How Each Fallout Begins

In video games, like with other works of fiction, making a good first impression on readers is of the utmost importance. Fallout is one series that has a variety of approaches, and I will compare each of them here. This will not include spinoffs like Tactics, Brotherhood of Steel, Shelter or 76; only the numbered installments and New Vegas.

Fallout: The Vault 13 Caves

There's not much to talk about here. It's basically a large cave full of rats and a few miscellaneous items. The rats are fairly easy to defeat as long as you tagged one of your skills that's related to your starting weapons- Unarmed, Melee Weapons(your knife), or Guns(your 10mm pistol). The beginning is a bit slow-paced and doesn't do much to teach you the mechanics, but it's not too bad to get through.

If I have a complaint, it's that the point at which you emerge into the outside world is rather underwhelming. Once you reach the end of the cavern, in-game text describes the feeling of seeing sunlight for the first time, and upon stepping onto the exit grid, you go to the wasteland map. There isn't a opportunity to see ruined buildings, or see what your character might feel upon taking a first step into a world ruined by nuclear war. Fallout 4 did this somewhat better, even if it's far from perfect.

Incidentally, you can later return to Vault 13, even before you get the Water Chip you were sent out to get, which grants you the opportunity to do some side quests and even ask the Overseer for additional supplies. There's little to suggest that you can do that or it will benefit you, but it's a nice touch for players who are willing to go a bit out of their way.

Fallout 2: The Temple of Trials

This is a rather deeply flawed tutorial level, although it isn't quite as bad as some people think.

The main problem is that, like with the rest of Fallout 2's early game, your resources and options are highly limited. Your only available weapon is a spear, unless you chose to invest in your Unarmed skill and would rather fight hand-to-hand. Healing items are scarce, and come with the side effect of temporarily reducing your Perception by 1.

Most of the enemies are radroaches and radscorpions, the latter of which is poisonous (and this is before you have access to an antidote).

The final obstacle you'll face is a fellow tribal named Cameron, who will challenge you to a fistfight in order to test your worthiness. There are three approaches you can use.

1. Accept Cameron's challenge and defeat him. This requires a good Unarmed skill to gain the advantage over him, as well as good Strength (for melee damage and hit points), Endurance(also for hit points), Agility(for Armor Class) and to a lesser degree, Luck (for Critical Hit chance).
2. Convince Cameron that it might not be a good idea to decide your worth this way, since there are problems that can be solved without resorting to violence, and it's possible one of you might end up killing the other during a combat trial.
3. Steal the key from Cameron.

It's nice that there are multiple approaches to take, but several of your skills are rather irrelevant. Gun skills are one example, since while it's unreasonable to expect to see any Energy Weapons or Big Guns this early in the game, Small Guns specialists may be disappointed to find that they don't get a 10mm Pistol right off the bat this time. Similarly, while Melee Weapon specialists get a spear, they won't be able to use it against Cameron unless they exploit a loophole by dropping before the fight and picking it up again at the start of the fight (which will cost AP).

It doesn't help that there's no way around this level. You're sent inside the temple at the start of the game and won't be allowed to leave until you pass the trial. You must make do with what you have, and won't even gain a level until the end of the temple. In all fairness, this is a symptom of a larger problem with Fallout 2's brutally difficult early game, but it's still one of the weaker tutorial levels.

Fallout 3: Vault 101

This tutorial level stands out from its predecessors by virtue of being far-more story-driven. It's divided into a few sequences, each some time apart.

1. The first is your character being born and your mother dying in childbirth.
2. A year later, your character crawls outside of his/her playpen and examines the surroundings. You can look at your mother's favorite Bible verse, which ends up being rather significant later in the game. You also set your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats during this time period.
3. Nine years later, you celebrate your tenth birthday party, during which you get your Pip-Boy. This mainly serves as a tutorial for the dialogue system. You also get a chance to try out some guns against the Radroaches.
4. Six years later,you take the Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test, or G.O.A.T., which involves answering a personality test that gives you a suggestion of which skills to tag. In this game, Tagging just gives you a one-time bonus of 15 skill points, rather than doubling the skill's rate of increase.
5. The last timeskip takes you to the present day, with your father having absconded from the Vault, resulting in the Overseer cracking down. You're then forced to escape the Vault and search for your father.

As you can see, it's a long and relatively slow-paced affair, albeit one that helps establish who you and your father are and set up your goal of finding him. Unfortunately, most of the other Vault 101 dwellers, from Butch the bully to your best friend Amala and her father the Overseer, prove largely irrelevant to the narrative, unless you decide to return to Vault 101.

One thing this game does well is making all your decisions temporary, and giving you the option to modify your stats, traits and tagged skills once you're about to leave the Vault. This is a good way of giving players a chance to experiment in the game's early stages, since one daunting aspect of a character creation process is the fear that if you make a bad choice before you know what you're doing, you'll regret it for the rest of the game (which may be  why some modern RPGs don't give you much choice at the start of the game).

Fallout: New Vegas: Goodsprings

This is probably the best tutorial level, since it's the most useful introduction to the game.

The game begins with Benny stealing the Platinum Chip from you, shooting you in the head, and having his Great Khan lackeys bury you in a shallow grave. You only survive with Victor's help and medical attention from Doc Mitchell.

You wake up in Doc Mitchell's office. Each aspect of character creation is justified by him examining you.

• He asks you your name.
• He gives you a mirror to check yourself over to inspect your face.
• The SPECIAL stats are determined by you takin a test for your vitals.
• The starting Tag skills are determined by a personality test. The answers aren't entirely obvious, so it's generally recommended that you choose your own skills.
• As for your Traits, he simply asks you about your medical history, which directly leads you to the trait menu.

The entire process takes a few minutes, only a fraction of the time Fallout 3's character creation system took.

Doc Mitchell has some free gear available(if it's not in red text, it's yours to take). Surprisingly enough, Energy Weapons specialists get a laser pistol early in the game, albeit one that's much weaker than the ones you get in the first two games. Once outside, you have an optional tutorial sequence that involves shooting targets and hunting geckos with Sunny and her dog.

There are a few minor quests to do in the Goodsprings area, which, while relatively simple, reward exploration.

• You can return to the grave Benny dug for you to kill some Bloatflies and collect your first snow globe, which is an item that will prove useful later.
• A man will come up to you, frantically begging you to save his girlfriend from geckos. Once you go up the hill, you find that the geckos were actually guarding a cache of weaponry, which is protected by a few traps. The man then turns on you, but is easy to kill.
• The Goodsprings Schoolhouse can be explored. After you kill all the giant mantises, you can either pick a lock or hack a computer to gain some supplies.

This brings us to the main quests. Some Powder Gangers are looking for a trader named Ringo, and are willing to attack the town to get at him. You can fight alongside the citizens of Goodsprings to protect Ringo and the town, or join the Powder Gangers. Assuming that you join the citizens of Goodsprings, there are a few steps you can take to prepare for the battle, all of which involve money or skill checks.

1. Convince Trudy that you have a plan, which requires Speech or Sneak skill, and she will convince an additional person to join the battle on your side.
2. Chet is willing to sell leather armor for 1,000 caps (a steep price at this point in the game), or hand it over if you use your Barter skill to convince him that he won't have much of a business if the Powder Gangers destroy the town.
3. Ol' Pete has some dynamite, and will give it to you if you prove you know how to use it.

This is a good introduction to skill checks, which rewards you for investing in skills that may not seem useful at first glance. The quest ultimately culminates in a fun gunfight; I generally think the Fallout games get interesting when you start facing human opponents with guns.

The tutorial sequence only ends when you reach the edge of Goodsprings. While this can happen by accident, it's a good way of showing that the tutorial is as long or as short as you want it to be. It's in your best interests to do as many quests as you can in Goodsprings, but you're never forced to do anything.

Fallout 4: Vault 111 and Concord

Fallout 4 borrows heavily from the third game when it comes to setting up the game, with mixed success.

You begin as one half of a married couple with a young son named Shaun. Your first order of business is to choose whether you want to be the husband or the wife, and then customize your appearance.

After playing with your baby, and talking with your spouse and Codsworth(a robot butler), you'll get a knock on the door from a Vault-Tec representative, who gives you a chance to sign up for a spot in Vault 101. At this point, you can invest 21 points into your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes; this is fewer than previous games, even without the Gifted Perk (+1 to all stats, but significantly reduced skill gains), but you can add points when you level up.

The invitation comes just in time, since the evacuation order for your neighborhood of Sanctuary sounds. Together with your spouse and son, you make a mad dash for the vault, and barely get inside as the nuclear missiles hit your hometown.

Once inside, you're issued a vault suit, and led to a decontamination pod that is actually a cryogenic freezer. You spend countless decades frozen until an intruder breaks into the Vault, murders your spouse and steals your son away. Decades later, you awaken, inexplicably having survived being refrozen.

You then fight your way out of the Vault, which mainly involves using your riot baton and a 10mm pistol against radroaches. The sequence isn't all that hard, but makes it seem as though the game's more generous with weaponry and ammunition than it actually is. You acquire the Pip-Boy near the end of the Vault, and are required to use it to get out.

Once you exit the Vault and ride the elevator back up to the surface, you're treated to the sight of your home town in ruins. It's a memorable moment, even if your player character doesn't emote much about it. Returning to your home finds Codsworth in working order, and he says that more than two centuries have passed since the war began.

Your next destination is Concord, where an organization of freedom fighters called the Minutemen are under attack by some raiders, forcing you to fight your way to Preston Garvey, their leader and the last known official Minuteman. And I do mean "fight your way to"- due to a programming oversight, if you slip by the raiders, Garvey will insist that you kill them.

Your next goal is to acquire a power cell to start up some Power Armor, and it's downstairs behind a locked door. You can either hack the computer or pick the lock, but the latter is rather impractical, since you only have one bobby pin, and you're out of luck if it breaks (the previous two games were more generous with them, and they were sturdier).

If you're familiar with the Fallout series, you'll recall that lockpicking and hacking are influenced by your Lockpick and Science skills, but that's not how it works here. In this game, you don't have any skills, just S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats and perks, the former of which mainly determines which of the latter you are able to access. Instead of getting skill points when you level up, and the ability to choose Perks at certain levels, you can choose a SPECIAL stat point or a perk when you level up. I may discuss this in more depth, but for now, the perk system makes it more difficult to specialize in desired skillsets at low levels, thus making it more difficult to craft a character build you'd like.

Once you get the power cell, your next step is to head back upstairs to plug it in the power armor, and then take a minigun. With your newfound weapons, you should be able to easily massacre the raiders outside, but the Deathclaw will prove to be a much more difficult opponent. This is an entertaining sequence featuring weapon, armor and enemies you won't normally see until later, but it isn't quite as deep or involved as the Goodsprings gunfight in New Vegas.

Once all the enemies are dead, you can return to Garvey, who will lead his companions to Sanctuary, and make it your first official settlement. At this point, the game opens up, and you can either start the search for your son, work with the Minutemen or build up your settlement. Overall, this is a fairly good opening to the game, and its primary weakness- a overly simplified character creation system that limits the number of solutions to any given problem- with the game itself.

Conclusion

For better or worse, most of the Fallout games' introductory levels put the game on display.

The original game's opening was relatively bare-bones, which signified that the series was gradually finding its way.

The second game's Temple of Trials is an exception, since a tutorial level was apparently added to appease the publishers, despite not actually doing its job very well.

The third game's Vault 101is rather linear and story-based, reflecting the greater importance of plot in the game compared to its predecessors.

New Vegas' Goodsprings involves a great deal of freedom and the ability to pursue multiple routes, showing that New Vegas is perhaps the best-designed of the newer Fallout games.

The fourth game's Vault 111 continues the third game's trend, both in increasing the amount of story content and simplifying the gameplay.

As demonstrated by these examples, the Fallout series has changed a great deal over the years, and not always for the better. While an old-school RPG like the first two games may be too much to ask for, I hope that one day, there will be another game like New Vegas with a similar approach to character building, questing and other aspects that made that game great.