Actually, you hit the nail on the head. I do blow off limbs and watch my victims bleed out or try to crawl to kill me. It's just lil' ole' me and the way I play.

I'm not trying to justify the slaughter or anything else and I do agree that F4 (and all Beth games for that matter) are pretty bloodthirsty and violent.

My only point was that I don't HAVE to go around wantonly killing everything in my path. Pacifying enemies (Kynes Peace and Pacify or Calm in Skyrim) or pacify and charm in F4 is just another method I use. I like to use the Cloud Syringer in my syringer gun and just leave sometimes.

Since these are my 4th & 5th playthroughs, I realize that there are a lot of situations where I just don't really care to kill everybody and sometimes I just want to.

I agree that the plot drives you to a lot of killing. My point was that it isn't just KILL! KILL! KILL! unless you make it that way.

Be honest. When you played F3 or FNV or Skyrim or Oblivion or any other Beth Game, did you always follow the plotlines and questlines through? I know I didn't. Sometimes I just created a character to live in the game.

I can justify just about anything in the RPG environment. Maybe the whole beginning was just a bad dream. With Skyrim, sometimes I'll play on PC just to use the "Start Another Life" mod and start somewhere else with different motivations.

I use my imagination and creativity and don't sweat the small stuff.

I suppose my level 40 girl should really be looking for her kid at this point, but she has other things to do. She's exploring, enjoying her companions, building settlements, getting rich, building relationships, finding farms, helping people, killing people... It doesn't matter. It's just a game that I'm enjoying. I'm not going to take it so seriously.

I'm an author. I make sh** up all the time! I twist the truth and the plot and the motivations to suit me, not twist myself to suit them.

Sneaking is all fine and dandy, but the potential of charisma is neutered and relegated as a means to mostly either extort more money or squeeze some info out of people. You can't truly exercise your power as a golden-tongue and achieve middle grounds or parlay.

Bang-on points. You know, I've never really thought about the games in that light. Gameplay always blended so well with the overall Wasteland situation, that I think I just subconsciously accepted that the war would continue no matter what I did. Of course it would. But the things my character had a personal hand in (assuming I was playing as a diplomatic character [which I almost always did for the first or second playthrough]), yes...those things...would be different.

In the end however, this is not a point that can be argued. Each game began at war. Each game ended at war. And that is 100% necessary for the main theme of the game, obviously.

I do think, however, that there are times when the player should be given a more straightforward, non-violent solution to things. Example -- the Diamond City bar fight (no major spoilers). Why is there no peaceful resolution to that? It sort of railroads you into it so it can move on to the next "rescue" section. And that's the way the quest plays out. Things like that could have offered a peaceful resolution while still advancing to the next stage with no more than a handful of dialogue to make the transition make sense.

There are two bar fights in Diamond City, are you talking about the one up top or the one below? Not that it really matters since killing is involved in both (one a little later than the other). You do have to admit that in both cases, there are some pretty unsavory characters involved. Neither is like the rather impolite conversation about how Baseball is played.

I didn't correct Moe, because nobody likes a pedant. What does he do if you tell him the truth?

Basically he tells you that he likes his version better.

There are two aspects of this conversation that are kind of funny.

The first is when you say something like, "You moron, that is not how it was played. It was non violent... err, mostly"

Some of the remarks by some companions can be a bit off the wall too. I remember Curie starting up on the statistics of the game, RBI's and such.

The thing is that it should matter simply matter if everyone in one location gets killed. Some locations should maybe stay empty or get "peaceful" people to use it (not only as settlements) aside from getting different enemies to move in. Pre-War stuff should actually never respawn only stuff the newcomers bring with them should appear. I have seen skeletons respawn on graveyard and I had to kill the same gunners and supermutants to secure a DIA chache that I just visited yesterday. My memory is not bad enough to not realize that I had already done that.

They had a lot of skillchecks in NV and I wished they had taken that as inspiratation. Fix some wiring here, heal a wounded there, ... That could wonderfully feed into the interaction with the current enemy groups and doesn't have to stop there.

I am not only talking about the major factions but yes them as well. The Minuteman could for example reach an agreement with a faction to either ignore their actions, trade with them or fight with them. Another example would be that you can't make a treaty with diamond city or to a lesser extend bunker hill and "vault city" as the representative of one or more factions. Which is quite odd considering the importance of these settlements.

Warning unavoidable spoilers!!!

Carefull with the spoilers guys. We are still on the general forum.

picky...picky...lol

New Vegas?

And Indie games can often be awesome.

I am sorry, I have to agree with Kolyana on this.

Beating the game with a zero kill count in not the same thing as a purely non violent win. If you maneuver someone or something else to do the dirty work is not a non violent approach since you are intentionally causing their death. "I didn't kill him, the bullet did. I just squeezed the trigger is all."

Looking at my stats, it appears I've killed more things within 50 hours of Skyrim than I have with 150 hours in Fallout 4.

true...still a tremendous accomplishment....but back to the OP....it does not have to be kill, Kill, kill. Kill....it could be kill...not kill, run, sneak, hide or coerce.

Picky? The game breaks several time and you think this is a real choice to play the game that way? That's like chaining yourself to a car on the highway and then wondering why it has gone wrong afterwards. The game isn't made to be played that way.

Aside from the fact that I never talked about simply not killing anyone or even be a pacifist (Not that you could if we don't change the definition of that word). That would be make no sense in this setting. That is one of the options that I don't mind not being in the game.

I specificly said "While killing is an obvious part in a post-apocalyptic world it shouldn't be the only idea behind the quest and level design.".

Odd, for me it is more of the opposite. I guess this just comes down to different playstyles.

Funny you mention playstyle as I've done far more exploration in Fallout 4 than Skyrim which you think would mean I've faced more enemies. I think it's because Skyrim's dungeons are generally larger and always filled to the brim with enemies while I've seen plenty of interiors in Fallout 4 where there is not a single one. With obvious exceptions such as the Thicket Excavation or Quincy Ruins, most Fallout 4 locations usually have around a dozen enemies at most. Meanwhile a mere section of a Skyrim dungeon can throw several dozen draugrs at you.

Running and sneaking are just part of combat. "kill, Kill, KILL, KILL, ..." is just a catchy title and a simplified description.

Besides we still have to just kill to solve many quests and you can't really explore (strong point of the game) and/ or loot to your hearths content if you don't kill at least most of the living things around you.

There is too often no negation to solve a quest peacefully or even a different kind of quest available outside of the main quest.

Let me give an example how it could work in F4 for peacefull options:

Quest: Get a McGuffin from a building where Gunners have their base.

Standing towards the gunners: peacefull (p), neutral (n), hostile (h)

If you are h then you just have to shoot your way through.

If you are not h then you have the option to ask for it from the highest ranking gunner which you first have to be allowed (bribe, speech, rank somewhere else) to meet if you are n.

Alternativley you could just try to get in (possibly after openly getting past the guards on the entrance) to steal the McGuffin without anyone noticing.

The gunner in charge can be convinced to give the McGuffin either by passing speech checks, performing some odd job or by paying for it. Doing the odd job may allow you to go from n to p for the future.

That is just one example how a quest could be spiced up and be more than just "murder everything there to fetch" while still retaining the option to kill everything.

You actively nuking people would be an instance of you killing someone.
Kiting violent people into other violent people is letting them neutralize each other.
{Follower NPC's did none of the killing, that counts towards a PC kill in the stats)

Note: I also never said it was a case of a pacifist playthrough- but I also didn't reply to someone saying "you can't do a pacifist playthrough," either..
I replied to it being said it was impossible to beat the game without killing anyone.
It is possible. The methods are not practical, and you may not like them. That's fine, too.
But it is still possible for the PC to beat the game without killing anyone.

I'm confused by the intent of this comparison. Both games are notorious for this - but the TES series has always founded it's gameplay on exploration/dungeon-diving, whereas the Fallout series has built itself on the idea of many different options for various situations. Instead of doing both things well, Bethesda has stripped down the dialogue to its core and overloaded the shooty shooty bang bang.

Even Fallout 3, by Bethesda, had elements that hearkened back to the older titles...

ME3. You were forced to play a certain amount of MP to get 100% Galaxy Readiness and hence the best "ending".

It's come up as a plot point in the new Dr Who series several times.....once he even had Davros, of all people, rip into him for letting his companions pull triggers for him so he could keep "clean hands".

For me that a bit of an improvement, as at least I can wander into a few locations in Fallout 4 without it being filled with several dozen enemies compared with Bethesda's previous titles.

Other than the addition of being a nonsensical mustache-twirling villain, there wasn't really more.

I don't see how stripping out perk/special checks is in any way an improvement - this is a specific element of the game that is deeply missed and really hurts the replayability.

And it's sad because I've been writing fervently for them to marry the best concepts of TES with Fallout, and by the looks of Fallout 4 I can't say I have high hopes for them ever doing that with TES VI.

I agree with the lack of Perk checks and I do miss Lady killer (F3 & FNV version), Black Widow, confirmed bachelor and whatnot. Terrifying presence was terribly underused in NV though.

With skill checks based on what we see in dialogue, it appears that most of them now connect with Charisma whether you are persuading, intimidating, bribing, demanding more money instead of demanding more money or bribing being relative to your bartering skills. I don't recall any speech checks involving your character talking about science, medicine or explosives though, which I guess makes sense since Charisma has little in common with what you know about those.

Yah. FO4 is kill 99.99% but now since i have 110k caps from selling Jet (because fertilizer and plastic are easy to find)... I like to pay the ransom now for kidnap missions. FO4 is a single player FPS now with some Minecraft.

Letting your follower(s) do the killing is not an exploit, it's emergent gameplay which, very much, reflects the way things are done in the real world. It's a refreshing touch of realism, if you ask me.

I'd point out, in light of the topic, that the Fallout 4 world is the next best thing to a war zone ("next best thing?" Whiskey-tango-foxtrot, anyone?). The only viable zero-bodycount scenario is to play the role of a refugee and get the hell out of dodge like any other sane person does when civil war hits the fan. But, one might well ask of a game, where's the fun in that? Moreover, in the context of the Fallout 4 world, I would point out that a zero-kill playthrough makes no sense whatsoever and just does not belong in a game that is set in a lawless territory outside all active legal jurisdictions.

I agree that the game is missing basic elements like:

1. A lot more mystery quests - especially ones with a solution supported definitively by physical evidence which can be found, in context, within the game world
2. Disguises as an alternative and far more believable mode of stealth for moving around within human settlements and camps hostile to the player character
3. Negotiation (as distinct from dialogue - there's a whole world of difference here)
4. Deeper negotiation and negotiation strategy
5. Positional strategy for settlements (based on which workshops you choose to activate or not and which provisioning network you tie the settlement into) with consequences in terms of less attacks or more attacks - particularly in areas of positional weakness.
6. Better dialogue and quest option coverage. I mean, what kind of donkey yells during negotiations being conducted under a cease-fire agreement. Talk about embarrassing faux pas. Sure, some people might do it but for some of us, it's just insane - especially if one thinks the person being negotiating with might be able to help find ones only child. When it's like that - all other considerations become irrelevant (which is why holstering instead of dropping his gun for parley is such a svcker-punch)
7. High level strategy - i.e. the option to obviate conflict by making room - which won't always work in the short term (because for some people there is no such thing as "enough"). Ultimately, however, the additional option for smarter, more effective, less punitive strategy would be an enormous improvement over the current quest design - especially where success revolve around how many alliances one can establish between the major factions.
8. Factions as quasi-legal entities so that crime is relative to specific faction instead of being some kind of delusional absolute (and if we really take a dislike to a faction, we can revel in the faction-specific bodycount!)

But viable, kill-free playthroughs? In a place where the words "War never changes" have a visceral significance of their own? Well, I guess a playthrough could involve settling down in Sanctuary, with Codsworth. As emergent gameplay, I'd describe that as unrepresentative and the words "tail wagging the dog" might well come to mind too. But, I guess it's kind of plausible in the sense of being lucky enough to find a conflict shadow covering the first place one encounters...

I only partly agree with the OP. In the main quest and some more elaborated side quests there are often options to solve in a different way. Quite often it is killing indeed. No problem for me.

The respawn of enemies is not a problem, it is mandatory for the game and also very realistic. Good locations would be used and were used in history over and over again. If a raider gang is annihilated, another would occupy the location. The new people woud bring with them goodies and store them, where you can find them again.

There are radiant quests for killing and searching for things. I can hardly imagine other radiant quests. They are repetitive by definition. Of course you could over and over introduce people during a radiant quest, but how is that better? It would be even more boring because of restrictive variety.

That brings it to the problems I see and where I agree with the OP: the respawn is too generic. I can understand that supermutant locations are again occupied by supermutants, because they have a kind of organisation and agenda to keep the territory for them. But other groups could change randomly. First raider, then gunner, then religious nutheads (atom-people), then synths, then, hmm, no one left. And also if the same group occupied a location there could be a variation in number and the exact spots in the locations they appeared.

The loot should also change partly. The only, but big problem I see is the look of the location, which is partly group specific. A gunner group in a supermutant location full of meatpacks would not be very immersive. If a change of look ingame is too difficult (and I bet it is) then the number and spots of the NPC in the locations and the loot should at least randomly change, so that you have to adapt to new fighting or sneaking situations.

Of course even that would be repetitive after some time. A game is a very restricted life simulation.