A medium-weight auto/semiauto rifle with high damage, good rate of fire with cheap and plentiful ammo and the most powerful legendary effect, two-shot. And best of all, it’s available to any character with 3 fusion cores and around 3000 caps. This makes it arguably the single most powerful weapon in the game besides the famous random legendaries like two-shot guass or explosive miniguns and shotguns.
The Overseer’s Gaurdian is clearly powerful, but why do I call it OVERpowered?
Fallout is not a competitive multiplayer genre (Please don’t get any ideas Bethesda), so it’s not overpowered in the way the word is most often used. But it can however be overpowered in the sense that it ruins the natural weapon progression present in Bethesda RPGs.
Why do I have to go through pipe weapons, hunting rifles, laser/plasma rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, radium rifles or miniguns, when I have the most powerful rifle in the game waiting for me in vault 81?
If you want to be as powerful as possible(which you want, unless you’re roleplaying), the obvious answer is to stop whatever quest you’re doing and beeline to vault 81.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, look at Fallout 3 and New Vegas:
In Fallout 3, a sniper rifle can be found behind Megaton the moment one leaves the vault. It’s a long ranged, scoped and powerful weapon with a reasonable rate of fire, all around one of the best non-unique weapons in the game. BUT it has a rare form of ammo on top of being in piss poor condition. This means that in order to use it on a regular basis, you must either pay loads of caps(that you probably don’t have) to get it repaired, or find/purchase other sniper rifles to repair it with. AND you need to buy a rare and expensive ammo type in order to use it at all.
In New Vegas you could find powerful unique weaponry in traders in every town, and with some effort get the caps to also buy them, but you would often be shooting yourself in the foot if you did. Because you most likely can’t get ammo type for it until later levels, and now you have wasted 13000 caps you could have spent on gear you CAN use. And the gun could also have a strength requirement you don’t live up to.
These limiting factors in 3 and NV ment that the game designers can either expose the player to powerful gear early on, giving a little taste of what’s to come in later levels, while taking it from you afterwards (a dev-move called the “Abilitease”) or force you to look at weaponry you can’t use yet, a different kind of tease. Bethesda performs the Abilitease in Fallout 4 as well. The kill-deathclaw-with-a-minigun-in-power-armor-section is an example. They succeed by giving you just enough minigun ammo and only half a fusion core, forcing you to ditch the minigun and power armor eventually(unless you know where to find some more).
On the flipside, the Overseer’s Guardian uses the same ammo as the submachine gun, an early game weapon. On the surface this looks harmless, but it means that traders must carry large amounts of the ammo type from the beginning of the game, in order to give submachine gun users ammo, which inadvertently, gives the Overseer’s Guardian plenty of cheap ammo at all stages of the game. It also does not degrade, because bethesda removed weapon degredation, so you don’t need to be at a level where you find combat rifles on enemies in order to be able to repair your gun.
Conclusion
OG is OP because it’s more powerful than anything else you are guaranteed to find in the entire game, is easy to get, uses one of the most common forms of ammo, and because you don’t need to repair it, because Bethesda are a bunch of cunts who removed weapon degradation (jk love u). All these factors come together and make the OG OP.
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