While I understand the notion to respect designer's decisions, which isn't quite lore, but very close, a certain amount of rationalization is required when putting two games together that should have shared the same 2077 together. There are huge problems with this:
1. The design problems with the "Combat Shotgun" I mentioned above.
2. The Riot Shotgun, presumably for riots, is much, much, MUCH more powerful.
3. The combat shotgun, if it is a military grade combat weapon, is WAY too common in the CW to be the weapon of any asshole raider. It would make sense if the raiders generally had Hunting Shotguns, which would be as common as sand in the the pre-war era, and much more simple to build in post war machine shops.
4. Lore has already been countermanded, and in a good way, by giving Overlords LMGs instead of Tri-Beams, and the gameplay is MUCH more immersive for it.
But, in praise of the the Combat Shotgun's niche: I LOVE it as a 20 gauge platform, and could see it as an actual combat platform, but mechanically it needs either a three round burst or full auto and a larger magazine (a 20 gauge military platform over a 12 gauge has the same dynamitic of the 5.56 over the 7.62), and it needs to be remeshed. The problems with me doing an individual replacement are 1. Lore loves wood stocks and 2. the point was never 'I don't like it', it is that we know what it takes for a firearm to work properly, and among the standardized firearms, this is the only one that is so badly designed it has no real world counterpart. If it's supposed to look like the PPSh-41 fine, but it needs to the magazine placement where the PPSh has it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPSh-41
Magazine receivers do NOT go in the middle of the barrel. It defeats the purpose of the barrel. This isn't an energy weapon, whose designs are all speculative by necessity. No government in their right minds would buy a combat shotgun as currently designed, and even an incompetent government (which the proto-Enclave WAS NOT) could not hope to avoid scandal.
