New Vegas had bean bag rounds for non lethal takedowns (even though they didn't work due to a glitch) and one of my favourite and challenging things to do in skyrim is play as a pacifist, do you want non lethal means of subduing your foes?

Knockdown attacks yeah but after using a mod that fixes the knockout effect on beanbag rounds I think that one returning would be a bit much unless you can't stack the effect constantly while they are still knocked out which results in them never waking up.

Two easy steps for playing a pacifist. 1. max out sneak 2. run for your life when even the lowliest mudcrab assaults you.

I don't know. It works really well for stealth games, since avoiding enemies is the entire point and it generally offer a new layer of challenge to the game. But this isn't just a stealth game, and prior games have put you in situations where all enemies want to do is kill you.

I'd love it if we got karma for sparing fleeing enemies, though. They should at least expand on that.

I'm not one for Non-lethal take downs but I hope they make a slitting throat animation like in skyrim. Or if they put a tranquilizer rifle in it then I'll use that.

Would be good for roleplay, and if it worked similar to Deus EX: Human Revolution where lethal takedowns created more noise due to shrieking in horror and pain Vs getting clubbed or slept and going unconscious.

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You think restraining your foe with handcuffs for example would be a good idea?

Something else to consider is that in a lot of stealth games, enemies rendered unconscious don't wake up during the mission. This works in games that are mission-by-mission like Thief and Dishonored, but in an open-world continuous world like Fallout, you have to have them wake up at some point.

There's always the metal gear solid route, they have a time limit on sleeping and unconscious guys, with some indicator that they are going to wake soon (like they start tossing and turning once they are close to waking up).

On the fence, options is nice, but then again a core theme of post-apoc is the emphasis of a kill or be kill world, a world where pure pacifism is like a genetic defect, destined to be left out of the gene pool, so tone wise a expanded none lethal option would feel kinda off *shrug*

Yeah.

it's the up to the player who takes this path to do what needs to be done and clear out by the time the baddies awaken and raise the alarm. Assuming gamesas affords the player this level of responsibility. Which won't be the case if they continue upon the dumbed down Skyrim route.

Actually, now that I think of it, they could make "non-lethal" pretty damn dark, and significant for non-stealthy characters. Imagine if they had radiant bounty hunter quests that offered you a bonus for capturing the target alive... and if you could incapacitate someone by straight-up blowing off their legs or something so they couldn't fight back. Stealth characters would get the more gentle takedowns (although I don't think sleep darts or a choke-hold could make it through Power Armor...), but combat-oriented characters could do it with blunt weapons or aiming attacks at limbs instead of the torso/head. You could potentially play a non-lethal character more f'ed up than a killer.

And if you let fleeing enemies escape (and they ought to actually go away and despawn instead of going back to murdering you), you get an XP bonus and some good karma instead of their loot (or the XP from just killing them).

It'd be nice, but I'd only want that if the game actually assigned some significance to the action. As in (for instance) a quest by a someone that wants the PC to act without killing their friends (who will be hostile to the PC); and to complete the quest without any of the friends getting killed... or perhaps even having to have remained unseen for the duration.

Just having a non-lethal option that doesn't mean anything, doesn't sound very interesting to me.

*BTW... One of my New Vegas mods, I'd like to see done in FO4 officially; or I might do it later.

Taser Shotgun shells. Non-lethal to organic life; mildly damaging to robots. Has a weighted chance of knocking out anything for an indeterminate period.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1oOltRjGZo