Fallout: New Vegas is often lauded as one of the best Fallouts, being Obsidian's first and only foray into the world of 3D ushered in by Bethesda's third game. But, being on the older engine as with 3 and Oblivion, it has some fairly wonky animations, and so one fan has opted to add a bit more oomph to them. Specifically, to melee weapons.
In a teaser shared on Joey Payne's YouTube channel, you can see knives cut through enemies (or rather, friends) while flipping around in his hand, feeling far more like a pulpy slasher than a cumbersome 2010 game. Moving away from knives, switchblades, swords, and all other kinds of sharp objects, Payne posted a third video where he doles out some pain by way of blunt force trauma.
Remember Easy Pete, that nice old fella in Goodsprings? His head gets bashed in immediately, and blood splatters all over the pipe. It's gruesome. Things move a lot more fluid, even if Payne is swinging about heavy objects. He describes it as "A comprehensive melee animation overhaul for almost every single one-handed melee weapon in New Vegas, its DLCs, and TTW", dubbing it Butcher Pete after the '50s Roy Brown song - perfect for a Fallout mod, eh?
To use this mod, you need kNVSE Animation Plugin and xNVSE, and if you use Classic Fallout Weapons Remastered, there's even a patch to make it compatible with this animation overhaul. And while it overhauls the animations, it "Retains all attack timings" and is "FOV-friendly", so you won't notice any breaks in gameplay.
The overall aim of the mod wasn't just to make weapons feel more impactful and fluid, ironing out some of that jank, but to make each and every weapon feel distinctive and more fitting of their type - cleavers and machetes chop now, for example, while blunt weapons are now bludgeoning, with bounce-off effects to up the violence. Smashing heads in Fallout has never been more fun. Unless you use a rebar. Can't go wrong with a rebar.