Unusable Enemy Equipment: Difference between revisions

** In story the Elites will rather fight bare handed rather than used a loaded human weapon right next to them.

* This is also present in so many video game [[Role Playing Game|RPGs]] that making a list of them would be useless. You can have a random encounter with an enemy who is a knight with sword and shield, wearing armor, but you're never going to get the sword, shield, or armor unless it comes as a [[Randomly Drops|random drop]]. Exceptions include:

** Every single piece of enemy equipment in ''[[Titan Quest]]'' is a usable item. If they have a shiny weapon, you will get it. However, most pieces are far below normal quality.

** ''[[Vagrant Story]]'' shoves this in your face, painfully. You can actually see each individual piece of equipment that each enemy has equipped, but you have only a tiny chance of any piece of that equipment being a [[Random Drop]] and hence obtainable. The game doesn't attempt to explain this.

* ''[[Shining Force]] 2'' has a few bosses that can drop items. These items can't be equipped, but one of them can be used to cast spells.

* Avoided entirely in ''[[Nethack]]'': if an enemy is using an item, you can loot it off their corpse when they die. But they ''don't'' all leave corpses behind--which is far worse, since [[Wizard Needs Food Badly|you'll need food]] a ''lot'' more than you'll need (say) even more rusty pig-iron broadswords.

* In the ''[[Crusader: No Remorse|Crusader]]'' games, you can get ammunition, ordnance, medical supplies, money, and other equipment off of dead enemies... but ''never'' weapons or shields.

* In the ''[[X-COM]]'' series, all equipment used by the aliens will show up as an 'Alien artifact' and will be unusable. It is still possible to interact with these items... usually by accidentally blowing them up, which prevents you from looting them post-battle. After researching the specific weapons/items, you will then be allowed to outfit your squad with those weapons in addition to looting them off the corpses of your enemies. This is basically how you "level up" your weapons as you precede through the game.

** If you cheat to get them, they will usually still work, the most notable one is the final bosses magic book in ''FE7'' which would let anyone use magic. Nils could actually do damage!

** This trope is justified with ''[[Fire Emblem]]'''s beast enemies. In these cases, the "weapons" are fangs, claws, or other parts of the beasts' anatomy.

* In ''Resistance: Fall of Man'' you can't get the fireball shooters used by Chimeran Titans when they die. Justified twice over, as said guns are as big as you are... and Titans die when their cooling units overload and explode, blowing them apart. It similarly justifies not being able to get the weapon Slipskulls use from their corpses by having it [[Arm Cannon|mounted onto their arm]] with metal bands. There's no obvious reason the Arc Cannon can't be recovered from Hardfang corpses, though -- it's just not there when you try. If you look closely, they ''literally'' [[Everything Fades|vanish in a puff of smoke]]; no, there's no apparent reason why.

** In the game's [[New Game+]] mode, both the Slipskull weapons and the Arc Cannon are available to the player, alongside a couple of fancy new pieces of kit that you had no way of knowing existed. Of course, it might have been helpful to actually tell the player this at some point...

** In ''Separate Ways'', Ada ''does'' eventually get the option of buying one of the crossbows that the enemies are always using on you.

*** With some [[Made of Explodium|slight alterations.]]

* ''[[Ghost Recon]]'' lets you choose a set of weapons at mission start, but you can't use the weapons your enemies drop after you kill them. In ''[[Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter|Advanced Warfighter]]'', you can at least scavenge the ammo out of them if they're the same caliber as one of your weapons.

* Flash RPG ''[[MARDEK]]'' is released intermittently in chapter format, with items and stats impressively being carried over from chapter to chapter. Unfortunately,chapter 2 stacks you with staffs - Unusable ''Friendly'' Equipment because no one in the act can actually use staffs, no matter how good they are.

* The ''[[Quest for Glory]]'' series was notorious for this trope. Even if you were equipped with only a dagger and leather armor, and you just killed dozens of enemies carrying scimitars, spears, maces, scale mail, shields, ball and chains, etc. they would invariably be too 'damaged' or 'worthless' for you to pick up, if the game even acknowledged their existence in the first place.

* ''Megaman Zero 4'' averted this. Zero's new weapon, the Z-Knuckle, is some kind of energized hand attachment which enables him to literally tear weapons off of enemies and use them himself. There's a huge variety of weapons and gadgets he can steal this way, but he can only use one at a time, and most of the projectile weapons have limited ammo (which a certain upgrade part can regenerate).

 

** Played completely straight by Rogue Drones, which only ever drop crafting materials, and [[Demonic Spiders|The Sleepers]] who never drop their overpowered armor plating, missiles, or beam cannons.

* In ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'', weapons dropped by enemies act like medium-size ammo boxes, giving you 50% ammo, 100 metal (Engineers), and 50% cloak (Spies). The exception to this is the Heavy's Sandvich, which restores health to the person that picks it up, the Scout's baseball, which can be used by other Scouts, and the Engineer's toolbox, which fills ammo completely.

* [[4X]] game series ''Space Empires'', and possibly other games that use tech trees, allows you to capture enemy ships and study them for new tech. However if they have Ancient Ruins, or Racial, technology you can't use it because only empires with that tech tree have access to it. If you're lucky you might have found those ruins as well or are the same sort of race.

* Averted very, very well in the PC game ''[[Siege of Avalon]]''. You can strip dead enemies down to their underwear (and sometimes take that too, though this doesn't change the dead enemy model having underwear) if you feel like it, though actually carrying that equipment in your bag can be problematic due to a bag of limited size and only being able to wear so much stuff at once. The same items can be thrown on the ground (and stay there until you come back for them!) if you decide you don't actually want them, but they can't be put back on the corpses. Unfortunately. That could have been funny, dressing up a dead enemy whose people are on a religious rampage against everything your people have touched in your old clothes and a silly hat...

* In ''[[Assassin's Creed]]'' games, neither Altaïr nor Ezio can use the bows archers drop. ''Brotherhood'' continues the proud tradition with the new crossbow- and arquesbus-users, though you can loot their ammo for Ezio's use.

** On the other hand, you can snatch enemy melee weapons almost at will. While usually their weapons aren't anything special, spears can be thrown and be used to disable large groups of enemies with a singe spin.

* In ''[[Resonance of Fate]]'', you can't pick up any of the guns from dead human enemies. You'd probably want to -- their handguns do about 100 times more damage than yours and they have shotguns and assault rifles which you can't get at all -- but they all vanish with the enemies when they die. Some large enemies will drop weapons, but they're broken and not human-usable anyway so they can only be used for [[Item Crafting]] (how the Tinkerer manages to make tank-sized weapons into normal gun parts, in such a way that ''you can disassemble the gun parts and get the tank weapons back'' is left unexplained).

* In ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'' and its sequels, loot is randomized and somewhat rare. This means that you cannot take the blasters the enemy was just using against you. More ridiculously, it also means that an enemy may drop an item they obviously aren't even carry, such as Dark Jedi dropping blaster rifles.

* Mostly averted in ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]'', as many beastmen that you fight use weapons and shields that actually have the same texture models as player-usable equipment. On the other hand, some beastmen dropped items, such as the Quadav Helm, explicitly say that playable characters cannot wear them, and are generally either used for [[Twenty Bear Asses]] quests or for synthesis materials.

* Played straight in [[Rainbow Six]] (or at least the earlier games), although justified. In addition to practical reasons listed above, most missions require suppressed weapons, which the bad guys rarely have. No ammo drops either, as enemies rarely use the same ammo, and when they do, it's generally a non-compatible magazine style. Annoyingly, (unless I'm mistaken) you can't get ammo off from your fallen comrades either, even if they are using the same weapons. Made slightly more annoying since there are no [[One Bullet Clips]].

* The playable characters in [[Undercover Cops]] cannot wield knives, bottles, bats, or axes. This is kinda justified considering they can all shoot energy beams and wield weapons 2 or 3 times their size.

* The World War II ''[[Medal of Honor]]'' games, such as ''[[Medal Of Honor Frontline]]'', prevent the player from picking up weapons from enemies. This is usually for gameplay purposes: the player would either have no need for the weapon (like a K98 bolt-action rifle) because superior ones are available in large numbers, or the enemies all carry the same guns as the player and simply provide ammo. However, almost all enemies will still drop ammunition for American weapons, suggestion that either the M1 Garand is able to chamber both .30-06 and 7.92mm Mauser, or that the K98s are all loaded with .30-06 rounds.