Coelocanth +1 for your valid points. But I still think it should have been ramped up a bit. It just didn't seem right that in the vault you had those bugs to deal with, then the guards and had quite a bit of action, and then, in all those houses you look in and all those back yards and then after seeing the sign, climbing all over those rocks to get to it there's nothing.
Sure I can understand that you can go off in any direction, but the fact is I had come from more action in the Vault than I saw in the first 5 minutes in the Wasteland that everybody on the vault and in previews and trailers kept on pointing how how dangerous the Wasteland was. I was expecting to be attacked and wasn't, and that's why I felt a little let down. It was at least part of the reason, after hearing Mr. Burke's and Gob's voices that I felt so dispirited.
I have put another 5 hours or so into the game and still have not got excited because of this weak start. certainly in Fallout 1 and 2 and Morrowind and Oblivion, things started popping pretty quickly. Whether from Seyda Neen to Balmora or the Imperial City to Weynon Priory you never looked around and saw nothing happening, and I doubt many made it to Balmora or Weynon without a fight of some type, even if it was just a rat! If I had just seen movement off in the distance it would have been better, but there was nothing beyond the birds in the sky and the Enclave flying radio.

i'd keep in mind that encounters in the wasteland are random. you got lucky, to be blunt. i can remember walking in fallout 1 and 2 from the vault/village to the first locations of those games (shady sands/klamath) without hitting a random encounter. and then during other playthroughs, i did get one. i don't see the very short (megaton is within eyesight upon walking out of the vault) distance between vault 101 and megaton as any different.

I agree the walk is quite short. But I have seen video's made of the start by IGN and other's going from the vault to Megaton, using the exact same route I did - and they didn't meet anything either.
Also, although short, there are 5-6 houses you wander around in and find stuff and there's that gas station, and then there's a good 500 yards where the highway runs out into a dirt road with boulders all around, and then the 200 yards after you see the sign to Megaton,where you are clambering over the rocks before you see Megaton in the distance.
As I walked down the main road of Silverdale (I think that's what it';s called) and saw those abandoned houses, I felt sure there would be something in one of them. But there wasn't. Now if a fairly sterile vault can have those flying bugs, I didn't see why dilapidated houses wouldn;t have one or two.
It would be interesting if anybody took that route through Silverdale's houses, past the Enclave Radio flyer, past the gas station (collecting all the while!) then following the highway to the Megaton sign and then right, over the boulders, to Megaton, met any creatures or not. I will ask on other Fallout sites, because if there are just two or three that say they didn't and nobody who say's they did, then it is not about random, it's about Bethesda not putting anything between Vault 101 and Magaton.

For me, though, I came out of the vault EXPECTING to be attacked. After I had gotten over the scenery, I was absolutely twitchy, looking this way and that, only had a few rounds left for the 10mm pistol after battling security at the vault door, I was sure I was about to be set upon. Real tension. Then, when I made it to Megaton, I was relieved that I HADN'T been attacked. Not disappointed, relieved.
I can see your point, just giving you a different perspective.

Fair point so a +1. Whenever I give my view I am expectant that others have different views. My point is how much MORE relieved you would have been if you had to fight something, or had something chasing you into Megaton. A fight where you ran out of bullets and had to finish the creature/NPC off with your police baton?! Now how much tension would there have been? Now you only have a police baton, no bullets and still not sure where Megaton is! Bethesda could have, with just one weak creature ramped up the tension, so as you say, tension prior to meeting the creature, then the fight, now an expectation after the fight there was BOUND to be another before you got to Megaton, then finally getting to the city - and then the relief three or four times more than not meting anything! That's what I was hoping for and expecting. I assumed Bethesda would want to show me how dangerous this Wasteland was from the get-go, so that for the rest of the game I would give Wasteland the respect it deserves!
Because of the start and the following 6 hours, I still don;t give the wasteland much respect. I can just imagine going out of Megaton on that first quest and being nervous of leaving the walled city. As it was, I wasn't particularly. How the start manifested itself has a lot to do with that.

Perhaps. For some. :) ! did get attacked first thing upon leaving Megaton. Molerat. For me, though, the anticipation and build up to something expected that doesn't happen is often more powerful than when it does. This goes for movies, games and even books. Also, a world that was packed wall to wall with things trying to eat, dismember or shoot me would get old. I like the fact that I don't have to battle continuously for every ten feet I travel from place to place. That gets annoying and frustrating. I like being able to explore the world, avoiding combat when I can. I have found that if you start to get complacent and don't 'check six' a lot you will get jumped. Dogmeat is a good early warning system. If he starts growling you better wonder why.
And on a wholly weird tangent, where are all the cats?
edit: +1 to ya. am enjoying the discourse.

Everybody have a great weekend! My BBQ team is cooking this weekend so no FO3 for a couple of days. :(
I'll knock back a brew for y'all. :)

Do you know how much I wanted to give a -1 out of jealousy! :)
Have a good weekend, and all I will say in closing is that one creature between the vault and Megaton would not have had to have led to monsters everywhere. Having that molerat jump at you as soon as you left the vault as opposed to when you left Megaton would have had much more impact, don't you think?

In all honesty, John, no it wouldn't have. Not for me, anyway. But that is what makes life itself so entertaining. (And maybe I'm more twisted than even I realize, but life is and is all about entertainment, for me anyway. Feeling down? Just stop on a street corner in any place on the planet and watch and wait. 5 minutes won't go by but what something entertaining will happen.) If everything and everybody were of the same cloth, life would be SOOOOOOOO boring.

Not sure what I did differently, but I was attacked before I got to Megaton, so that feeling of survival was there for me.
Might have been a random encounter though.

Every now and then, I think I encounter a bug where someone is angry at me, without doing anything to them. The other day I was going up a hill and I found Crazy Wolfgang and he and his guard were attacking me. I died because of it, but when I reloaded I went ahead and off'd him anyway, but the strange thing is, he wasn't angry with me after the reload. No clue what I could have done. Anyway, I really enjoyed the armor he dropped.

i'm positive that all encounters out in the wasteland (i.e., not inside any specific locations like megaton, rivet city, etc) are randomly generated, in the same spirit of random encounters from the original games. so that would be why you had two different experiences (attacked/not attacked when first leaving the vault and going to megaton.)
what's your karma? if you're a "good" character, there's a group that sends out contract killers who want to collect a bounty put on your head. i don't know if there is an equivalent for "evil" characters, since i'm concentrating on good karma in my current game. i've already collected two separate contracts for my head on the dead bodies of groups who have attacked me -- some people called "talon."

I'm in the town with the fire ants - pray for me! :)
And, weirdest thing - went to the Bethsoft forum (patch is out ,by the way!) to post a message about Fallout 3, typed out my message and posted it and got an error back saying I had not typed anything-or words to that effect! The message box was now empty! tried it again and same thing! Tried to send a PM and same thing again. It's like I am typing in a box superimposed on the box so i see the text but it's not appearing underneath!
In any event, I tried both with my IE6 and my Firefox 3.0.3and got the same result. I even tried different fonts and stuff and still the same! Can't be a cookie thing for something like that - can it?!
If the text wasn't appearing as I typed, or the same thing happened on other sites, i'd think it was my keyboard or something, but being as I have no problem here - or on any other forum except Bethsoft's I am utterly flummoxed! Any idea's out there?!

The town's actually called Springdale (I think, definitely not Silverdale, minor point either way), but did you completely miss the school there? It's packed full of raiders and a little Ant nest/cavern at the bottom where the raiders, if you read the computer logs inside, were trying to dig into Vault 101 to raid it. There's also a couple raiders on the outside of the building and if you explored all of Springdale you should have run into them.
Also, on my way from the vault to Megaton I actually ran into about 2-3 animals. Granted, I did not take the directly straight to Megaton route, I went maybe 30-40 feet off the path to the east, but it was pretty close and I had to deal with a vicious dog and that annoying buzzing insect. Based off that, I think you got extremely unlucky (or lucky) in terms of random encounters, but since the distance is pretty short I'm not surprised you did not run into anything.
I'm also 100% positive that the non-location specific encounters in the wasteland are random. If I travel and die before remembering to save and then load my save and travel to the same place, the animals/monsters in the wasteland are different, although the locations tend to remain the same, so they probably have some type of spawn locations set but what comes up is random.

Facing those fire-ants at early levels was actually the toughest part of the game for me... super mutant masters go down easier for me now than those ants did.
Anyone notice there was a very hard lock on a trash bin right behind that diner where the fire ants are? I don't have the ability to unlock it, but I'm highly curious as to what could be in a trash bin behind a diner.