>I dunno, I don't think that's worse. In those situations, there's
>always the possibility, however remote, that you might get out of it
>(as, indeed, you almost immediately do in all of those games). There
>is zero possibility of escaping from the starting scenario in a
>Fallout game. Whatever you do, whatever niche you may manage to carve
>out for yourself, however much power and makeshift luxury you might
>somehow accrue, the world is still a filthy, radioactive ruin overrun
>with mutants and psychos, and you still live in ramshackle squalor
>surrounded by decaying relics of a past that will never return. (And
>in Fallout 4, it's all made that much worse by the fact that
>it's a past you knew. At least in the other games, you were
>born into that shitty reality and never knew what it was like before.)

Well, depending upon how you play your cards, The Courier could end up beating the House. And The Chosen One in FO2, assuming you go for a "good" playthrough, eventually ends up as the leader of a semi-modern settlement significant enough to end up on NCR maps.

But yeah, even if you live in a place like Vault City or one of the major NCR cities, the reality remains that you're in a crapsack world where your choice is between wildlife that the Aussies would cringe from or living in the decaying ruins of the old world under governments that range from despotic to corrupt.