I’ve beat Fallout NV as a true pacifist - no companions, no death caused by me.
It is funny, because it really doesn’t seem to fit the themes of the game to be a pacifist. You end up doing things that would (IMHO) be more fucked up ethically. It’s also hard for me to leave Vulpes alive - killing him is an every play through thing.
I’ve tried playing Morrowind and Oblivion as a pacifist. Morrowind you can get pretty far, but the Sixth House Base quest requires the death of an NPC. Oblivion… lol. You can sorta try if you don’t count dragging along companions from uncompleted quests, but that doesn’t fit the spirit of the challenge.
I wish more video games allowed you to play pacifist. I play most video games with the least violence possible, but even really well written stories like Planescape: Torment need you to solve some problems with violence.
I’ve really appreciated games like Undertale and Dishonored too.
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Technically speaking Far Cry 5 meets this definition. At the beginning of the game the big bad guy arrests you and says to wait while he brings you the person you’re trying to save. If you sit there for 10 minutes doing nothing he returns with the person and lets both of you go. Most people just start murdering instead
I think you’re mixing multiple endings. Far Cry 4-6 all have quick endings like that but none of them I know of fit your description?
You’re correct, I had mixed up several of them in my memory. I think 6 is what I was thinking of where you can say “fuck your civil war, I’m out”
The Deus Ex series often have pacificist playthroughs (3rd one definitely does, you can play a pacificist playthrough of the OG game with a few exceptions).
The Age of Decadence has a mostly skill check and conversation playthrough. I forget if it’s fully pacifict though.
Dishonored can be completed 100% pacifist, IIRC
I came to say this The game actually discouraged violence. The more people you killed the more police rat swarms you have to deal with.
I think you can only be non-lethal, not truly pacifist, if someone cares about this difference. You still need to knock people out and do stuff to them, even if they don’t die by your hand.
Also some of the “non-lethal” fates you subject people to are way worse than just killing them.
Sending one lady away with her stalker, or frying the brain of a “genius”, just to name a couple.
I think frying that guy’s brain was a lethal option, but the worse one from that level is the brothers who have their tongues torn out and get thrown into their own mines as slaves. Corvo’s blade really is the kinder option!
The lady with the stalker actually kills him a couple of years later and lives the rest of her life peacefuly and secluded off of his fortune. (According to the wiki)
All Dishonored games feel amazing when you manage to get in and out completely unseen and unheard. And there’s always a none lethal option to get rid of your target. Although I’d argue most of the times the non-lethal option is the more cruel one…
Live a Live’s Twilight of Edo Japan chapter gives a special completion reward if you complete it with zero kills, or a full 100 kills. It’s designed in such a way that figuring out how to do the pacifist run is a puzzle you are unlikely to solve on your first playthrough.
This mechanic was actually one of the inspirations for Undertale!
As far as I know this mechanic wasn’t in the original SNES game, only in the remake.
It is in the original. For the most part, 2022 is very faithful to the original and doesn’t feature any big structural changes (apart from one new thing that’s a big spoiler), mostly just balance and quality of life improvements.
Like I said, Toby Fox openly cited this segment as an inspiration for Undertale (2015), and that came before the 2022 remake.
There are lots of games where combat is not even an option, like Life is Strange, Before your eyes (do play this one with a camera and a box of tissues nearby), or Firewatch. But games where you’re expected to fight but can find ways around it the first example that comes to mind is Metal Gear Solid 3, you can beat that game without killing anyone, there’s even an achievement for that and one of the bosses will be particularly easy if you go this route.
I think your best bet would be looking into the CRPG subgenre, though I can’t name any specific examples of games with pacifist routes.
Sil (specifically Sil-Q, the most modern fork) is a great Tolkien-esque roguelike in the vein of Angband where pacifism is a first-class citizen. You get a lot of XP just by observing hostiles from the shadows. I highly recommend it!
Also forgot to mention the latest version has tiles support that looks like this:
So you don’t have to play with ASCII graphics. ;)
Fairly certain the NPC in Morrowind could theoretically be killed by a combination of his own drain health spell reflected back at him and/or - once he’s out of magicka - dying to fire shield.
In Morrowind, you have to kill a ghost to please the Urshilaku, Dagoth Gares for the Sixth House Base, Dagoth Vemyn for Sunder, and Dagoth Ur/the heart. I guess you could probably cheese reflect spells, but that doesn’t feel quite “true pacifist” to me - just like dragging Eridor everywhere in Oblivion doesn’t quite feel like “pacifism.” You’d also have to do a lot of leveling/side quests to get the Hortator/Nerevarine skip to avoid the inevitable slaughter of Venim, Gothren, the bad Erabenimsim, etc (it’s annoying, Gothren stalled out my “no inventory” run and working on the skip took 5ever)
You could trade the ghost and Gares for Vivec if you wanted, and then not have to do the leveling/side quests.
I tried a run like that in New Vegas. I think I got to Primm, and just kept getting tore up too much to be fun.
Well, Fallout 1 definitely allows it, and I don’t believe necessitates unethical behavior in order to achieve. It’s just a challenging and rewarding questline that I wish more games would emulate.
Some of my friends and I in a D&D campaign managed to talk our way out of so many encounters, and heist our way through so many quests, that we started calling ourselves Ocean’s Five. It was some of the most fun I’ve had in that game, improving our way through heists and getting away with it.
Not an RPG, but in the Thief series the hardest difficulty usually means that you aren’t allowed to kill anyone. Many people even try to play the games as a ghost. Meaning the only sign of their presence after leaving is the stuff they stole. Every door has to be closed and locked again. Keys stolen from guards have to be returned (in lieu of a game mechanic for this you have to lay it on the ground behind them).
People do challenge runs of the Gothic games as pacifists. So it isn’t part of the games but doable with some shenanigans.
Baldur’s gate 3 has only a few required kills for main story progression. Most combat can be avoided.
Not an RPG, but: In the Hitman series, you will have to kill the target, but how many non targets you kill/cleverly avoid killing is up to you.
There are some fun ways to complete some Hitman missions “without killing anyone”, just by fiddling with the environment so that the target coincidentally dies “by accident” later on. You can even get one of your targets in Hitman 3 to commit suicide.
What? Amazing! I stopped playing Baldur’s Gate because I dislike the combat. How do I avoid it?
It’s mainly just talking to people, but if you want to fight as few times as possible, you probably need to know the game or tons of save-scumming. You’ll also have to be ok with just missing a bunch of stuff, or pick and choose your fights, which again, needs prior knowledge.
I don’t think it’s a good way for a first playthrough.
IIRC there are six fights you always need to do (two of those in the tutorial and another shortly after, although technically you can use glitches to skip these). But if you only wanted to do these fights, you’d basically do an evil playthrough and miss most of the game, especially Act 1 and 3. And if you’re not talking to people, save-reload the correct dialogue choice, you would just sneak around everywhere, trying to avoid enemies, constantly saving and reloading, because you were spotted.
If you add a handful of boss fights, a good run is possible, but still, there’s going to be a lot of sneaking around and save-scumming.
You end up doing things that would (IMHO) be more fucked up ethically
Example?
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With Mr. House, it feels like a quick golf club to the head is much more merciful than keeping him trapped in his mind for possibly hundreds of years.
With the Khans, IIRC I ended up needing to help them expand their chem empire. Selectively excising a few very evil people seems like it would have been a better choice. Which is really the larger moral question of a NV pacifist run - it’s a game about war, people are going to die, and playing as a pacifist seems more about not wanting to get your hands dirty rather than about practical morality.
Is pacifism ever about practicality, though? The issues you describe sound like the normal issues that always accompany pacifism.
Yeah, these are people who’s solution to the trolley problem is to refuse to touch it.
Yeah - I think those questions are actually part of why New Vegas is such a well written game. It does give you the option to get out of most situations without violence - but it doesn’t automatically equate pacifism with “good.” It doesn’t really equate anything with “good.”
