. Ultimately I do think that I did tune some of the Energy Weapons too far out of "spec" compared to Guns, mostly at the low and mid-range. I did not intend to make Energy Weapons "bad" and I apologize if that is the perceived result.
Q: Linear?A: You can skip any number of the steps of the first half of the main quest and the story still makes sense. As with Fallout 1, the steps you follow to reach your goal are information-oriented. You go to Point A to learn about going to Point B, which leads you to Point C, but at these locations you're not doing anything that changes the world in a way that's necessary to continue to the story. Nothing prevents you from going to... the place where the water chip is... right after leaving Vault 13. It's just difficult. And that's the way F:NV's crit path is set up. You're just physically closer to your goal in Goodsprings than Vault 13 is to the water-chip-place.
The second half of the main quest is more open in terms of the order in which you do things, but you are required to do more things to advance the MQ.
Q: Boone overpowered?A: We discovered why companion skills were all over the place (mostly low) and why Boone was the god among scrubs. One issue was a bug related to calculating the leveled skills of characters once they were set to followers (they were reset to 1st level values). The other problem was that Boone, specifically, was having bonuses applied to his skills through his script. This resulted in Boone always having over 100% Guns regardless of when you recruited him. Weapon skill not only increases damage, but reduces weapon wobble during movement, which is why regardless of where Boone was moving/what he was doing, he was able to pull off running headshots that drop the target in one attack.
Q: Does the game push you towards supporting NCR?A: We aren't trying to funnel people toward a specific ending, and if Steam stats are correct, NCR is not the most common ending (it's Yes Man/independent).
Q: Why only one human companion?For the companions, there are a few reasons:
- It makes the game way easier to have two human companions whom you can equip.
- Reduces logical complexity in a variety of scenarios.
- Memory. It's hard enough to account for the player's various equipment loadouts in an area. Three human characters with potentially any weapon or armor -- that gets really hard to deal with.
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