3 is better from a cinematic standpoint. Growing up in the vault and getting to know some of the inhabitants was cool. Then when stuff goes down, it's really exciting escaping the vault. 4 is cool for how quick it is but it does kind of feel almost too quick. I suppose there's time to wander around the vault for awhile but it doesn't have that tense feeling as much as 3 does.

4. Without question.

The tension works on so many levels. What a compelling problem for the character! From the bombs dropping to waking up 200 years later with the (insert spoiler) in between... That's less than an hour of the characters perception.

Ok Mr. Man. You just watched your reality utterly destroyed in less time than your woe commute. How will you stop yourself from eating a bullet?

LOVE 4's intro. Best opening act since Morrowind

slightly 3, but only because the opening of the vault door in fully 3d was so new, exciting and fresh.

For me it was awesome leaving the vault since a Radiation Storm was just starting. So it actually out did the Fallout 3 one. I doubt the next time I leave the vault in FO4 will have that storm coming.

Dang! How can people vote for 4 on this one? This is clearly a no-brainer. It doesn't hurt to be a little objective from time to time you know. Nothing will happen if something stops feeling perfect.

4 had better music along with it, so it gets my vote.

I would have loved this.

I prefer F3 for the same reasons. They should have added a few conversations to make you care about the people in your neighborhood. Sanctuary is small enough to have been a tight knit community but you don't even know the names of your neighbours. Seeing the presentation at E3 I thought it was a great idea to build the intro this way, I thought having briefly lived in this town would make the return to the wasteland this more gut wrenching. Unfortunately it did not.

Even though so far my opinion of FO4 is that it is generally an improvement in nearly every way from FO3, 3's felt a bit more interesting/immersive.

yeah, it all seemed a bit rushed too. I remember my exact thought being "why is no body questioning the concept of being put into weird pods?" even the confusion of a nuclear detonation I feel that most people would be to scared or what ever to question almost any thing. But being crammed into cryopods is extreme. Its not bother me very much at all, but the whole plot device is obviously an after thought of how they were to accomplish their goal of bringing a pre war protagonist to the time setting of the wasteland. It was modestly contrived but that is ok.

FO4 vault beginning does get points for not taking a full 40 minutes to accomplish though.

4 without any doubt. It creams 3 in like every possible way.. In the third game, they spent a lot of time discussing silly things like growing up and stuff which never really added all that much to the story. The part in which it started to connect was when your father left the vault ( a part I admit that I really couldn't connect to regardless). In 4, there is a story throughout every single part. It is very short and works wonders in setting the up the story with a bang.. In 3, I know the story but am not at all interested really (As far as I know, father left without me so he is an arsehole).

Fallout Capital Wasteland "leaving the vault" was wwwwaaaaaayyyyyy better...in my very first playthrough it literally took me 4 hours playtime to go through the "leaving the vault".... THAT WAS A MAGIC MOMENT this is one of the best experiences I have ever had in a game...the best part about the whole playthrough in taking four hours was the fact in not knowing how long it was going to take in leaving the vault because of the passing of time from being age one to age nineteen that it exactly felt "this is how life would be like if you had to live through it......Fallout New England Wasteland "leaving the vault" could never replicate the feeling of the Capital Wasteland unless if they would do " A passing of time montage of living in the vault for 200 years experience....Fallout Capital Wasteland will be my forever favorite Fallout game!!!!!

I thought the same thing and there's something written in one of the vaults logs about that. I'm pretty sure when people barely escaped death by atomic blast then they're not going to question the "decontamination chambers" or will be calmly assured it's a safety protocol. They were making us believe that we had great living quarters somewhere down there. I would've questioned the pods but at that point what can you do, go back home?

Play fallout with music off. It really gives you the sense that you're alone in the world

From a technical standpoint I would say that Fallout 4 did it better. From an emotional impact standpoint, first times are always the best.

Subjective question asked. Objective answers demanded. Apply generous confirmation bias and we've got your prototypically garbage internet conversation.

I poked 4 because I enjoyed 4 more. I found the situation more urgent and the story telling more compelling. Now, please regale us with the objective failures in those two statements.

Hahaha waited for that post, for someone to pop up and point out how I subjective I am while claiming to have an objective opinion and all that hehe...

Well, you can say whatever you want but for some, it's obvious the enthusiasm for the new baby takes over. I mean I find it very improbable for someone to genuinely vote a start that has some running, some radroaches and that's it, over something which is longer, has a lot of dialog, choices, rp, more action, more lore, tries to attach you emotionally to the circumstances etc etc.. but anyway, power to you, I get it.

That's actually kind of sad... that you would attribute an opinion different from your own as disingenuous.

I have to say FO4 does it better. FO3's was too long and brutal. I know what they were aiming at a "Day in the life of a Vault Dweller" type of thing. But I liked the whole prewar scenario of FO4. It finally gave us a glimpse at how life was before the bombs fell.

Stepping off the boat in Seyda Neen. Oh wait. Wrong game.

Fallout 4. I was going to pick Fallout 3 because tunnel snakes rule but then remembering reading stuff in Fallout 3 where people were experimented on sounded cooler than being in a normal shelter. Fallout 4 decided to put you in a shelter where you were experimented on which made it a lot more memorable to me. Fallout 3 also made it drag out too long. Where playing another playthrough and having to sit through that, dreadful.

Just so you know, Vault 101 was not a control vault. There was a Societal Preservation Program experiment at Vault 101. It was quite a bit more subtle than the others and a whole lot less detrimental. Basically, it was a genetics experiment to see what would happen with a small breeding population that was permanently isolated.

True, but it was effectively a control vault with and end date of "heat death if the unuverse".

Either way, waking up in what is decidedly not a control vault "moments" after seeing the hope of the Pre-War dream ending is... well, FO3 pulled at familial ties. FO4 pulls at the idea of your whole world being destroyed. Wake up in the morning on a nice day, by that evening you're sitting in the 200 year-old remains of your house without your spouse and kid trying to figure out what, exactly, had happened.

FO4's ending isn't great because of it's length, but because of how it shatters the Sole Survivor's worldview. For all the unfamiliarity the LW had of the wasteland, the war was old news. He knew that the world was a wasteland when he stepped out if 101. The Sole Survivor didn't.

Well, 3 was around the 3rd 4th time we went through that, they clearly just wanted it out of the way for the 4th game.

Obviously 3 "did it better".

But how many times can we go through the Vault intro? Better to ask which of the first 3 Fallout games did it best.

Fallout 3 easy, but I think Fallout 4 had the potential to be superior. 4's opening is way too short for one, in 3 you could RP during the prologue which allowed you to establish your character's persona before the game started proper (kind of like origins in the 1st Dragon Age), for exemple you could be more violent than the bullies and give sociopathic and/or psychotic answers in the GOAT, so becoming a raider type when you got out wasn't too much of stretch. The worst you can do it 4 is being a bit jerky to the Vault-Tec guy. Woulda been nice if you could have established being a serial killer or something, have a grisly secret basemant, strange meat in the fridge, maybe a scene where your spouse finds out, etc.

Also if the PC wasn't all "waah, dead people, waaah, my baby waahh", at least not without you deciding that.

Yeah, i read those logs too. I didn't bring them up because I couldn't remember enough to confidently reference it with out feeling like im talking out my rear.

For me, leaving Vault 101 in Fallout 3 was much bigger than leaving Vault 111 in Fallout 4. In Fallout 3, you didn't know what was out there. It was a completely brand new word that you (and no one in your vault) had ever seen before. It was also my introduction to the Fallout series. In Fallout 4, you saw the world before the war, and you saw the bombs fall. You pretty well knew what was going to be out there, at least for your neighborhood.