Ranking The Opening of Every Bethesda RPG 

What Bethesda game has YOUR favorite opening? Let us know!

I would say Skyrim has to be my favorite just from nostalgia alone.. yes its rough after a few playthroughs. But its iconic! Keep the content comin! Love it!

I like the bit of Morrowind where you're told to go off & level up, haven't often seen it in games. Skyrim has the urgency of dragons & Fallout 4 you need to urgently find your kid, but they're both expecting you to ignore the urgency & level up until you're ready, and don't have quest pauses like Morrowind.

Totally agree with the Fallout 3 thoughts -- that was my first Fallout game and it was a great intro into the universe but man do I hate running through the intro again on new playthroughs 😂

RPG isn't exactly my format, however! based off of these intros I may attempt to play some of these games again :) hopefully you had a great short break! Welcome back

Great video. Starfield was a lot of fun, looking forward to dlc and mods. I got what i expected. Only better than F4 imo (although i very much enjoy f4)

Fallout 3 opening is far better than NV. Even the opening step out to the world is far better in fallout 3. Seeing the capital wasteland for the first time is crazy. Hell what game usually starts with you being literally born. Pretty unique

Yep! got 10 minutes into starfield and already got bored lol. I might give it another try, but I'm in the middle of Lies of P right now! a souls-like game that is in a tier of its own with story and gameplay

i like starfields opening for it sets the tone of the rest of the story. you're not someone special or some chosen one. you're just a random person who got dragged into bigger things way beyond their comprehension by sheer accident

other rankings coming soon?

I've always felt that another fault to the opening of Fallout 3 is that it spends so much time establishing your upbringing in the vault and the community inside, only for none of it to matter the minute you leave the vault to search for your father. Sure the game gives you a chance to return... with banishment from the vault as the end result. Not to mention how the vault basically descends into implied inevitable failure based on the consequences of your journey and you basically have no agency on impacting any of that. There is a shared past with the vault and a story within it that should mean alot to the main character but suddenly it is narrative blackhole you are supposed to walk away from. You spend sooooooo much time there only for it to basically not exist in the main game at all, even though it is supposed to be important. It just makes you not care, especially when it drags out your following playthroughs. There is admittedly thematic impact with walking away from the only home you know into an inhospitable world, but it all just seems like wasted potential. It almost would've been better if the act of the vault opening spelled doom for its inhabitants (like the game implies but does not depict) and it were to become abandoned shortly after the player leaves it (becoming an explorable dungeon obviously). The player could return due to natural homesickness/curiosity and explore the aftermath of what was surely a grim and dire situation that you and your father caused. From there it could've spawned a handful of quests out in the wasteland where you could run into these characters trying to survive out in the wastes etc.

I played just under 190 hours of Starfield when it launched in Spetember 2023. Then I uninstalled it, and haven't wanted to play it since, probably never will again. Yes, I enjoyed those 190 hours. But the fact that it's so generic, repetitive, and overall punishing with the NG+ by stealing all your things, and not even starting you with a weapon; It gets really old, really fast. Faster than even Daggerfall, Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 3 and 4. But my favorite had to be Oblivion. Simply because of The Shivering Isles. Boy do I love that place.

Sorry you had to go through 80 hours of starfield man, sounds rough. Fun video, jokes aside. Though I do disagree with how far down you bumped fallout 3 and Skyrim because of replayability, I don't think the majority of people will do tons of runs and i think a great first impression makes it worth it. Especially skyrim, the into is straight up iconic. I'd bump both arena and daggerfall down to C or D too, they're not bad necessarily just really dated compared to everything else.

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New Vegas is S tier because it isn't Bethesda, but Obsidian. They don't fuck around and waste your time with "Daddy issue" story lines that immediately fail the "Do I give a fuck?" Test.

I never got bored with Fallout 3's opening, it's good and allows to basically build a profile for how your character will be before leaving the vault and entering the open world. Idk, it was knowhere near as boring as Skyrim's long cutscene and then going through many scripted events. I wouldn't be bothered by that, if it was as engaging as when Rockstar does scripted events.

A lot of things bothered me about Starfield's intro. It's not engaging, you don't really do much. The only mechanic explained in the first--what--20? minutes is using the mining laser. Which isn't even all that important later on in the game. And then it's like I found myself on this ride where some dude gave me his ship and told me to go join his club. I went to join them, and they keep giving me free stuff. The big reveal of the plot? It's just a treasure hunt. That's it. That's the plot as initally presented. Go find some weird space metal for science. At that point I didn't really care at all about the main quest. Fortunately, some of the other content--the faction missions and some of the stuff you just stumble across are pretty good. It just bothers me so much that the intro does not introduce a conflict or sense of urgency.

funny how bethesda's best game was made by obsidian.

Unfortunately with Fallout 3, it immediately fails due to the fact it decides so many things about your character for you. You are forced to be a vault dweller since birth, looking for your father. You cant have been a courier who has been traveling throughout the wasteland since you were a child for example. It severely limits the RPG and character creation elements. And it hurts even more since these characters that were forced onto our characters are uninteresting. In new vegas the only thing that was set in stone for your character was that you were a courier who visited the divide and goodsprings, going to deliver the platinum chip. That's it. But in 3 my 18 years of life were decided for me. I can't be a older man or woman. I can't be older than 18 at the start. I can't have been an orphan or have a full family. I can't have been a slave or slaver. I have to be from vault 101 rather than another vault or somewhere else in the world. I cant be a ghoul or radiated. I have to look for dad. Among so many other things. It forces me to be Bethesda's character. It's not as bad as what occurs in 4 but it's terrible for creating a character all your own.

Literally no one associates New Vegas with Bethesda, It's all Obsidian.

i dont play besethda games.