The Pacifist Report, Redux: beating the game killing only two people

[Fence]

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?

This is something I originally wrote for elsewhere, but figured would also be of interest to this forum. 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.)

Herein I report how things went out trying a similar thing in the sequel! I'll tell you in advance that things did not go quite as smooth for this run, but let's jump right 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

Spoiler

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.

As for Dumb, well. Let's be fair to Whisper. Whisper is a member of a covert government group regularly called to enter hostile situations. Whisper does not know how to use a gun. In fact, in spite of the fact Whisper must have undergone extensive vetting and training to cover exactly such situations, she is categorically *incapable* of learning how to use any weaponry whatsoever. Still, though it may be foolish to still not have mastered your sidearm several years into service, to survive several years of service without mastering your sidearm must in turn make you a Brilliant fool indeed.

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.

This might feel like we've shortchanged Sneak a little, but honestly, we don't care about Sneak Attack damage and at Sneak 7 I was still able to crouch around pretty overtly. Essentially Sneaking is nice, and we'll be doing a lot of it, but it's not something we have pressing need to maximise.

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?

Spoiler

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

Spoiler

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 these stat requirements 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

Spoiler

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. And if you're curious, I recorded the ending slides here. 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.