Just for the record, when we say "Stay true to vanilla" we mean in terms of story and "feel".
That's pretty subjective, admittedly.
Everything we added or changed in FO3 was done because we felt like it would be weird to have that content in FNV and not in FO3. FNV weapons were added, but anything that has reason to be local to NV was kept in NV, a good example is the Ranger Sequoia, finding one in FO3 would have been weird. We normalized the weapons because there is no good reason that weapons like the 9mm pistol wouldn't exist, logically, in the DC wasteland. We did the same with armors, and some of those were very subjective, the APA mk1 (non-unique remnants armor) is a good example. Adding Mk1 and Mk2 talon company armor is another subjective one. We used the APA mk1 to close the level gap on the enclave, so that at low levels they didn't have APA mk2 (classic FO3 Enclave Power Armor) because that would just be horrible on the player. APA1 isn't much better but it is better. Same with Talon Co Combat Armor MK1 and MK2, in FO3 the talon co was a reliable source of combat armor which offers the highest non-PowerArmor protection; we wanted to keep that trend. As the player levels up in NV plain combat armor is surpassed by other armors, but MK1 and MK2 remain in the upper levels.
We overhauled the leveled lists on almost every enemy encounter in FO3, partly to make it work like FNV (and use a lot of FNVs lists) but also to make sure that weapons are well distributed.
We added new recipes so that a survival player could still be viable in DC, to enable that we needed to add new harvestables and place them all over the world.
The most controversial change we made was the use of the 9mm pistol in V101 instead of 10mm. I hate it. Practically everyone on the team hates it. Most people that play hate it. But I also feel it's the best solution. Otherwise the player walks out of V101 with a mid tier weapon and tons of ammo that is already sold by merchants at level 1. They skip the entire skill 0 tier of pistols instantly. If the player uses Energy Weapons, they start with a laser pistol, and so using the 10mm favors Guns over E. Weapons, not good. It's worth mentioning (even though nobody seems to have noticed this) that the V101 Security Armor is weaker than any other vault security armor, again, so that the player doesn't leave the vault with excellent armor. I am to this day open to just about any solution that makes sense logically, within the framework of the game, and doesn't give the player an imbalanced boost from the beginning. Some things we've discarded are: low condition (with the amount of 10mm pistols and NV's ability to repair to 100 no matter your skill, you would still leave with a max condition 10mm pistol, just less of them); low ammo (10mm ammo is buyable from the start and you would still leave with enough ammo to get some caps rolling and start buying that 10mm).
And another controversial change: the removal of .32 ammo. Many members of the team campaigned to have 2 hunting rifles, one chambered in 32 and one in 308. In this case I made an executive decision and said no. I didn't like the aesthetic of having two visually identical weapons with different stats and ammo types. Some members of the team said we could change the .32 Hunting Rifle to make it look different. I killed that as well, because by changing it's appearance, we are making it a different weapon, and then people would bitch about the fact that it doesn't look like FO3. So we overwrote the FO3 Hunting Rifle with the FNV Hunting Rifle, that left ONLY the .32 Revolver that used .32 ammo. Now you'll notice that there are other ammo types that are only used by 1 weapon, but those are specialized/powerful equipment, not a simple revolver. We kicked around different chambering values: .308, .357, .38 special, 9mm, and .22LR. Of those, .308 was ridiculous for a revolver, especially for a low level one. A 357 revolver already existed. 38 special is just a type of 357 in NV, so same deal there. 9mm was a viable option, but we felt that using 22LR would make it easier to have a rifle and a pistol chambered in the same caliber, something that JR Sawyer admitted to doing on purpose, harking back to old cowboy practice of doing just that. So we settled on a .22 Revolver and killing .32 ammo.
I believe that's the extent of the content changes we made and I still feel they were all justified. If you have other changes you've encountered, throw them in here and I can usually remember why we made them and we felt they were justified.
it is really hard to keep up to the changes because it just keep coming, people use their time to make TTW and their own personal projects so no one ever has time to write an in-depth doc.
