"didnt kill anything" lol

Agreed. The whole 'i beat the game as a pacifist by having others do all my killing for me' thing is pretty lame, but if somebody thinks gaming the system like that to get a goose egg in their kill tally is fun stuff, mo powah to 'em I guess. It would actually mean something, if they made the game so you could get that goose egg without anyone having to die because of your choices and actions, as in the past games.

They did? I remember an interview where Todd Howard explicitly said they didn't design the game to let you go through without killing anything.

And I dunno about the original games (tell me: does nonviolence involve a lot of save-scumming?), but you had to do almost as much game exploiting to avoid violence in New Vegas - I'm sure you can go through the main questline in a way that avoids any quest where you're tasked with killing someone, but the game throws a ton of violence at you, and you can't expect to escape from or sneak through all of it.

You could avoid, sneak past, or run away from most of those situations, if you were of a mind to not hurt anything at all. But killing something that attacks you first and corners you when you are minding your own business should not be counted against you, in my opinion.

While it's true an absolute pacifist playthrough is very hard (and pretty exploitive) in FONV, the fact remains that a great many quests can be completed without killing anybody. Quests that require you to kill everything in an area to complete them are rare and optional and the most intelligent beings don't attack on sight. I haven't gotten very far in FO4, but it seems like every step in the storyline is an unavoidable bloodbath and almost everything you encounter is hostile.

The guy wore the save button off of a controller to do it.

Using that article to prove a point that it's possible is just as silly as playing an entire playthrough with your character only in their underwear- it can be done.... but....

If we actually minded our own business in the Commonwealth, nothing would attack us other than the occasional insect.

It's more kill, kill, talk to npc, kill, kill, I'd say.

Does a pacifist run.

Nukes the Institute.

So, still just a Farcry shooter/open-world game that uses the Fallout universe (although butchered and shallow) as its setting.


Thanks for confirming an already known fact, OP

let's see, Game starts with nuclear apocalypse, loved ones murdered in front of me while my son is abducted. hmm. that would take pacifism of the Dalai Lama to overcome normal reactions a person might take!

Minding your own business means walking down a street or road peacefully in order to get to where you need to go. Practically nothing you meet in the game allows you to do that without trying to kill you. So no, you cannot just 'mind your own business' and not get attacked. Traders try to do that, and see what happens to them.

Well, that's kind of the thing I dislike with Fallout 4. We're essentially handed the keys to gradually becoming an unstoppable demigod, but the predominant method of showing that power is being able to kill people better. If you're going to let people power-trip, kill, and maim their way through every problem, there should be an equal amount of alternative routes that don't involve killing or maiming things. Talking them down and being the smooth operator with a golden tongue should also be viable.

In Fallout 4, the golden tongued devil devolves to mostly more caps/extortion, a sequence of 2-3 options that progressively get harder, or more information. There are very few scenarios where you can reach a middle ground, even though some individuals seem like they can be tempered and guided to a better path (*cough* Elder "Daddy-Legacy-Issues" Maxson *cough*). I can't think of many quests outside of Big Dig or Unlikely Valentine that demonstrate the ability to reach a middle-road. Even Unlikely Valentine's middle road solution is reached at the very end, after the fact you've killed and maimed your way through a vault full of Triggermen. Can you imagine if Vault 3 had been set up like that? "Oh I'm with the Khans and I want to sell drugs to you guys" - Said the Courier after leaving a trail of dead bodies behind him.

I don't feel that every situation should call for a diplomatic one, and there are inevitably situations that should result in lines being drawn in the sand and people duking it out. But in Fallout 4, there are situations that would lead you to believe that the opposing parties are malleable, intelligent (enough), and pragmatic to a point that they'd be willing to parlay and open dialogue - and surprisingly they rarely do. Arthur Maxson is shown to be conflicted over his heritage and Lyon's teachings, but it's glossed over, and there's no way for the apparent forced father-figure (AKA the sole survivor) to influence the 20 year old dumb ass. Oh you killed a Death Claw once Maxson? I killed 40+ of them before even meeting you, and I had no formal preparation for my first encounter with one and I emerged from that fight without a scar).

That's the point I was making. If you were minding your own business you'd never meet 99.9% of the things in the game world that want to kill you.


Leave vault > Find Codsworth > Follow radio transmissions > Ask Directions > avoid the sound of gunfire and corpses strung up on telephone poles > find peaceful settelement > Get menial job > Die of natural causes or workplace accident > The End


Everything wants to kill us because we get uppity and invade its space, supremely confident that "our business" is whatever we say it is, wherever we say it is. Traders make a living by sticking their noses in other peoples territory in order to make a profit. That some of them come back noseless is no surprise, but they're not exactly unsuspecting innocent victims. Commerce is always risky until you can manipulate someone else into assuming the risks for you.

And once again the Bethesda [censored] prove they have terrible reading comprehension. This thread failed hard.

When I used "On topic:" I figured that it went without saying that I was addressing the topic and not you. The former sentence was geared towards aiding in your future posts, since you expressed an issue, while the latter was towards the OPs thread.

My bad then, the fact that the on topic wasn't meant for me went right over my head.

It's fine man. I fully understand that it's difficult to gauge conversations when they're all in text.

Well, if you want to define minding your own business as strictly hiding out and avoiding any and all conflict, then... yeah. But sorry, raiders and supermutants and etc. don't own the open road/country. If they want to kill me for walking through, that's their horrible career choice

Pacify this, beach...

I think the OPs title was cut off ...

What is was going to say, had it been able to accommodate the full text, was ...

Well...yeah. That's pretty much the only way it makes sense to define it unless the character is totally oblivious to the way that the world works around them.


Unless getting into firefights is your business, then wandering around places where people start firefights is not a hot career choice either.

Just saying...the rails don't lead to Mutual-Respect-Ville in this fairy tale.

The main character's journey is to find their missing son. He's not imposing on anyone else by going out onto the open road and looking for clues as to where the child has gone. Codsworth literally points you to Conchord telling you to ask the "rough sorts" there if they've seen him. You go there, not with the intention of saving Preston or stopping the raiders, but to ask them a damned question. And they shoot at you anyway (compare that to say, the Powder Gangers, NV's starter raiders who you can help, hinder, ignore, join, or trick).


The only people whose business you get into during the MQ are the Triggermen and the Institute. And the latter's business is your business.

Not really. Once you learned how to get past the deathclaws / super-mutants from level 1 (up the ravine near Tabitha would save you your stealthboy for later), there was only minor details to get sorted, in order to do the main quest without any, or at least very little killing. You could pretty much smooth-talk your way through it, and sneak / run from enemies in the wild. It is very doable, but probably not from the first time you fire up the game. You pretty much have to be aware of that possibility, and build your character for it, with very specific milestones. But exploiting I wouldn't call it, since you don't cheese the game per se.

You can use those charisma perks to avoid hostile enemies now. That makes a pacifist playthrough much more viable than in New Vegas and Fallout 3, since you have more options than simply running away from every enemy you run into.

We're off into the spoiler weeds, for which I'm at fault, sorry about that for anybody who caught the edge of the blast. (previous post edited)


Anyway, I think it depends on what you think of as the main quest. There's a couple of ways to get where you're going, but the way the story starts out it really presents only one of them as a task you're expected to complete, and it's a path directly through a bulletstorm, as we all expect from a shooter, if not from an RPG.