How the fuck are people saying Fallout 3?
The brilliance of the original Fallout was that you (as the player) begin to play a character who is in the exact same boat as you. You know nothing of the outside world and you set off to explore it together. This, and it was done without use of the amnesiac mechanism which is the cheapest possible way of getting the same effect.
And then Fallout 3 takes a massive dump on that idea. Here is your birth. Your father. Your friends. Your vault. The player isn't even the hero of the story, their fucking father is and they just tag along in his footsteps. And the fact that the media praised it as some revolutionary introduction to the game... People go and watch the Transformer movies too, I guess.
Have you considered that maybe people don't give a shit about the differences between Fallout and Fallout 3's opening?
Some people like the "growing up" beginning sequence. I personally don't like it for one reason: it feels poorly done, not as a video game and RPG, but as a
cinematic experience. It feels extremely half-assed and poorly written, considerably so in the birth and toddler segments.
While New Vegas' intro has much more punch and it's a much better RPG, the intro sequence is still fairly lame outside of the cutscene: all the player sees is that he was shot in the head, and the next second he is walking around a room and exploring Goodsprings. No quick montage of Victor saving you, Doc patching you up, Doc examining you looking for good signals, no nothing.
The original Fallout has a fantastic intro movie (so good Bethesda felt the need to copy it twice), but the intro gameplay sequence is fairly shit. The intro video finishes with the player leaving for the spooky unknown, and there lie... rats. Lots of rats. Talk about reversal of expectations.
This goes for
Outlander too, a good "RPG begining" is not the same as a good "beginning". And judging from the OP, it is clear octavius wasn't talking about "which game has the best character creation process" or anything like it, so "IT DOESN'T LEAVE ROOM FOR MY ROLEPLAYING" is kind of an autistic excuse to dislike a game's beginning.
My favorite intro because of that is Vagrant Story: it's cinematic as fuck in the good sense, not just "there's a camera and you can't control your character". It goes from place to place quickly establishing the factions and the characters of the game to great effect.
