» Tue Aug 03, 2010 6:48 am
While I really liked the car in FO2, the game-worlds of FO3 and F:NV are not big enough to warrant the use of one.
For those who don't know, the area encompassed by FO2's overworld map was HUGE; the entirety of FO3's or F:NV's map would fit in one node, and the game had about two dozen not including special encounters.
Now, in FO1&2 you could not walk directly from one node to another but instead used the overworld map to do so. You were represented by a little marker that moved across the map while the calendar kept track of the number of days that passed during the trip. Having the car in FO2 sped this up dramatically, as well as allowing you to store a huge amount of stuff for later use/sale. Since travel on the over-map was somewhat abstracted you didn't have to worry about things like driving off a cliff or into a tree, while use of a car in FPP travel would make these events very likely unless you were allowed to steer the car directly.
Since you can walk from one corner of either FO3's or F:NV's map to the opposite one in a couple of game-days a vehicle would be overkill; travel time between map nodes in FO2 was measured in weeks if on foot (except for the trip from Klamath to The Den, which was short), so a vehicle made much more sense there.
The car in FO2 could also be more headache than help, as the trunk had the annoying habit of glitching out and separating from the front half of the car. If this happened the trunk would stay at that location forever and be inaccessible unless you were there, but when you did show up at that location it might delete the contents thinking you had arrived with a new trunk. This made using it as an ammo dump (probably the most common practice) fairly risky if you were using high-end weapons, as said ammo was a real pain to replace. On top of this, there were some locations at which there was not enough room for your sprite to stand at the proper place to access the trunk, which made looting those places a real hassle.