Fallout 4 expects you to commit murder. While you can occasionally avoid killing others, the wasteland is ruthless and demands violence. That’s how Bethesda intended the game to be played, anyway — but clever players are finding ways around it.
Back in July 2015, The Guardian interviewed Todd Howard, Fallout 4’s game director. Howard was asked about what playstyles the game would support — traditionally, Fallout games let players approach problems in a variety of ways, many of which do not require killing anyone. Fallout 4 is different.
“I can’t tell you that you can play the whole game without violence — that’s not necessarily a goal of ours,” Howard told The Guardian.
Sure enough, there are portions of Fallout 4 where the story railroads the player into killing certain key characters. You’d think, then, that it would be impossible to finish the game without having your kill counter show a few bodies here and there. But you’d be wrong.
Ever since the release of Fallout 4, dedicated players have been working tirelessly to find a way to beat the game with zero kills. One particular player, Kyle Hinckley, stands above the rest, though: not only has he completed Fallout 4 with zero kills, he managed to do so on Survival, the hardest mode available. And he documented the entire thing on video, to boot, so his zero kill claim is entirely verifiable. Via Hinckley’s “The Weirdist” channel, here’s the first episode of his pacifist run of Fallout 4.
“The thing about Todd Howard is, even he doesn’t know what his games are capable of,” Hinckley told me in an interview.
Getting to this point wasn’t easy. “My first attempt was dismal,” Hinckley admitted. “I got discouraged immediately on the first quest, which insists all the raiders in [one of the early missions] die.” Hinckley was stubborn though, and he kept trying. He eventually found out that the raiders on that mission could actually be left alone, and this revelation allowed him to move forward. Unfortunately, on that particular run, he poured 75 hours into a playthrough only to find out that he backed the wrong faction. It was a mistake that cost him six lives, which is no good for a pacifist run.
So he started a new character. This one would be called Dizzy, and Hinckley was determined to make sure she was incapable of killing even lowly Radroaches.
Dizzy is built for mind games. Think of her as the Kilgrave of the Commonwealth. With a high charisma stat, Dizzy can convince humans and Deathclaws alike to calm down. Better yet, Dizzy eventually gains the power to turn people against each other in a murderous rage, all without having to fire a single shot.
Oh, just because this is a pacifist run doesn’t necessarily mean no blood will be spilled. People do die in Hinckley’s playthrough of Fallout 4. He just finds ways to make the game blame other people, while retaining this gem:
“It’s not about whether or not I’m against violence, because the game doesn’t give you like Fallout: New Vegas-esque abilities to avoid violence completely,” Hinckley said in a video. “All that matters to us is [that the game doesn’t count any kills.]…Robots, turrets, legendary enemies, synths, all this shit. Zeroes. All the way down the line.
“That’s what we want. That’s all we want. If we can do that, that’s a pretty crazy achievement. That’s something that most people have already dismissed as being impossible.”
While this may seem like cheating — it’s not technically a pacifist run, given how many bodies pile up by the time the credits roll — Kyle Hinckley’s playthrough of Fallout 4 is still a fascinating look at the ways players bend and break games to do their bidding.
At first, the strategies for pacifism are simple enough. He exits the vault without killing anything just by trapping Radroaches in certain areas of the map, where they can no longer follow him. Later, he kites enemies straight into other NPCs, so they start fights with each other.
The start is easy. Everything that comes afterward, though, is a trip. Most of the XP granted in Fallout 4 comes from combat. That’s not an option for Hinckley, so he starts the game out by focusing on settlements. He builds the same structure over and over again, dozens of times, to grind out enough experience to get to level ten — which is high enough to have some of the basic, necessary perks required for a pacifist run. This is as excruciating as it sounds, especially when you consider what little XP building stuff grants you in the first place.
The entire thing is a test of patience. The run makes ample use of save scumming, that is, the practice of saving before taking an important action and then reloading if it fails. Fallout 4 has a perk called “Wasteland Whisperer” which lets the player pacify enemies — instead of attacking the player, the enemy will simply put their hands up. However, having the perk doesn’t guarantee it will work. It just gives you a chance of calming down your enemies, and Hinckley can’t rely on a dice roll to complete the game with zero kills. So he reloads and tries, tries again, until it actually goes through.
It’s a brute-force method, yes. Like I said earlier, Fallout 4 really doesn’t want you to play the game this way, and all of its mechanics ensure that, at some point during a normal playthrough, you’ll have to lodge bullets into someone’s noggin. Even if you take the so-called peaceful perks.
So Hinckley gets creative. At one point during his playthrough, you can watch him repeatedly pickpocket a NPC — but he’s not trying to steal from that character. Rather, he’s trying to give that character better gear, so that they might have a chance of killing a particularly troubling enemy. Except Hinckley is repeatedly caught attempting this trick, and it’s hilarious to watch an otherwise friendly NPC turn on a character that’s only trying to help.
Sometimes, however, forcing a pacifist playthrough makes Fallout 4 lose its shit. There’s a quest in Fallout 4 where the player must save a companion, Nick Valentine, from a vault. Nick Valentine goes into the vault searching for a missing dame, only to find out she had actually run off with a mobster type, Skinny Malone. At the end of this level, the player has a confrontation with both Malone and the dame. You have a few options. You can attack everyone. You can convince the damsel to turn on her lover. Or, you can convince the damsel to leave without having to hurt anybody.
In a pacifist playthrough, the last option seems like the most obvious one, right? As Hinckley progresses through his playthrough, though, it becomes obvious that the game literally doesn’t know how to deal with a player who pacifies everyone into submission. So, he starts experiencing weird audio problems related to that peaceful mechanic. More notably, when he convinces the dame to leave, the game bizarrely spawns an enemy where it shouldn’t, and this forces the peaceful encounter to become violent once more. Normally, this wrinkle can be dealt with fine — Hinckley can simply pacify the characters again. The problem is, after calming everyone down, the game borks itself. Characters won’t continue their dialogue. Nick Valentine refuses to actually leave the vault, even if there’s nothing stopping him from doing so. Hinckley becomes so desperate after this happens, he tries to physically push Nick out of the vault. It doesn’t work.
In this case, one of Fallout 4’s rare “talking your way out of it” options broke down because the player tried going through the entire game in a peaceful manner. The only way Hinckley could actually complete the quest was by picking the violent option, thereby starting a firefight that he couldn’t actually participate in. Worse, he had to stop his own companion from taking shots at anyone, because companion kills are logged as player kills. It took a ton of tries, but eventually the AI found a way to kill itself without any intervention. It’s amazing.
The biggest hurdle of all, however, has to be the part of Fallout 4 where the player has to kill a character known as Kellogg, the player’s arch-nemesis. Hinckley has to come up with a way to finish the game without personally killing the game’s main villain, absurdly enough.
Hinckley, miraculously, still works through it. He does so by luring Kellogg into a series of mines — not to kill Kellogg, but rather, to get his health down enough. Once past a certain threshold, however, Kellogg will start trying to heal himself (the bastard!) To stop that, Hinckley pops a cryo mine, a weapon that freezes enemies in place. This, in turn, gives the other enemies in the room, which Hinckley has brainwashed to fight for him, a chance to kill Kellogg where he stands. What you have to understand here is, the chances of pulling his off without a hitch — getting all the characters in the right place, having the pacify/incite mechanics pop without fail, and then having the AI successfully kill someone despite their terrible pathing and bad aim — is extremely difficult. The fight took five hours. Five entire hours.
“THANK FUCK,” Hinckley exclaims at the end of the ordeal. “What a shit show,” he proclaims.
“I’d love to ask [Todd Howard why pacifism is so difficult in this Fallout,” Hinckley told me in an interview.
“I’m a little disappointed in the lack of diplomatic solutions in this game, it’s a lonely departure from the rest of the Fallout series,” Hinckley said. “My version of pacifism isn’t really diplomatic, it’s more exploitative of the game mechanics to achieve a zero-kill record. In other [Fallout] games, you had a lot of alternatives for bypassing the combat, whether it was with sneaking, speech checks, or a back door opened with lockpicking and hacking. In fact, in previous games (at least 3 and NV), your companion kills didn’t count towards your record either.”
Hinckley says that he felt sad when he found out how much Fallout 4 focused on combat — it made him feel like the developers forgot about about players like him, who have stuck with the series for a long time. In a way, Hinckley saw his pacifist playthrough as a way of showing the world that he refuses to be forgotten.
Hinckley’s run isn’t perfect. Already, other players are theorycrafting better, less painful methods of dealing with certain portions of the game. But this is it for Hinckley. While his time could be improved, he can’t do better than the zero kills he already achieved.
“I wish I could’ve brought myself to use a mod to simply bypass the reload-reload-reload quality of much of the videos,” Hinckley remarked. “But, that would have been seen as cheating, and I would rather torture than cheat.”
“It was a little aggravating to reload as many as twenty or thirty times on a quest completion, but the fun came from putting problems behind me, rather than solving them outright,” Hinckley said. “However, the sense of relief that I got from the synth killing Kellogg will never be matched by another struggle with this game. Knowing how to beat a game without doing personal damage goes a long, long way toward understanding what lies under the veneer of combat that Fallout 4 is associated with.”
You can watch the finale of Hinckley’s pacifist Fallout 4 run here:
And the rest of the run can be viewed via this YouTube playlist.
Comments
14 responses to “Guy Beats Fallout 4 Without Killing Anyone, Nearly Breaks The Game”
Even in Fallout 3 you could talk down Col Autumn and he Kills your father right infront of you and get the President to Self Destruct. Yet you cant do that with Mr Cornflakes.
And thats what seperates Bethesda from Obsidian, Black Isle, Inxile and CDPR.
But they’re both made by Beth?
yes abut there was even less choice in Skyrim. and as the years go on beth is moving farther and farther way from RPGs and choice because they cant compete against the competition that other Developers bring. Hell for the first time ever Reviewers are not giving bethesda a free pass when it comes to the bugginess of their games despite fallout 4 being alot more stable and bug free than fallout 3 and Skyrim (90% of all bugs in New Vegas existed in Fallout 3 but because it was made by obsidian they copped a hiding when it came to bugs)
http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/fallout-4
87 on Metacritic shows that the reviewers aren’t really against the game at all are they? Tbf I think you’re making mountains out of mole hills. Beth are free to decide how there games should be made. We just decide whether we liked it or not. They don’t have to stick to a set formula any more than we have to buy it.
I didnt say reviewers are against the game, i said reviewers are not giving bethesda a free pass on bugs and glitches that they have previously had due to the fact that other developers are beating them at what they do and that is Character RPGs. Hell even PC Gamer came out called Fallout 4 a good game, but a mediorce RPG.
Dont get me wrong i do not hate fallout 4 or BSG Fallout is bloody great game that i have 250hrs played in but its not a good fallout game because Bethesda just dont get it when it comes to fallout.
FO2 was the last good fallout game…
Yeah, that’s one thing that’s really upset me about me about Bethesda games – starting with Oblivion, things have slowly started to be removed from their games. They’re not key gameplay mechanics or anything that get removed, more the nitty-gritty min-maxer stuff that we love so much.
The fact that it is still impossible to not have anyone die demonstrates the biggest problem I have with F4, which is the lack of meaningful choice the game gives you. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed exploring the world and seeing the sights, but looking back it all feels hollow. My character’s motivations felt flat and there was little option to expand upon this with interesting dialog choices or gameplay choices. Choosing how to kill something (in this example by forcing others to do the killing) is different then choosing to kill something.
I bought Fallout 4! I don’t have a PS4 though…
The fact you cannot legitimately do a pacifist run through Fallout 4 shows the games failing on a very core level…
Exactly, fallout 4 is a good game, but a poor fallout game just like 3 was.
Indeed, yet I enjoyed 3’s setting at least, quite a bit. 4’s I found…. to be honest… bland.
dumbed down fallout experience is dumbed down
If you gave Mama Murphy her drugs she tells you a phrase that allows you to bypass that entire encounter with Skinny Malone allowing you to leave the vault without killing anyone.
Skinny Malone can be bypassed with high charisma gives you an answer for having the charisma
Being that this is an older engine yes it has problems being pushed to the max but for the most part its proven stable and reliably with cheap publish factor.
The main problem is an older AI system as I noticed I”m still playing with AI’s back from my days of SWG even though there nicer smooth looking AI’s there mechanic’s of operation are still the same.
There blind AI’s they can not see you, there can only sense your there they have no idea what your wearing or gun your using or what you look like, they can only sense what they are programmed to sense like entering your power armor or your vault suit.
This why the leave doors open and fences~ left closed and there blind beyond that point why they walk out into open areas is to see through sensing there environment, they cannot jump and that would make them blind in doing so, they can not use a sniper rifle for distance shooting and shoot at things you can see at far distance, the mutants have a longer sensing range than the typ AI.
If they gave the AI’s sight it would be a completely different game and a lot harder
Hinckley: I Have a way you can bypass the apparent glitch with Valentine, Skinny Malone, and his dame…
You can only unlock this dialogue option if you get “The Sight”; a drug induced vision of Mama Murphy’s. She will say something along the lines of “just remember to tell the fat man (Skinny Malone) to try to remember something along the lines of ‘a creek and mint julep on the rocks’.
I have not confirmed it but have seen it work in a youtube clip. A speech challenge pops up in yellow, of moderate difficulty, shortened as a dialogue choice as something along the lines of ‘Remember the Creek?’.
If all of this is succesful, Skinny will say “What… How do you know about that…”
His lady will bark at him but , but he proclames, “I’m putting my foot down Darla!” He’ll give you and your crew ’10 seconds to leave the vault’. *NO deaths & NO dialogue bugs; save you a lot of time save scumming and failing pacification attempts..****