Some Sort of Blog

Just doing whatever pops into my mind: artworks, gaming challenges, all sorts.

[lavaeolus]

The Pacifist Report, Redux: beating The Outer Worlds 2 killing only two people

Hey there! Do you ever feel tired of war and bloodshed? Are your arms not weary from swinging batons and axes all day? Are you not tired of washing questionable dark red stains out of your suit?

Six years ago I did a little write-up of my experiences trying a pacifist run of the first game, in what was something of a test of what sort of approaches you could take to the game and what sort of builds were viable. It went well! I cleared the game without firing a shot, got every companion, and secured almost a perfect ending for everyone except Nyoka. (Sorry, Nyoka.)

I'll tell you in advance that things did not go quite as smooth for this run, but let's get into the weeds. Our self-imposed rules:

No direct killing. We cannot do anything that would cause "Enemy Killed" to pop up on the screen.

No companion kills. A Leadership run where you outsource everything to your companions is probably an interesting enough build, but our goal is to minimise bloodshed with stealth and wit, not just outsource it.

Try to avoid indirect killing. There will be times where we can, say, gas a building, set a bunch of turrets on people, etc. Unless mandatory to progress the plot, we're going to try to avoid this. Similarly, try to avoid just luring enemies to allied NPCs.

We can be a bit looser with robots. I won't be smashing any, but if I turn a dragoon off with a terminal, I don't want to have to engage in an in-game investigation over whether it's considered mechanically "dead" or just inactive. If it doesn't pop up "Enemy Killed", it's fine.

Character build

Meet Whisper, an Earth Directorate agent who always aims for a clean job: minimal violence, minimal bloodshed.

I think some of the traits / flaws won't really come as a surprise. If you're going to spend a lot of time crouched, it is, in fact, pretty convenient to pick the trait that boosts crouch speed. Brilliant isn't super gamechanging, and some of the dialogue it unlocks is redundant with the Professor background, but it is handy to have and a nice boost early on.

Obviously for our purposes, Dumb is an ironic no-brainer. We won't be using Guns, Melee, Explosives or Leadership. That means Dumb is really just sacrificing one skill, and it's not like we'll be drowning in points to spread around. I went with Engineering, because while it's useful it usually has another alternative or just hides loot. But Observation is probably also sacrificable. Medical too, really, but it does have the odd unique quest solution.

Early on we can split our points between the various sneaky skills, but we need Speech 20 to bypass the final boss (since a "pacifist" playthrough is locked out of some info that would lower the check). I probably put more in Hack than I really needed: I wanted to play around with how the Plug Puller perk worked, and that's locked at Hack 20, but in the current version it just immediately kills a robot, complete with Enemy Killed pop-up. Granted, without combat.

I picked up most of the non-combat perks, but I'd say the big ones were Pickpocket and Ghost. Ghost, when you're attempting to sneak through a building, turns "I'm about to be detected" to "I win". Being briefly invisible is useful for stealth! Who knew?

Otherwise, you know, Nature's Friend is interesting in theory: as a perk that turns an animal non-hostile, you'd think it'd be right up a pacifist's alley. But I didn't really have that many uses for it. If I'm in stealth, and able to crouch behind a beast for several seconds holding E, seems like I could've just walked on by and saved myself any hassle. I got basically no use out of Charlatan or Tall Tale Teller. But then, it's not like they really had much to compete with by the time I picked them up.

How'd it go?

We failed! Well, okay, the title already mentioned I killed two people. Really, this side of things is a bit of a step-forward, step-back on the part of the game. We got rid of disguises and talking your way out of minor crimes, which were a little silly in the first game. Cool ideas, but the gameplay they led to could largely be described as "walking around". And we got a real stealth tool, in the form of the Distraction Device. Someone using a terminal, or watching over something you need to interact with? Fire away!

Unlike the first game, there actually are perks that are worth taking / interesting on a non-combat character, which even aside from this kind of run, I think helps add a bit more flavour to character building. Completely jettisoning combat still has an impact, of course, but it's a good change from the first game where all perks and flaws were basically irrelevant to my run.

There are a few times where the game does just drop "Okay, combat time" on you. When stealthing around the raptidons for Milverstreet in the first planet, there's a point where one jumps down from the ceiling and immediately alerts. When you go to restore power to the Archive, there are points where the game just alerts every Proctectorate in an area to your location, even if you're a mile away from them. You can run from these fights, but they are a little odd; it doesn't feel like you're being ambushed, which I think would be a fair situation to have to deal with, so much as it feels like the game occasionally just blowing your stealth for no reason.

Those moments are, to be fair, rare. For most of the game, I'd say ghosting is a valid and fun approach. I continue to take a perverse sort of thrill from crawling around, seeing all the Protectorate people at work while I slowly pilfer everything in sight and snatch an objective right from under their noses. This is a kind of run that'll force you to look around at how the environment's constructed, what platforming is possible, where the vents will take you. (Even if the vents are, in true RPG fashion, completely bonkers as architecture.) Obviously avoiding all kills does lead to a bit of an XP gap, and I finished at level 25 despite going out of my way to complete quests, but I didn't have too much trouble keeping up with checks.

Really, though, a big difference between games is less how much is blocked off from you, but rather, what. You can complete most quests in the game, aside from a few bounty board tasks (which you wouldn't expect to complete on a pacifist run). I don't really expect these kinds of challenge runs to always get the best, perfect ending, since they inherently limit your options. But whereas the first game had one companion quest locked behind mandatory killing, in the sequel you can complete... VALERIE's questline, because it's just gathering stuff. You can technically recruit Aza and Tristan, by letting them handle any killing prior to their recruitment, but chances are your ship is going to be a little quiet.

To an extent, this isn't a bad thing. Surviving ambushes, meeting someone to find their base under siege... these are fair plot beats, and show a bit more quest variety than if every companion quest was a glorified fetch quest, even if the latter would technically support this run more. I like doing these sorts of runs to poke at a game, but I do know neither game really advertises a no-kill route as a feature. But I wouldn't have objected to Niles' quest having a few more options than just "murder the museum docent".

One other loss is that companions can no longer be set to Passive Mode and offer less of a non-combat boost, which I think is something of a shame. Yes, for this run, it means the optimal thing is to leave them behind. But just generally, I like it when who you choose to bring along feels like it has a tangible impact even when out of a fight. Although I'll admit the skill boosts in the first game were a bit much.

Tricky spots

So, Vaillancourt. Vaillancourt, Vaillancourt, Vaillancourt. Did you know you can blackmail him?

If you remain on speaking terms with him, which you can only do by ratting out Dr Hurley and not outright rejecting his offer to kill her, you can use an audio-recording he kept of the Consul to bypass his boss fight without doing his dirty work. When I was initially playing, you needed an 11 Lockpick and an 11 Speech to pull this off. Quite costly! And also weirdly specific? You're an odd noncombatant if your go-to is agreeing to kill people. But the newer patch lowered it to 7, which was pretty fortunate for me.

This path doesn't feel quite developed, but it's there. In fact, taking this route led to the quest never actually being marked as complete, although I was still able to progress through the game. I feel like Vaillancourt would just kill Hurley himself once you've left, unless he ends up dragged into Mental Refreshment first, but hey. We *technically* kept our hands clean in this situation.

If you're storming the endgame by yourself, you'll have to kill three people at the Consul's hangar, or a door will just stay magically sealed. They're accompanied by a giant robot, but you can leave it standing and just run past its bullets once they're down. If you're siding with a faction, your allies will storm the bay and handle this themselves. Not the cleanest solution and I'd prefer to avoid it, but it is what it is.

Now technically, activating the Archive and restoring its thermal cooling – necessary for siding with anyone – is said to possibly disrupt the crabbles who've made their home there. This doesn't actually happen on-screen, so you could just restore cooling. But if not, don't worry. If you take the Archive yourself and end up destroying it, yes, usually you'd piss off whoever you're speaking to. But if you've already blown up the Archive and then start the negotiation between Auntie and Ruth, you can hand Ruth the Calcaduceus with nary a mention of the Archive's state. Hey, if it works. Non-Truce/Directorate endings are out anyway, because the later Auntie and Order quests have some mandatory killing in them.

So who are our unfortunate direct kills? It's the two snipers in the mission where you face off against De Vries. The door behind them is magically sealed until they're dead. Theoretically you might be able to use the robots to kill them or some such, but it wouldn't really be in spirit of the run. It's a little unfortunate: I assume it's this way to prevent just running past them, and as a setpiece activating the bridge and getting over to them is a fun enough moment. But it's not like there's much firm narrative reason why you can't just bypass these two.

Conclusion

So let's wrap things up. Just to give you an idea of how much in the game is doable non-lethally, I'm just going to list all the quests I did, and maybe some notes on how they worked out. It's not an exhaustive list of what's possible, in that I missed a few collection quests, but it's fairly hefty. Ahem.

A Complication with the Computronic Cerebrum

Fiends in High Places

On the Trail of the Traitor

The Saboteur of Paradise

Recalling the Score

A Cause Worth Killing For

Discrete Mathematics

The Mechanical Matriarch

Crash Course in Telemetry

A Study in Disruption

Mysteries of the Mental Modulators

An Equitable Arrangement

Now Hiring: Invaulable Disposable Agent

Beginning at the Endpoint

Vanquishing the Vexing Vapors

For Whom the Bridge Tolls

Obviously handing over Charlton would get him killed, but if you have this quest in your journal, it gets automatically marked as complete once you've dealt with Montelli and the Vox Relay. It's mentioned the bridge guard no longer needs people to execute now that he's gone.

The Brain Benders of Auntie's Choice!

A Refreshing Bit of News

The Pursuit of the Partite Pentaptych

A Collection of Rogues

A Way Back to the Light

The Case of the Mystery Rations

Controlling for Convenience

Escape From Placid Waters!

Walking on Eggshells

Wanted: Genuine Authenticity

Missive From the Lost Days

Imprisoned by the Riddles of Reality

The Curious Case of the Cankered Chief

Doctors Inside Borders

Present and Future Company Excluded

The Last Voyage of the ACS Free Market

Who Else But Us

An Aegis Against the Miasma

The Saga of the Malfunctioning Mechanicals

The Lab that Shouted Incoherently and Often

A Final Death for Gravity

Schemes of the Secret Smugglers

Better by Factors

Pressing Cares

A Healthy Improvement

Contraband Contrivance

The Starving Remainder

Confessions of a Sub-Finagler

By remote-hacking the turret before it explodes, we complete the quest and instead lock everyone into a, still alive, state of perpetual sickness.

Invaluable Insight for Hire

The Invocation of Inconclusive Innocence

A Sprat to Die For

Tiny Metal Death Pellets

Stalking an Associate of Angry Ascendance

The Mystifying Case of the Midnight Marauder

Diablolical Drones of Doom

This is a "bounty" task, but there's a panel we can interact with and, if we have the Manual Reset perk (or pass certain skill checks) we can just disable all the robots in one go.

Perilous Journey to the Grove

The Cadet's Degrading Dilemma

Would I recommend you go out and do a no-kill run of the game? Maybe not. I don't regret doing it, because I find these kinds of runs interesting, but it does mean missing out on some key things in the game and still requires a bit of blood on your hands. But, if you enjoy the game and want to see how you can push it, hey, maybe.

More reasonably: if you ever want to mix it up, try solving something specific with stealth rather than just storming in, I'd say go for it. If you don't hardline it like I did you can pick up Inez, go help Tristan, etc. There's definitely room to take a less aggressive approach than most would go by default.

And finally, if you're curious as to how this all worked out for everyone in Arcadia, I recorded the ending slides here:

[lavaeolus]

I beat New Vegas and its DLCs with 0 kills on Hardcore

Right, I feel like I owe you some details on this. Meet Michaela, courier and Wasteland doctor. Swearing something not entirely dissimilar to the Hippocratic Oath, she's a devout member of the Followers of the Apocalypse. And less devoutly the Brotherhood of Steel -- but she's a little concerned hijacking a robot army might've gotten her kicked out of the latter. Hasn't had the nerve to ask about it yet.

Strap yourselves in; this is going to be a long one. First, the core three rules to this playthrough:

No direct killing. Don't do anything that would increase People Killed, Creatures Killed or Total Things Killed.

No companion killing. Would make this a lot simpler if we brought one along! But I think that would be less a "no-kill" challenge and more a "companion commander" one.

No luring enemies to their death. It's hypothetically possible to just beat a guy to 1 HP and lead them to a radscorpion. But that's not very nice. Try to bypass them through means other than reducing their HP to 0 if possible.

Full disclosure that I did allow myself to use Robotics Expert and shut off machinery. I didn't really view this as destroying them, as they retain their HP and can theoretically be turned back on one day. In fact, deactivate Mobius's giant roboscorpion with the perk and he will, after a few moments, do just that.

Tackling the base game

If you follow some of my other social media, you might know this isn't my first try at a 'no-kill run'! The main difference is that in the last one I didn't really do any DLC. I did Honest Hearts and called it a day. This run was also done on Very Hard / Hardcore, which doesn't change things too dramatically but does mean we can't be quite as cavalier about rushing in and running past people. We side with Yes Man in this go-through, unlike our first run which was NCR. They share a lot of ground, though, so again: not too big of a difference.

One fun fact about New Vegas is that being able to get through without killing anyone was one of Obsidian's initial design tenets. But... that comes with a bit of a proviso. You can get through to pretty much any ending without ever having to pull out a gun (or ballistic fist, as the case may be), although there will be clunky moments from the engine being designed with the idea you'd be clearing places of enemies. Hell, you can wipe out most of the factions without ever pulling out a gun, if you help Lanius come to power and side with the Legion.

Can you get through "as a pacifist"? Well. I mean, you don't have to kill House, exactly. You can just pull him out of his tub, expose him to bacteria, and then shove him back in -- disconnected from his systems until he inevitably dies in about a year. There are a few other questionable moments, like the fact that bringing law to Primm inexplicably causes all the people in the Bison Steve to suddenly drop dead. Heart attacks, I assume.

Still, side with the right faction and your hands can come out relatively clean, and I do a few extra things to keep in spirit to the run. I don't give the Legion the Boomer howitzer parts. Our favour from the King is spent ending the violence against NCR citizens, thereby avoiding conflict with Pacer. For the Omertas, I avoid having Cachino open fire on the bosses. Instead I blow up their weapons, blackmail Clanden, and then re-enter the casino. Whereupon they ask me to hand over my weapons and I tell them to shove it, rendering the Omertas irrevocably hostile to me. (This lets me progress the NCR path a bit further, although it's not strictly necessary on an Independent run.)

While there are a handful of quests you can't do, you can complete the majority of the game and most of its quests. The only companion you can't recruit without loosening the rules a bit is Boone. With Cass, you can avoid having to help Ranger Jackson if you take the Barter or higher Speech routes. I avoid having Old Lady Gibson put down her dog for Rex, but if you're not being as extreme fixing him's just a few caps or a Barter check away.

That doesn't necessarily mean you'll get the best ending for everyone, of course. There are some factions, like the Powder Gangers and Fiends, who probably should be dealt with -- but sticking to the pacifist ethos leaves these groups in play. This is only heightened by staying Independent rather than joining the NCR, who would ultimately deal with the Powder Gangers and limit the Fiends' influence once their hold is strong enough.

Tackling the DLC

Does that ethos carry through to the DLC? Sort of. There are troublesome spots throughout, and obviously dealing with Father Elijah through stealth still involves locking him in a room without food, water or light. But I think the only direct violation of that earlier design tenet comes in Lonesome Road. Honest Hearts is actually where we get our main weapon of choice, the Compliance Regulator: a special laser pistol that does less damage but temporarily paralyses an enemy on crits. (A few similar fatigue weapons exist in the base game, but are usually trickier to take advantage of.)

But let's go through some issues:

Companions! Honest Hearts, Dead Money and Lonesome Road all have you escort companions around. If you go into Caution, companions can open fire on people. Sometimes we can just walk on and be sure they won't do much. By all means, ED-E, solo the three deathclaws while I scoot over to the next area. I'd recommend you bring a few Stealth Boys to the Divide just to help keep ED-E out of trouble. Other times we have to get creative. To complete "Prisoners of War" without anyone dying, I have to zap both a White Leg and Graham with the Compliance Regulator, paralysing them each for 10 seconds. I then have to paralyse Graham again to get to Salt-Upon-Wounds without Graham going Rambo on his minions. In all cases, you can abuse the Wait function once you're far away enough from enemies your companion might still be fighting.

Holograms. Dean doesn't want to do his part in the heist without some protection. Two options: threaten to break his legs, which is tempting, or you can activate some holograms to keep guard. Unfortunately the Ghost People have some special coding that says whenever one is permanently killed, for any reason, they should be added to your kill-count. The solution is simple but difficult to pull off. Activate the holograms, then leg it out of the area before they have the chance to murder any poor Ghost People. A gamey solution for a gamey problem.

Saving ED-E. Can't use the terminal until the robots are dead! So either nuke somewhere or trick a few robots into blowing themselves up. But this is technically optional.

Showdown with Ulysses. When I mentioned there being one violation, this is what I was referring to. The DLC ends with a big final showdown between you and the Marked Men, which doesn't progress until the Marked Men are dead. Strictly speaking, Ulysses is perfectly capable of soloing them all while you hide in a corner -- which we do. But that a high-Speech character is able to be carried by Ulysses doesn't really change that you're meant to be fighting off waves of enemies.

In the end, though, we're able to come out moreorless abiding our initial rules, some dodgy moments aside. Old World Blues is the best about it, having no real catches throughout. The enemies have pretty good Perception, so can be a little tricky to sneak past, but there's no mandatory killing. Honest Hearts is interesting in that it's clearly aware a pacifist approach is possible and actually addresses the possibility in some dialogue -- although, of course, Graham does add some complications if you're strict about it.

Dead Money and Lonesome Road? Tough stuff. If a non-combat character interests you, there's an extent I'd say go for it, but maybe just give yourself a mulligan for these two DLCs and the Graham-segment of Honest Hearts. From a roleplaying angle and outside the confines of the Pip-boy stats, it's not strictly your fault if some guy you're forced to travel with attacks someone, right? So long as you don't deliberately take advantage of it.

Video proof

I didn't record this full playthrough, but I did record the final mission and the ending of each DLC. Just so I'd have a record of having done it. The full playlist is here, but if you'd like to watch any individual one:

Base game

Honest Hearts

Dead Money

Old World Blues

Lonesome Road

I realise this isn't, like, irrefutable evidence. But if you're curious about how the ending slides play out or if there's anything special, there they are.

[lavaeolus]

Beating Weird West with No Humans Killed

Weird West is a game that proudly wears its immersive sim inspiration on its sleeve, and later updates explicitly tried to support this more by adding a visible human-kill-count and non-lethal weapons. So let's take it at its word and see how far we can go. Spoilers ahead!

Be aware that when the game says "no lives were claimed", it’s being a little generous. No human lives were claimed. We do put down a few sirens, a whole lot of ravenous, and I ultimately had the Protector kill Pigwoman Ruth to prevent her massacring Cedar Flats. All other pigmen and werewolves got to live, though, so that's nice. You could take things further for a "truer" pacifist run, although there are some mandatory monster kills along the way.

In any case, the end result was interesting if flawed. Once you know how to navigate around them, Weird West's levels can be surprisingly open. Look for a window, climb up a shed to platform over to a balcony, get up to the roof and use a rope to go through the chimney... Unfortunately I do think doing all this from a top-down perspective can be clunky at times. There were a few times I went to KO people but, uh, accidentally picked up the chair they were sitting on and alerted them. Whoops! A bigger concern, though, is that reloading can often reset objects and the environment to default states -- and sometimes it will inexplicably change where NPCs are located. It didn't really bust my stealth, and sometimes even worked to my advantage, but it was a frustration throughout.

Outside of stealth you should be aware that combat does require some careful control. Things easily and rapidly swing out of control as an oil lantern gets shot and the whole place erupts in fire and acid. Which, dare I say, is bad news for anyone KO'd on the floor at 1 HP. Posse members can be equipped with warclubs and shovels, and they can be really useful for some mandatory fights, but they always come with a risk. In a random encounter, it's usually best to just find a horse and hijack it, letting you flee to safety.

Still, it was overall a fun time seeing how far you could go. Some fun stuff:

What's up with Albright? We actually expose Albright early on. Specifically we bring a candle over to her and watch her "accidentally" catch aflame. Once she's transformed and fled town, we can be sure the Stillwater interogee will surive and Snack will just give us our husband’s location up-front. But the dilemma about exposing her to the marshal remains unaltered, and gets the game a little confused about whether she's actually been exposed or not.

What is a human being? Sirens are okay to kill provided they have transformed. That means fighting Shelby in an open fight. It also means it's 100% allowed to turn Ruth into a pigwoman, and then immediately open fire while at the Soul Tree.

The misadventures of Sybil and Franciscus: You can avoid the initial fight with Sybil and Franciscus by KOing Sybil before you read her journal, but this'll cause the two to ambush you in a random encounter. Immediately flee, and they'll try again at the Blood Moon Temple... but I believe you can just roll over and interact with the Blood Moon. They'll both end up in Oneirist cells come the start of the Oneirist Journey.

[lavaeolus]

Finished watching Avatar: The Legend of Korra. Have some quick drawings of Team Avatar to celebrate.

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After the last two drawings I received some immediate feedback from friends: ‘What about the cabbage guy?’ So here’s a quick drawing of the cabbage merchant.

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Bonus Toph doodle.

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Finally got around to actually watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. Have a quick doodle to celebrate.

[lavaeolus]

A few weeks ago I went through some of the older stuff I had lying around on my computer, old files and screenshots and whatnot. You know, see if I could claw back some extra space. Anyway, what I did have was these old shots of my SR3 character. Since there’s a new Saints Row out, may as well share them.

I don't know what I was going with for theme, but I don't know, I played it back in 2012 so just assume the Boss was a big fan of Tennant's run on Doctor Who. As I recall, this character is kind of unplayable now because, due to the upgrade system, they're both invulnerable and have infinite ammo for all their weapons. It's a tension killer!

Oh, and Russian Female Voice, incidentally.

[lavaeolus]

With the subdue-run done, here’s the second conversation most people probably won’t have seen. If you side with the Elders but subdue rather than kill Gaichu, the next conversation differs as well. Granted, with the implication that the Elders will just kill him off-screen.

In some of the other mission outcomes, the dialogue also differs slightly if Gaichu is subdued. There’s no variance for killing/subduing the Elders, however.

[lavaeolus]

With the subdue-run done, have two conversations most people probably haven’t seen. The first, if you avoid killing any thugs in the intro.

[lavaeolus]

Shadows of Hong Kong: The Minimum-Kills Run

Last year I attempted what was basically a Shadowrun: Hong Kong pacifist run. Essentially we played a perfectionist Shadowrunner who preferred clean ops: they used charm and guile to complete objectives without violence, and if combat did break out, used Duncan to subdue enemies non-lethally. On a good run, we were the ideal Shadowrunner. On a bad run, well...

Now, you might wonder why it's been over a year between installments. After all, the DLC isn't that long. The truth is that our ethos doesn't translate. Or at least, it's been changed radically. We could beat the main campaign without killing a single metahuman, and only a few key runs threw heavy combat at us. Neither of that's true any more. Many enemy types now no-sell AP damage entirely thanks to JoltAlert, and our slow-and-steady approach to enemy removal will now frequently have us sustaining ourselves through multiple waves of enemies.

Still, you may as well strap yourself in. The campaign's on the shorter side, so that means you can have a full breakdown this time. How many people do you have to kill in Shadows of Hong Kong?

Mission-by-mission report

Rude Awakening: We actually get through this mission with no kills recorded, despite gunning a captain down. Maybe it's something to do with the plot-radio he's carrying messing up the scripting. If you like, mentally increase the kill-count by 1. Unfortunately we can't save the civilians from the police, since we can't enter Pang's restaurant while in combat and one of the officers involved is another captain with JoltAlert. If you're questioning me leaving a bunch of civilians to die to complete a run smoothly: absolutely, you've got a point. Given the themes of the story, I like to think of this as an opening descent of sorts. After all, we've been shadowrunning for a while and have evidently reached the point of executing the odd person here-or-there. We're still keeping to a code of keeping the bodycount low on the job, but mayhaps we've gotten a little too used to the casualties this line of work can leave.

The Tiger's Den: The key fight takes place shortly after Lam's betrayal. It's terrible to have your own tactics turned against you, but not much can be done to stop the shock-baton heavies crawling out of the woodwork, bashing poor Gaichu over the head again and again. I could've set the turrets to lethal mode, but while I've used it as a measure, I'm not strictly trying to game the kill-count here. (Fun fact: I think in Dragonfall at least, DOTs will sometimes avoid adding to it. You know, if you want to do a murder-everyone no-kill run.) So that means the turrets are peppering away at the AP of my enemies, but they don't have much of a sense of who to prioritise. Still, by drawing aggro they make this whole affair just that bit easier. We subdue all we can, but by the end 7 police members die by our party's hand. Once the main fight's done, however, we're under no obligation to fight anyone on the rooftops or car park. We sprint past the AP-damage-abusing bastards to safety.

Detention: While the other optional mission requires you to fight (and kill!) things right from the start, here fighting can be delayed until the end of the mission. In an expansion that frequently ensures you end combat before progressing, it's a change of pace to just be able to run past the drones on the rooftop. Things wrap up with, of course, a mass group fight, but we can try to keep casualties to a minimum as chaos rides. I did side with a corp here, which makes the fight a little easier.

Tai Po: We have to kill one person outside the warehouse and then it's time for the final showdown. As far as I can tell, we can't grab the spider-drone controller without having killed some captains, so we take out all four of them the hard way. Fortunately, the evidence to persuade Krait is accessible. That doesn't mean our final fight gives us much room for mercy, though. We subdue what few we can while unloading on the rest. In the end, 12 of our recorded 19 kills come from this mission, but that count includes the spiders. When Krait finally appears, we tell her to shove off; she complies. As to whether we leave Shadowrunning behind now that the bodies are piling up or finish things by pulling Qiu from a burning building, well, I'll let you decide.

Wrapping things up

So that was Shadows of Hong Kong. I don't know if it was to provide a challenge and test for endgame builds, to provide a sense of escalation after facing an actual god, or an overcorrection to complaints of Hong Kong being too combat-light; but whatever the case, it certainly gave my team a good workout.

Unfortunately, Shadows doesn't have quite the polish of the base game. While it's absolutely hit-or-miss in terms of reactivity, the main campaign will occasionally deign to acknowledge a few subduals: the thugs at the start, leaving Gaichu tied up, sparing the Plastic-Faced Man's mistress. I don't think there's any such moments in Shadows.

Still, the job's done and all-told are hands our as clean as they could be. Fun to dust off this old stunbolt-enthuasiast of a character and bring their story to a close. As bloody as that ending might be.

[lavaeolus]

Needed an avatar for a Pokémon forum, threw this together a few months back. Or, in avatar-size resolution:

[lavaeolus]

A Peaceful Stroll: reaching level 50 without any recorded kills in Elder Scrolls Online

To anyone on the EU servers who might've stumbled upon odd and erratic behaviour from a Wood Elf player, I'm very sorry. Maybe you saw me running as I was chased by everyone in a dungeon. Maybe you saw me being attacked and jumped in, only to wonder why I had been speedily circling an enemy while spamming cloak and doing jack-all. Maybe you saw hints of me creeping through a delve and then, the moment you took on the boss, saw me swoop past to take the objective and leave.

I had an urge over the Christmas season to revisit the game. Wanting a refresher but also not really wanting to just repeat content again, I decided to mix things up with a challenge: to beat the game without killing anything. At least, not officially. Not a unique idea to me: I've seen some threads here on pacifist characters and while preparing for this I found this old Reddit report from Zenitharr. But hey, four years have passed since that post, Vets are no longer a thing, and One Tamriel dropped -- so perhaps it'll be interesting to give it another look.

Terms and conditions

The rules I set for myself were relatively loose. My goal was to get to level 50, and there were just two firm, unbendable rules to follow while doing so:

1) Keep those kill counters at 0.

To my knowledge, a kill is added when an enemy you have dealt damage to is reduced to 0-health. If a quest needs you to 'weaken' an enemy or just 'challenge them to a duel', it'll generally be safe to do (just watch out for other players). Non-combat objectives that result in an enemy dying do not, generally speaking, count.

At one point I was doing a quest and was tasked to burn down some slaver tents; "Hell yeah", I yelled to no one in particular, "No more tents for you!" Immediately after, an animation of a slaver running out screaming and burning to death played. This is what is known in pacifist circles as an 'oopsie', but it did not increment the counter. Rule of thumb: if you attack and damage something to death, that's a kill; if you press E on something and an enemy explodes, you're probably in the clear.

2) No grouping up with killers.

I generally prefer to do these sorts of challenges without interfering with other people's games. If another person feels like grouping up for some sort of pacifist raid, well, maybe that could be fun, but you can probably understand why it'd be a little dull to write a post about "Can you sit back and let other people kill and do quests for you?" (The answer's yes.)

Still, I didn't bar myself from interacting with other players entirely, and every now and then you walk into a dungeon where everybody's already dead or you get credit for another player jumping in and defeating people. That's fun! Emergent gameplay, sort of. When opportunities made themselves apparent I used other players to my advantage, but I never explicitly asked anyone to tag along or gank a guy.

The build

Overall a simple one. I made a Magicka Nightblade with a Restoration Staff, using Medium Armor to enhance my stealth and sprint speed. In hindsight the Khajiit's racial stealth ability would've been nice here, and a race with boosts to Magicka would've had its charms, but Bosmer was decent enough even if not a particularly optimal pick.

Life mostly revolves around your cloak: you can pretty much just sweep through to the end of a dungeon with it. Get enough Magicka and you can practically run through most places. Sometimes confrontation is inevitable due to the time it takes for your character to interact with things -- but there your cloak comes in handy again. Turn invisible and everyone tends to freeze in place. So if someone's lured away from what they're guarding... and if you have the time to walk back and just interact with it before they can hit you... bye bye. Alas, it's a strategy that's a lot less consistent than it sounds.

Note: Since you don't tend to actually fight, a Restoration Staff isn't amazingly necessary. For the first 20 levels I had actually resigned myself to not having the Restoration skill at all. You can't kill something to pick it up, and Restoration seems to have no skillbooks to let you bypass that. So how do you get it? Er... I don't know. When beating someone up with the staff, the skill popped up mid-fight. I have three theories, then: 1) if you manage a certain amount of hits with a weapon without killing anything, it's automatically added; 2) I had been carrying around a Resto Staff and, as a failsafe, a skill's stuffed onto your character if it somehow reaches level 20 or so without being learnt; 3) I just accidentally hit a random 1-HP spider or rat during the fight, didn't notice, and it didn't increment the counter.

What can you do?

More than I expected, to be honest. Quests where you have to kill -- as an objective -- are common, but compared to other MMOs there are plenty of quests where combat is technically incidental. The game will set you up for a fight, but it won't always demand it. I ran into plenty of scripted ambushes that you can just... immediately cloak away and ignore, quest proceeds as normal.

Sometimes you'll stare at a delve boss aggressively standing in place and psyched for a fight, and you'll realise there's absolutely nothing stopping you just walking past them. That's always funny.

Which isn't to say this was a walk in the park, exactly. Presumably to stop exactly what I was doing, interacting with objects takes a noticeable amount of time. Which means sometimes, yes, you can just cloak past someone and do the objective while they're still turning to face you, but that's not always practical and sometimes takes a fair amount of maneuvering to pull off. If you're not willing to deal with the frustrations of possibly getting caught and having to flee and try again, you'll cut off most quests.

Nor is it to say that you won't get through a quest and hit a sudden roadblock where, uh oh, the objective suddenly does require outright combat and you'll have to abandon what you were doing. I'd say the story quests can be worse than sidequests here, as they're more likely to end in a climactic fight and leaving them undone is more likely to lock off other content.

What was it like?

There's an inherent fun in just bending a game and doing something you weren't meant to do. There's something fun about there being a dungeon and you just swooping through it. Did that wear off? Ultimately I ran into frustrations from the game not being designed to support me doing that -- arbitrarily suddenly being locked off a quest, progression assuming I'd be a killer, the amount of quests on offer in an area being very feast-or-famine, etc.

But the One Tamriel update was kind to this playstyle. This is not a character who'll ever have a complete track of the overarching main storyline, and they'll never officially mark a delve as complete -- but they can absolutely wander the world and dive into delves, stumble upon quests and attempt a lot of them, and gather skyshards or lorebooks or whatever else. Just be aware that I did most of this using double-XP from the New Life Festival, and I found towards the end that I was running the XP-well dry with just the base game. (I only started trying out DLC areas once I'd gotten to level 50.) Note that I got most of my XP through questing and exploration; it'd be theoretically possible to sit there and craft your way up to 50, but I was curious how much general content I'd be able to do.

It was interesting. I was, for most intents and purposes, locked off the main and faction questlines, albeit able to dabble here-and-there in the latter. The end result was that I pretty much lost all sense of direction. The flipside is that it freed me up to go anywhere, do anything. I got used to questlines not always having much of a conclusion and sort of adopted the mindset of a wanderer occasionally helping out. Jumped about a little and wasn't too certain on where I'd end up next. I did heroic things, but I wasn't the hero; indeed, the whims of other heroes charging about could have an immense impact on my gameplan.

I also had a lot less loot, obviously. I'm wearing the Servant's Robe disguise there, because my actual armour is pretty patchwork. Maybe not an experience I'd wholeheartedly recommend, overall, but an interesting enough change-of-pace for a gimmick alt.

The end

And that about wraps things up. I uploaded my character to ESO-Database and, while I'm not sure the stats are entirely accurate, you can see their quest history here; that'll give you some hints on what I was able to accomplish and what I wasn't. My Achievements are here.

If you see me in-game feel free to give me a /wave. Just don't invite me on a raid. My damage-per-second is terrible.

Originally posted to Reddit in 2019, followed by a post on the official ESO forums. It's actually a little outdated: kills are now tracked account-wide, across characters!

[lavaeolus]

The Hong Kong Minimum-Kills Run

Typical, isn’t it? You’re making a game, you add in a small little touch, and suddenly players are trying to build their whole approach to the game around it.

So it is with Duncan’s Subdue, which takes people out without actually counting as a kill; the only catch is that you need to reduce them to 0 AP and stun them first. Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a little on the easier side and it’s also the entry in the trilogy where talking and tricking your way past things is most supported. These two things in mind, I set out to beat the game with as little kills tracked as possible.

As you can see I didn’t quite reach 0 kills, but considering my first character had a killcount above 100 I’ll call this a success. You might find it interesting that all kills I couldn’t dodge come in the endgame, and none of them are people. I had to kill 8 Matrix ICs to free Raymond, and had to kill the final boss and their minions. Had I been a little faster removing the Queen’s ability to summon extra minions, I could’ve shaved off two kills there.

I’m told in original versions of the game you could actually Subdue the Queen and co., which is hilarious, but evidently no longer supported. I did still get the ‘best’ ending, but she’s nonetheless registered as a death on the stats. So for the RP-conscious amongst you, my hands are still pretty clean. The most questionable, kinda-lethal thing I did was refuse to side with either person during the Whistleblower mission. This ultimately resulted in a bloody fight where everyone but the two ringleaders (Subdue’d by yours truly) died. C’est la vie.

Build and playstyle

My character was a Mage and a Decker, but the emphasis was very much on the former; just enough Decking to save a party slot that might otherwise be spent on Is0bel. As you’d expect, my spell-choice focused on a dash of utility combined with sources of AP damage like Stunbolt. Note that despite its description, Petrify doesn’t seem to actually enable Duncan’s Subdue, although it’s still convenient to be able to disable people for a few turns.

Otherwise, if attempting something similar to this post, I’d advise grabbing a Shock Glove and Geichu himself (Metal Stance) from the Whampoa mission as your first run. Oh, and be aware sometimes you don’t actually have to stick around for a fight and can just walk to the mission’s exit.

Etiquette-wise, I used Gang, Shadowrunner and Socialite. In hindsight, swapping Socialite for Security might’ve let me bypass a guard in the final level. (As-is, I just had to KO him and the two others he summoned; Ku Feng lived, but was not taught to be a better monster.)

Tricky spots

This was done on Hard difficulty, but as mentioned Hong Kong isn’t a tremendously difficult game. Generally speaking, once I’d picked up AP spells my goals weren’t too unmanageable; when you and your team are entirely spec’d around AP, you can shut down people pretty hard while Duncan’s cooldown passes. There are a few tricky spots, though:

The opening: You just don’t have the tools at this point in the game. In the initial fight I tactically lured people into shooting me and Carter over Duncan. In the escape, I summoned a Shaman spirit solely to be a bullet sponge. I’m a hero.

Prosperity Tower: Specifically the fight to free Raymond. I brought Is0bel along because I wanted to keep my character available to Stun people, but that also means there’s just a lot that can go wrong: Duncan can’t go down, or you’ll be unable to Subdue people. The decker can’t go down, because they need to free Raymond. The decker can’t be detected, or you might have to add kills. You can’t go down, because you’re the main character. (You should also be aware that I metagamed a bit and just remembered passwords from a previous run, saving me some kills of software in the Matrix; things get complicated if you’re strict about doing it in a more legitimate manner.)

The final boss: The final boss is mostly the same as always. It’s just since you’re probably spec’d around damageless subduing spells, you might not be ready for the switch to Overt Firepower you’ll need in the second phase, to bring down the boss without taking down her healing sources.

What couldn’t be done?

I tried to be relatively completionist, but the following missions were left undone. If anyone has any thoughts on how to finish them up, I’d love to hear it.

The Feng Shui mission: I thought I had such a clever idea here. I wanted to use Gobbet to ‘Steal’ the spirits. Doing so seems to immediately end combat… releasing the spirit. Combat immediately restarts. Maybe you can make this work through cheese, but it’d be a pain.

The Dig: You can get the paydata and one of the two books required without fighting. The other’s in front of some monsters and if it were ever possible to Subdue them, it doesn’t seem to be so in my version of the game.

The Sinking Ship: Be careful not to trigger this one. You can actually get quite far here, if you’re willing to rely on NPCs to do your dirty work, but the doors in the basement of the ship automatically lock until you kill some rats.

Gaichu’s mission: I think this one might be doable. Sort of. You’ll always kill one person who you separate from the others, but because this isn’t done through combat it shouldn’t count in the stats. IIRC you can’t Subdue Ishida, but since he’s left alive for the cutscene it might be fine. The reason I’m foggy here is that for RP reasons I just didn’t do this one: yes, you can technically Subdue almost everyone and render the point behind the mission a little comical, but you’re explicitly setting out to kill some people. Now, it’s for justified reasons and to protect a crewmate, but we’re trying to avoid wetwork here.

How was it?

Always using Duncan’s Subdue feature can be a bit of a pain in the sense that sometimes the game knows to react to it, other times it’s all “Oh, so I heard you killed X”. The game generally assumes you’re a killer, of course, albeit perhaps a relatively nice and peaceloving killer, and the dialogue choices mostly reflect that. There’s some bits you might otherwise miss; I don’t think I’ve ever actually not killed the Talon before, since even if you’re planning to flee the fight early he immediately runs up and makes himself a prime target.

Still, it was fun looking at encounters from an alternate perspective. I used Duncan in my first playthrough and spec’d him around KOs, but obviously using him to take some people down is another matter entirely to trying to keep the entire battlefield in a constant state of paralysation. Actually getting past some of those mentioned tricky spots was pretty satisfying, of course.

I don’t always know going into a challenge how well the game will support it or how frustrating it will end up. Other than the intro and the missions I mentioned above, however, this approach was surprisingly viable; for a lot of the game it wasn’t so much a challenge as it was just an alternate playstyle. That said, while the vast majority of missions supported it, it was admittedly only metagame knowledge that prevented me from walking into or triggering a mission where it would've impossible to proceed. Still, apart from Gaichu’s and maybe Gobbet’s personal missions I don’t think I’d ever be forced to kill any ‘people’ (aka anything the Shadowrun setting would dub a metahuman).

I’m not so sure this approach would work as well in the game’s expansion. While we could still go through with a lighter-than-usual touch, I remember many of its enemies having Jolt Alert — a feature which automatically jolts them back from 0 to 1 AP, no-selling our main combat strategy. Could we still get through with clean-ish hands? A question for another day, perhaps.

This was originally published in 2021 to r/ShadowrunReturns on Reddit, but is now being crossposted here and on my WordPress blog along with some of my other posts, with a small bit of expansion.

[lavaeolus]

Jedi Shadow: beating KotOR with as little killing as possible

For a game with such an array of skills, Knights of the Old Republic is very willing to just let you charge in and clear out dungeons with your lightsaber. There's about one point where Stealth as an option is explicitly acknowledged, and it's on the Endar Spire. From a player's perspective, it's an odd investment: you could slowly sneak in and bypass foes or set up mines... or you could just charge in and collect that sweet, sweet enemy XP in a flash.

Still, it did get me wondering. How viable is sneaking around? And in a game that pats you on the back for mercy and de-escalating conflicts, how much combat is unavoidable? Neither of the Old Republic games would support an outright pacifist run, but how well would the game react to us eschewing its main gameplay? Let's go on a journey together, people, a quest to save the galaxy with a minimum of whoosh-whoosh pew-pews.

Enter my character, a Scoundrel. I wasn't sure what approach would be best for this run, but I figured the class that starts with stealth and gets a buttload of skill points would be a good choice. I decided I'd take the extra effort to grab 14 Intelligence, even though in the harsh world of the first game that equates to a whopping one extra skill point a level. Given the goals of the character, it felt fitting enough to go for a more defensive Dexterity-focused build. Would it be enough? Let's find out.

Oh, and this post is pretty long. Just a warning.

The Endar Spire

Look, I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. For the Endar Spire we're in full tutorial mode, and that means you're gonna learn how to combat. You can mostly leave Trask to it, as you sit in the corner mourning Sith, but your hands will get dirty.

A bloody, bloody time. I counted 16 people in total, including 5 I electrocute with a computer. Keep that number in mind for later! It's a very murdery tutorial.

Taris

Would you believe only 2 kills?

Well, sort of, but that's a charitable count. First, it doesn't count the ships in your first mandatory turret sequence. Second, a specific rakghoul needs to die before Mission will spawn -- but it's the one who attacks Hendar, so if you charge out and take hits he can land the final blow. It's also ignoring Davik, who we technically never lay a hand on: he just gets crushed by rubble mid-combat with us, thanks to the Sith bombardment.

Brejik, then? You win the swoop race, but Bastila (not yet part of our party) breaks out of her own accord... and can easily handle things by herself. You're obligated to kill zilch.

So who are our lucky two victims? It's an assault droid in the Sith Base and the Sith Governer. All other combat kills can be avoided by stealth, by hacking computer terminals to open doors and shut down turrets, or -- more than I would like -- by running away from people while screaming. Let's call it 1 person, 1 droid and 1 creature.

Dantooine

Dantooine doesn't get much time to wrack up a killcount. We talk down Juhani and become a Consular, then head to follow a vision. The only necessary kills are 2 droids guarding the Star Map. Even then, you don't need to take them out in *combat*. You can stealth past them, use the computer to unlock the seal, and then just run back into the main room. Do so, however, and they just... inexplicably explode when you open the door to the Star Map. C'est la vie.

Still, here's something fun. You know the beasts attacking the runaway droid? You can run up to them, lure them away, then break line-of-sight and return to the droid to talk to him. While I don't know if that's intentional, it's cool it works as a solution.

Tatooine

You do need to get a Sand Person disguise, and those are dropped by the Elite Warriors who form part of each desert ambush. Otherwise the game auto-kills you when you pass by the Sand People's turrets. So we kill this Warrior, but let the other two ambushers live.

Since we'll go light-side, you might think that's it: Sand People negotiations done and killing's solved. Alas. We have to take part in a krayt dragon hunt, and that means luring some banthas as bait. To finish luring the banthas, we're forced to kill four more Elite Warriors who attempt to stop us.

That makes 5 people and 1 creature (the krayt dragon) in total. Calo Nord tries to ambush us but we can... literally walk past him without triggering combat? A bounty hunter for the ages.

Korriban

Home of the Sith, and a multiple-quests Prestige system! We sweet-talk our way into the academy and do most of the non-combat stuff: recite the Sith Code, reveal Yuthura's betrayal, get the info from the Mandalorian (and fake his death while we're at it), fetch Ajunta Pall's sword. You might recall in that last one, a Sith student tries to get the relic off you. We refuse to give it to him but run past him; any overt trickery would get him killed.

But count that up. We need five Prestige points, and I listed *four* things. We're left with a sadistic choice. To get our last prestige point, we must either:

Rat out Kel Algwinn to Uthar, which technically keeps our hands clean and avoids combat altogether. But Uthar is implied to kill the young apprentice.

Help the renegade Sith students escape: they just need a Terentatek killed.

Head into the Tomb of Tulak Hord and either let the hermit kill Mekel, or help Mekel turn the tides against him.

In the end, I went with killing the Terentatek. This way we can say with some earnesty that, hey, did you know you only need to kill one person on Korriban? A crack stealth squad of me, Mission and Juhani (remember: she has a stealth ability!) went into the caves, just barely eliminated the beast, and reported its death to the renegade students. It's not an easy task at level 9, but when you're loaded up with determination and adrenals, there's nothing you can't do. (You can get the Qel-Droma Robes without actually killing the beast, for the curious: they're on remains nearby, so you can grab 'em with stealth.)

Technically I cower in a corner, stealth, and just let Yuthura solo Uthar. In this case my character walked in knowing there'd be a conflict, and I did poison him to weaken him, so I'm still going to count that as a kill. Yuthura is spared but, sadly, not redeemed -- we need peace with the academy so we can convince a Sith duelist to free the academy's captives. (He assumes it's all part of a powerplay by an in-hiding Uthar.)

So there you go. Korriban: least bloody planet so far. 1 person and 1 creature.

Manaan

It might seem sneakier to use a passcode or passphrase to enter the Sith Base, but that actually results in a fight the moment you enter. If you go to the Hangar, however, you can just sneak aboard a transport and arrive at the back of their base, avoiding combat altogether. At least initially: we'll still have to trigger the fight when exiting the base, but at that point we can just run through the front door. Sadly, the dialogue doesn't change to acknowledge your relatively softer methods.

Three Firaxan sharks must die to clear us a path in our first sea floor expedition, followed by two more sharks in our second. It's a shame because in principle, these sharks don't need to die -- but I couldn't figure out a realistic way of avoiding their aggro or their attacks.

So that makes 5 creatures. Manaan, with its cold war and courtroom drama, was almost our first pacifist planet completion. Alas.

Kashyyyk

I, er, actually don't have much to say! You're not on Kashyyyk for long, and here's the secret: we're not going to be doing the core of it. This whole Chuundar vs Freyyr civil war thing? Seems like that's something for the wookiees to solve. We just get the Star Map and leave. Sorry, Big Z!

Oh, but the trick with the droid earlier works here as well: we can lead the two Mandalorians attacking him away, peacefully saving Grrrwahrr. Beautiful name. All-in-all, we finally completed a planet without having to kill something and all it cost was one of our companions.

In case you're wondering about my order here: by leaving this planet completion last, we can avoid the Star Map's droid fight without getting any dark side points. But I'm simplifying things. Technically I went to Kashyyyk, picked up Jolee, took him to Manaan and dealt with Sunry, *then* came back to wrap things up. The XP from the Sunry trial is too important to pass up.

0 kills!

Leviathan

Mission's the pick for a bloodless rescue, in my eyes. We invest a point into Carth and Bastila's stealth skill and equip them with basic stealth generators, just barely giving us some wriggle room to work with.

Of course, there's the Saul Karath boss fight and his minions. That's 7 people in all! Weep.

After that, though, we can get through without killing any other Sith while on the ship, although leaving begins the second mandatory turret sequence. How many die there? I still don't know. One for each ship at least. Maybe they're drones. We live in hope.

Unknown Planet

Starting this begins our third and final forced turret sequence. But we don't actually have to kill anyone in this One vs Elders war. Rescuing the Elder scout from the One requires he set the beasts on you, but once that cage is open all you need to do is find that Elder and tell him to get a move on.

But we don't manage to complete this planet without some death. In the catacombs, the door to the tile puzzle's room actually won't open until our party takes out the 2 droids in the map. An attempt to proof the tiles against NPCs walking on them, perhaps?

That's it, though. Sorry: we'll be staying on the light-side rather than murdering Jolee and Juhani. I know it'd be funny to do a dark-side pacifist run, but alas, here it's not really viable. Maybe in KotOR II.

Star Forge

This is it. Our journey's complete. No more level-scaling any more and we do have some mandatory fighting. But it's also the last of any significant XP gain from objectives. So where did we end up?

Level 13. That's not good. That's not good at all! Bastila and Malak are level 20, so our Force powers won't work. And it's not that I haven't been completionist, either! If a sidequest didn't require killing, it was done. Oh well.

We run past most of the Star Forge. We have to kill three Dark Jedi to progress, but the first real obstacle is Bastila. Still, give it time and we wear her down. Fortunately, we manage to give her a quick pep talk and avoid having to deal a fatal blow. She is Good once more.

Malak's another matter entirely. Now, I tried various ways to cheese him: my accumulated mines, kiting, etc. But in the end, it's not enough. Maybe if I'd been more prepared: if I'd optimised a little better, if I'd remembered to get that Crit-Immunity belt. Alas. I have to turn the difficulty from Normal to Easy. Importantly, that neuters his crits.

That done, I decide to go the extra mile. On Easy mode, Malak can't realistically kill me so long as I'm pumping medpacs. Thanks to stealthy looting, I have about a hundred of these things. I decide I'll take on Malak out without personally killing the Captive Jedi. It's less impressive than it sounds; Malak makes terrible use of them, draining them when he takes only a bit of chip damage.

And with that, down he goes. Peace in the Republic is restored. The full gang reunited, heroes of said Republic.

Wait, are we missing someone?

Final tally and thoughts

So that's 34 people, 8 creatures and 5 droids. Thank the Force we could spare the droids. But wait. That means just under half the people we killed were on the Endar Spire. I told you tutorials were dangerous! Obviously you can quibble with that count a bit. There's also the ships we blew up, and we turned the tides of a war and were complicit in the Star Forge's destruction. Still, there's the broad strokes of it all.

I really wasn't sure how this run would play out. How much XP would we get on Taris? How many Jedi levels would we be able to get? Had I a more solid idea it would've changed some of the things I took for granted. I managed to fully restore HK-47 before the Leviathan, but only just; I just assumed I'd get Master Valour at some point, but that power's not available until character-level 15! Stealth is more finicky in the early game, and there's a few annoying encounters on Taris who have +60 Awareness. But there comes a point where you can reliably count on it letting you delve through a dungeon, looting what you want.

In hindsight, I wish I'd repaired more droids. I avoided it because I didn't want to start fights, but had I realised that every little XP would matter come endgame, it definitely would've made sense to optimise them but not put them in patrol mode. I did all sidequests I could, but squeezing out the maximum XP wasn't something I prioritised early on. I also avoided XP leeching (e.g. triggering Canderous to fight against the rakghouls), which probably would've bumped my level up... and in turn, given me a free ride from character level 6 to 7 at Dantooine.

But hey. We did it. The constraints proved interesting enough. Did you know you can't access Yavin's shop after you get your fifth Star Map? There's also equipment that's useful -- but only available by killing. Goodbye, my Circlet of Saresh. But with a hundred medpacs and a bunch of drugs, no Sith Lord is completely invulnerable.

Originally posted on my Reddit, I’m now crossposting here for prosperity.

[lavaeolus]

Briefly streamed Pokémon Black a while back, only using Dark-types. But because I was showing off two screens at different sizes, threw this together to fill some space.

[lavaeolus]

Peaceful Wanderer: exploring Guild Wars 2 without attacking

Combat! Dare I say, an important thing in a lot of MMOs.

But when I first played Guild Wars 2, I noticed it almost always went out of its way to provide non-combat alternatives to clearing hearts. Oh, sure, those were probably meant to be done whilst clearing out the local bandit population, but it did get me thinking.

If you did want to get through this world leaning on this sort of thing, how dirty would your hands have to get? How viable would it really be to get around without partaking in the inevitable violence of Tyria?

I decided I'd set out and see. Explore the world, reach level 80, see how it goes. Since I'm posting, you can gather I was overall successful; I think I was tagged as killing one monster during the whole affair, and that was through means other than directly attacking them. (I was credited with inflicting a centaur with [Burning] while others were fighting them; I believe someone inadvertently gave me a Fire Aura.)

Rules

A term like pacifist run can be a little vague and mean different things to different people, so when posting things like this I think it's important to be clear. The rules I settled on when starting were these:

No using damaging skills. The core rule: I can heal, I can stun, but no using skills to hit things. In general, I attempted to not do damage at all and -- if damage had been done inadvertently -- to ensure the fight ended without anyone dying. This is a little hard to keep track of and verify, though. What I can tell you is I didn't use any damaging weapon skill, never put a damage skill on my second bar except to use non-damaging tool belt tools, and while I picked up items/weapons from the environment, I didn't use them to hit things.

Summon hits counts as my hits. Fun fact: my first character was an asuran Necromancer. So, you know, if I wanted to sit back and let a veritable personal army handle things, I'd hop on them. I decided things I actively summon, whether through skills or items, are an extension of my character. On the flipside, NPCs and other players aren't my responsibility, although for obvious reasons I didn't just group up and get a friend to babysit me.

No shortcuts. While accumulating 80 Tomes of Knowledge would technically get you to level 80 in short affair, it's also a bit out of spirit of things. So no Tomes, no writs, no XP boosts. I didn't have a hard rule on account-shared stuff or crafting, but I likewise didn't just port myself a bunch of equipment or use the gold I've previously earnt to craft my way from level 1 to 80.

You could be a bit looser with the rules, such as allowing damage against objects. Or you could be harsher, and try to moderate what actions you take in the overworld (e.g. squishing spider egg sacs). But those are the rules I set myself.

The build and playstyle

Enter Queemva, sylvari and faithful adherent to all-things-growing. It may be wrong to think of her as an active peacemaker. Rather, Queemva's a child of the dawn who wants to view the world in both all its splendour and horror. While she might lend a helping hand, she doesn't really want to right any great wrongs or control/change the world; she just wants to see it.

She's also an Engineer. You know, having done all this I'm still not sure what the best approach to a passive explorer would be. I considered a Thief that just stuck it out in stealth, but felt that would be a little one-note. A Water-focused Elementalist, perhaps? Feel free to mull on it in the replies, but in the end I went with that odd-grabbag of skills that makes up the Engineer profession. In hindsight, asura get a bunch of non-damaging racial skills and are probably best suited to this type of character; but, you know, gotta get that RP.

Queemva uses a shield but no weapon, but mainly focuses on using the Med Kit. Being an Engie, she's also got a few gadgets and elixirs, and can throw a net at people to very briefly immobolise them; the Net Turret itself can do a bit of damage when initially summoned, so has to be deployed more carefully. Elixir S might not be that useful for outright stealthing an area, thanks to its cooldown and 5-second length, but is a nice thing to have when you have to stop to heal someone or commune with power. When combat inevitably breaks out, she can dodge, drink or do whatever's necessary to keep herself up while tending to wounds and hurt NPCs (or players, if a big group event's started).

In a pinch, she can also just outright lure NPCs places. Hey, this wasn't my go-to, but I'd be lying if I said me running around combat areas like a headless chicken didn't occasionally end up going balls-up and backfiring for a few NPCs. Those guards were probably pretty surprised when a sylvari came running out followed by a bunch of monsters. Look, the important thing is, I got heart points for reviving them.

On the record, I did try to keep a better watch out for screwing over other players. The last thing an AFK player needs is to be swarmed by a bunch of spiders.

How'd it work out?

You know that odd sense when you first start out, the Personal Story isn't unlocked yet, and the world's just staring at you with little direction provided? Good/bad news: you're not going to be able to do your Personal Story, so that feeling might be staying a while.

Freeing in its own way, but if you don't like setting your own goals or exploring the world for its own sake, this probably isn't the run for you. It took me a bit to get into the groove of things, myself, since while the early levels go by quickly they're also when you're without any of your later tools. An Engineer with no weapon, elixir, gadgets or kits is a poor Engineer indeed.

Once I was a bit more built-up, though, I found it fairly relaxing (dodging bullets is very peaceful). No doubt progress is slower without combat XP, but I still found myself steadily levelling up each session. Always new places to see, new vistas to reach and added incentive to work them out. Minimal loot, of course, but if you're avoiding actually fighting you can probably afford to let your gear slip a bit; I was still gradually making money.

Well, I say 'always'. Once I got to the higher levels, let's say 55+, I noticed myself start to lag behind the map level curve. Completionism had kept me up to date beforehand, but it couldn't last forever. Fortunately, at this point I had generated enough coin and karma to supplement my levels with crafting (I went with raising Cooking). Even so, reaching level 80 forced me to do some hearts I'd not bothered with earlier.

I admit to feeling a certain level of burn-out. Part of which might be down to my pacifist playstyle, but if I'm honest, I hit a similar burnout when originally playing the game. On my first character, I think I used Tomes to just skip the final push to level 80, but that wasn't an option here. Guild Wars 2 is fun and has an overall engaging world, but it can -- combat or no -- get tiring or repetitive after a while.

So, of course, I took some breaks; between you and me, a lot of this was done between bouts of Great Ace Attorney. Like I'd generally recommend when going for Map Completion, I think it's important to pace yourself. Log-in, take in the sights, come back when you're in the mood. That's how I tried to approach it, and certainly reaching 80 took a fair amount of gametime; but it was done in bits while making slow-but-steady progress.

Final notes

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. While writing this, I found this similar no-kill run, which you may be interested in since they've actually gone further than me. A final thank you to anyone who noticed some erratic behaviour from a sylvari player and let it go without comment, because not once in this run did anyone break down and call me a tosser.

I don't know what's next for Queemva. I could take her further. Sure, 100% Map Completion isn't possible; even if you can score credit in combat Hero Challenges through healing, I believe there are a few odd challenges here and there that do require you to actually 'attack' something. But certainly there's more to do (I missed 70 POIs!), and I haven't touched any of the expansion content.

At this point I probably wouldn't take her through the personal story even if I could. Everyone else is the Pact Commander; it's fun being some random plant for once. Good luck with the whole dragon thing, incidentally.

Have a good one, all, and know that the quaggan uprising is coming. None will be spared.

I originally posted this to Reddit, but decided to crosspost it here. Apologies to anyone with sudden déjà vu.