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.
Ideally, games where you kill nobody at all. Even avoiding killing creatures for a “true pacifist” run.
I’m just going to spoil a bunch of things, because why markdown?
There’s quite a few games where you have alternatives when it comes to main bosses - in the original Fallout ::: you can talk the Master into suicide by proving that the supermutants are infertile :::
in Planescape Torment there are multiple ways of ::: convincing your mortality to merge back with you :::,
New Vegas lets you talk down
:::Legate Lanius, at least on the NCR route:::
Jade Empire will give you a bad ending
:::where you surrender to the Glorious Strategist in exchanged for being fêted as a hero:::
even Fallout 3 will let you
:::talk Colonel Autumn into surrender for like no reason at all:::.
I’d really like that to expand into video games having killing “mooks”/generic enemies be more of an action with consequences. Undertale does a good job of that -
:::if you kill any monsters, even if you spare all bosses, the ending still mentions that there are some hard feelings towards you.:::
Spec Ops has no “pacifist option” but also makes you realize that
:::you were slaughtering American soldiers and innocent civilians because you were going insane:::.
The default problem solving strategy in most games seems to be violence, and that breaks my immersion. The last time I was in a physical confrontation with anyone was fighting my sister in high school - I’ve certainly never killed anyone.
I mean, the whole point of the game is that you could have not killed anyone, you could have stopped playing, you choose to keep playing, you choose to kill all those NPCs, the game never forced you, turning off the game was always an option.
All those games you listed are violence centric, so I imagine the non-violent route isn’t as satisfying. I tried to finish Dishonored (not really an RPG) without violence, but most of abilities involve violence and getting caught just meant waiting for them to kill me instead of fighting back. The gameplay just isn’t optimized for it like something like Thief is.
There are games designed for non-violence where violence simply isn’t an option, such as Disco Elysium or WanderHome. Searching specifically for games without violence is probably a better option than finding games where nonviolence is an option, unless you’re specifically looking to find clever ways to play games non-traditionally.