Unusable Enemy Equipment: Difference between revisions

 

* Many, many [[First-Person Shooter]] games. Nowadays it's less prevalent: the player character can pick up and use enemy weapons. In less modern shooters, however, defeated enemy grunts would often lie as corpses on the ground with their weapon in plain view, but you'd be unable to take it unless they spawned the appropriate weapon/ammo item while dying. As noted above, this isn't necessarily unrealistic.

*** And the bosses are all [[Super Soldiers]] wielding weapons you legitimately ''couldn't'' use (i.e. several-hundred-pound [[Gatling Good|Gatling guns]]).

** Most Tactical Shooters will forbid you from carrying enemy weapons except to take as evidence, the reason for this is simple, they are either poorly maintained or is different from what your team is carrying, this is true in [[Real Life]] as taking an enemy weapon to use will lead to friendly fire incidents.

* In ''[[Call of Duty]] 5 World at War'', the player will see many Japanese officers with a Katana, sometimes even using them, but they can not be pickup up or used by the player after killing the officer.

** One of the ways to get around this was to literally [[Video Game Stealing|STEAL the equipment]] from a desired enemy by using one of your more stealthy mercs to sneak up on the enemy, loot him, and run.

* [[Bungie]] plays with this one quite a bit:

** In a rather useful aversion, ''[[Oni]]'' not only allows you to strip and disarm enemy weapons, but the lack of [[One Bullet Clips]] means that it's advantageous to do so just after an enemy reloads. Likewise, if you see an enemy using a forcefield (the kind that stops bullets, but not punches), you can pick it up after you drop them, with same level of power remaining. Hence, making a punch to the face more effective, as it makes their equipment much more usable.

** While the first ''[[Halo]]'' game ignored this trope for the most part, some items (FRG, Sword, Shield, Wraith) still cannot be used. The second and third games clean this up for the most part.

** 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.

** An earlier counterexample is the ''[[Ultima]]'' series, in particular ''Ultima 6'' and ''7'' and their related sub-games, in which every single lowly guard drops his sword, armor, et cetera when killed. The effect is that you quickly stop looting the junk because you simply can't carry two dozen sets of armor around.

** In ''[[Fallout]]''. all armor save for the [[Powered Armor]] worn by the Brotherhood of Steel could be looted. In ''[[Fallout]] 2'', armor wasn't lootable; apart from the game-balance issues, presumably the idea of shooting the enemies through their armor and then using it yourself feels a tad unrealistic. The [[Powered Armor]] exception was pointed out in-game too: One of the paladins of the Brotherhood of Steel mentions that you'll never encounter a non-brotherhood soldier in their trademark power armor since with it fully encasing the wearer, the latter dying means the armor has been shot to unwearable bits.

** In ''[[Fallout]] 3'', anything that the enemy carries, wears, or uses, can be stolen. Early in the game, it's a good idea to leave your dead enemies rotting in their underpants. This extends all the way up to the Enclave and Brotherhood armors, which you can easily pilfer off the dead. However, no armor you find this way will ever be in 100% top condition. You can even loot the power armor, but you can't ''use'' it until 2/3 of the way through the main story quest. Unless you have the Operation Anchorage DLC, which will not only give you Power Armor training much earlier, but also a [[Good Bad Bugs|nigh-indestructible]] T-51b.

* 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.

* This is present to some extent in ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'', where most weapons and armor (especially blasters) cannot be collected, but ancillary items (medpacks, stims, grenades, etc.) are commonplace drops. Since loot is randomized, this makes sense, but it also leads to the odd situation of an enemy dropping an item he isn't even carrying, such as Dark Jedi dropping a blaster rifle. Boss battles are a major exception to this trend, but this is the case sometimes even then (e.g. the Sith governor of Taris wields a double-[[Vibroweapon|vibroblade]] that can't be scrounged).

* 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.

* In ''[[Dark Sector]]'', the trope is somewhat averted by being able to pick up the guns, but they blow up in your face after 30 seconds due to 'infection governors'. Why you can't loot the ammo is anybody's guess.

** If you watch the blinking of the sensor, most of them are very close to the weapon's magazine.

** But effectively played straight with Phantom Ganon's sword, which is only dropped in rooms where there are no other enemies anyway.

*** Which is secondary to the fact that you don't ''want'' to pick it up anyway, since watching how it falls is a puzzle hint.

*** And you get the Gale Boomerang and Ball and Chain from beating the two minibosses that use them.

*** And then there's a case of a boss reversing this trope ''on the player'', [[Wake Up Call Boss|and it's the first boss, no less!]] If the player is unable to break out of a struggle when Ghirahim uses his [[Barehanded Blade Block|finger to parry your attacks]], he'll steal the Goddess Sword from you and use it against you, forcing you to have to use a well-timed [[Shield-Bash]] to knock it back out of his hands.

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' has a notable quest where you need to collect weapons from specific monsters (which you could actually use, if you so wish), but as with all quest drops, the chance to get one is far lower than you'd expect. In fact, the chance of another weapon is higher.

*** The standard [[Hand Wave]] is that you, in the process of killing the mob, destroyed the body part in question. In classic Blizzard style, this response fits all scenarios, ranging from the [[Justified Trope|plausible]] to the... [[Blatant Lies|not]].

*** Hard to imagine destroying a troll's ears or tusks in the course of killing it.

** Much like the sissy defaults for dismemberment, this can be overcome by the flipping of a few flags in one's INI file.

* There are often weapons which enemies in ''[[Fire Emblem]]'' are seen using, but the player cannot actually obtain.

** 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...

* A common staple in ''[[Nippon Ichi]]'' games, though considering everyone and their grandmother (sometimes coming up as a storypoint even) is portrayed as having [[Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?|Cthulhu-sacking]] prowess, it's generally accepted they simply annihilated the other person's equipment [[Everything Fades|along with the entirety of the enemy]]. Which doesn't explain how it comes back when you get them revived at the hospital, but there you go. If you see something you like, you must either steal it with a special item (it doesn't have to be used by a thief, but it's much harder otherwise) or capture the enemy and take the items away.

** The ''[[Disgaea]]'' games in particular have Geo Panels that can clone your characters - the clones are hostile and replicate the original ''exactly'', down to the equipment. It is impossible to steal their equipment even with the specialty items listed above, and only a weapon in the third iteration has the potential to knock only one of those items off the enemy when they do die to it; if you could freely steal equipment from the enemy, it would (much sooner than usual) [[Game Breaker|snap the game in half]].

* 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.

** However, you cannot actually obtain the items collected this way, as in have them in your inventory. While the weapon drop system renders this a non-issue, it would break the fandom apart if you could get a hat by simply collecting it off of a corpse. The game does make one exception though: killing someone currently wearing a Ghastly Gibus or any of it's variants would grant you a Gibus of your own, if you do not already own one.

* 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...

** The engine of ''[[Neverwinter Nights]]'' allows for this as well; any equipment a humanoid enemy possessed can be flagged as droppable, and looting the armor or weapons of a dead enemy will actually remove it from the corpse's model. The official campaigns go back and forth on this; generally, the expansions are more likely to let you loot enemy equipment, but it varies from encounter to encounter. Unofficial modules, of course, can run with it any way the creator likes.

*** In cases where it came up in my game, the party just happened to know about a simple ritual that swapped holy symbol properties.

* In the Tabletop RPG ''Deadlands: Hell On Earth'', the Black Hats use vehicles and weaponry equipped with self-destruct devices that trigger if anyone without an identity chip tries to use them. Said chips are surgically implanted in the Black Hats, and naturally self-destruct if anyone tries to remove them.

* In ''[[Pitfall]] The Lost Expedition'', Harry passes by crates full of TNT throughout the game and is assaulted by enemies that throw it. You cannot use it yourself until a friendly character hands you some during a cutscene late in the game.

* 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.

* In ''[[Minecraft]]'', Zombie Pigmen's gold swords and Skeleton's bows would once never drop upon their deaths. The 1.2 patch made these items Rare Drops, with a chance for these weapons being enchanted.

* ''[[White Knight Chronicles]]'' and its sequel revolve around a quintet of five [[McGuffin|20 foot-tall suits of living armor]] known as Incorrupti. Each Incorruptus has its own human pactmaker--four of them are full-time members of the player's party, and the fifth is the [[Big Bad]] ([[Big Bad Wannabe|Wannabe]]). But one of those four is a [[Sixth Ranger Traitor]], who's hiding the fact that their Inccoruptus is the evil [[The Rival|Black Knight]]. Its a poorly kept secret, even in-game, yet gameplay-wise [[Story and Gameplay Segregation|the game treats it like the character in question just doesn't have an Incorruptus at all]].