sea said:
I will take 5 minutes with the very well-written, well-acted Doc Mitchell and tromping around Goodsprings to get some early XP and loot under my belt over 30 minutes of forced Vault 13 tutorials featuring cringe-inducing dialogue and 100% linear level design. The only "downside" of New Vegas' opening is that it doesn't have melodramatic Emotional Engagement(TM) or explosions and death everywhere.
I agree that the Vault 101 (not 13!! you should be banned because of that) sequence is pretty bad, especially on replays, but I still think it accomplishes a couple of interesting goals (though I wish they were accomplished with a better written, better paced and more easily replayable starting sequence):
1) It does a great job at reestablishing some fundamentals of the Fallout setting for a new audience and puts the player and the player character in a similar situation, in terms of knowledge of the world (the game will forget about this immediately after the beginning sequence and suddenly your PC will know about ghouls, raiders, and all the dangers of the wastes.. or will be hilariously unaware, depending on the writer that was working on the dialogue I suppose);
2) It showcases more or less all of the gameplay mechanics, giving you a rough idea of whether you'll want to play with this build or change it.. New Vegas arguably does this too, but split a lot of the side stuff in locations such as the school in Goodsprings, which on one hand is good because it's less heavy-handed, but on the other hand is very easy to miss;
3) It offers you a couple of choices with later ramifications early on.. arguably extremely minor ones (they only tie with other sidequests), but they're there;
4) It sets the tone for the rest of the game extremely well, down to the bad writing (
) and ties into the main story, whereas New Vegas' tutorial is basically completely separate from the rest of the game.. I appreciate that it's easy to skip, but it also means that it will (and it has) bore a lot of players to tears;
5) After the game is done teaching you how to play it, it basically leaves you on your own. There's some foreshadowing on the locations you might want to visit on a terminal near the end of the tutorial (which also offers some clues that maybe not everything is as it looks in Vault 101);
That's more or less what I think Fallout 3's beginning did well, especially when taken in a broader audience context (compared to No Mutants Allowed, at least).
New Vegas' beginning sequence, on the other hand, feels like it was designed with hardcore players and people coming from Fallout 3 in mind, and while you could argue that the second category makes up the bulk of the player base, I'm still not sure if that was the right call.
But even keeping accessibility aside, I think the problems with New Vegas' beginning location is that it feels like.. a side quest hub. There isn't a lot of stuff that will come back later in the plot, it doesn't really do a good job at setting the tone of the game (though arguably it does a good job at immediately telling a returning player some of the most notable differences with the Capital Wasteland) and, while the tutorial portion and first quests are easy to skip, it more or less sets you on rails in terms of plot progression, since very few players will be able to overcome the challenges in I-15 without prior knowledge of the game.
Arguably, though, if I had to make one single complaint about Goodsprings it would be that, for a starting game location, it's kind of boring.
P.S. : I think there are a few things that New Vegas' starting sequence does better than Fallout 3, like familiarizing you with skill usage in dialogue, and teaching you how to use stealth, and I'm grateful of the fact that I'm given the chance to skip it quickly. I just think it's kind of a faux pas when you consider that it was meant to be an "AAA" title that caters to the widest audience possible (and a lot of the design makes it obvious that, while it's a deeper, and arguably better title than Fallout 3, it's still very much meant to cater to the same crowd, and not suddenly go back to the niche audience of the first two Fallouts).