Not an RPG, but in the Thief series the hardest difficulty usually means that you aren’t allowed to kill anyone. Many people even try to play the games as a ghost. Meaning the only sign of their presence after leaving is the stuff they stole. Every door has to be closed and locked again. Keys stolen from guards have to be returned (in lieu of a game mechanic for this you have to lay it on the ground behind them).
People do challenge runs of the Gothic games as pacifists. So it isn’t part of the games but doable with some shenanigans.
Disco Elysium? More or less entirely conversation-driven RPG about an alcoholic cop who drunk himself to submission so hard he forgot who he is, hence developing him back with skillpoints. Off the top of my head there’s like one combat situation which you can talk around if you’re so inclined.
Otherwise, it’s been said many times that “Planetscape: Torment” is similar … ish. Not the setting, but mechanics, apparently you can entirely go through the game without combat - but that’s not to say there’s not going to be bodies - or so I’ve been told, haven’t played the game to completion, only dabbled the beginnings.
So, these suggestions are with grain of salt, obvs. But afaik both are pretty high up on the rpg shelf.
Grain of salt? Disco Elysium is the perfect example and Torment would have been a better game without combat. I‘d like to add Citizen Sleeper. I‘m a bit tired of RPG where combat often is the only or favoured option.
There are some fun ways to complete some Hitman missions “without killing anyone”, just by fiddling with the environment so that the target coincidentally dies “by accident” later on. You can even get one of your targets in Hitman 3 to commit suicide.
It’s mainly just talking to people, but if you want to fight as few times as possible, you probably need to know the game or tons of save-scumming. You’ll also have to be ok with just missing a bunch of stuff, or pick and choose your fights, which again, needs prior knowledge.
I don’t think it’s a good way for a first playthrough.
IIRC there are six fights you always need to do (two of those in the tutorial and another shortly after, although technically you can use glitches to skip these). But if you only wanted to do these fights, you’d basically do an evil playthrough and miss most of the game, especially Act 1 and 3. And if you’re not talking to people, save-reload the correct dialogue choice, you would just sneak around everywhere, trying to avoid enemies, constantly saving and reloading, because you were spotted.
If you add a handful of boss fights, a good run is possible, but still, there’s going to be a lot of sneaking around and save-scumming.
In Nethack, you can fully complete the game as a pacifist, although it’s VERY hard and the game is already hard to get into to begin with. In that case, you are only allowed to indirectly kill enemies by having your pet(s) kill them or by using spells which make enemies attack themselves. Or simply by avoiding enemies completely. Playing as a healer or wizard is the easiest option, but still very hard. The game rewards this and other conducts (= supported “challenges”) by mentioning it in the very end after you’ve ascended.
That’s not so bad. The good news is that the game gets easier the farther you go. The endgame is the easiest part. The bad news is that you still need to know about a lot of the enemies, items and potential situations that can occur and how to handle them. The most important thing is to gather what’s commonly called an Ascension Kit, which is an approximate list of items you pretty much should have in order to win the game because then you can deal with literally every enemy and situation (unless you make a stupid mistake). So you need to know what those items are, how to get them, how to identify them in the game and not waste them, and things like that. You can get somewhat far just through sheer luck but you’ll never make it through if you play blindly (don’t read any tips or spoilers) or just rely on luck.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance has an achievement for a main quest line pacifist run. There is one NPC you have to kill for story reasons which apparently doesn’t count towards that achievement.
It’s been a while and I’ve never tried a 100% pacifist run, but I think that it’s theoretically possible in Planescape: Torment (Steam, GoG).
I know for a fact that the vast majority of encounters can be skipped with dialogue, and in fact, it’s heavily incentivized because the combat system is not very good.
I’m pretty sure you have to kill a zombie in the first level to escape. And I don’t think you can avoid fighting (and killing) Ravel and the Deva. The Deva I think you can maybe spare after defeating, as long as you don’t bring a certain party member with you…
The Deus Ex series often have pacificist playthroughs (3rd one definitely does, you can play a pacificist playthrough of the OG game with a few exceptions).
The Age of Decadence has a mostly skill check and conversation playthrough. I forget if it’s fully pacifict though.
Styx games have rpg elements and have shadow achievements which you do not kill anyone. Dishonored i believe have the same but i don’t think those can be loosely called rpg
There’s a skill tree, equipment (not clothing/weapons like most RPGs, but still equipment), and crafting. That’s enough to make it an RPG mechanically.
There’s also the perspective definition. You are embodying a person separate from yourself and you are expected to make choices as them. Textbook RPG.
I will never forgive Dishonored for glitching the peaceful achievement on the Xbox 360. I went out of my way to not kill anyone and it was still locked when the credits rolled. I remember there was some funkyness with knocked out enemies dying from external factors.
With Mr. House, it feels like a quick golf club to the head is much more merciful than keeping him trapped in his mind for possibly hundreds of years.
With the Khans, IIRC I ended up needing to help them expand their chem empire. Selectively excising a few very evil people seems like it would have been a better choice. Which is really the larger moral question of a NV pacifist run - it’s a game about war, people are going to die, and playing as a pacifist seems more about not wanting to get your hands dirty rather than about practical morality.
Yeah - I think those questions are actually part of why New Vegas is such a well written game. It does give you the option to get out of most situations without violence - but it doesn’t automatically equate pacifism with “good.” It doesn’t really equate anything with “good.”
I’m gonna throw the rythm game Osu! into the ring. The lazer client works natively on linux and is available in the AUR. (The -bin version is required for score submission).
Roblox has always struck me as being like Unity (and i suppose Godot too but i haven’t touched that for game development). Similar environments and tools. Roblox only really handles distribution, but you can easily handle that yourself with itch or gamejolt (or if you have the cash i believe steam is 100$ for a developer account). This is only really for single player experiences though
As much as I don’t wanna recommend it for personal gripes, I’d say go with minecraft if you want more content in general due to the size of the fan base.
If you don’t care as much and just wanna play a voxel sandbox game and don’t care about having as big of a backlog of fan made content, Luanti ( formerly MineTest ) is a fine enough platform.
The drawbacks for mc, in my opinion, are pretty much things like chat verification ( assuming they actually went through with that ) for basically all messages you send, even in single player mode. And, assuming they didn’t back down and did parity on java with the bedrock version that chat and signs are censored to make sure in every single way you play, either online or single player, is child friendly by replacing all characters with asterisks. I personally left over both of those because I prefer not being treated like a child and having parental controls forced on me.
Also, drawback for mc bedrock is how they, still, after years have bugs where you’ll just randomly start taking damage or will be placing blocks that will not actually place, causing you to die from falling if you are high enough or other similar bugs. Works in single player, too, as far as I’m aware. Rubber banding kind of issues that I don’t know if they’ve actually fixed yet. I’d hope they have, but I doubt it. There’s a reason I’ve heard that version be called “bugrock” many times before in the past. Besides that, the bedrock version is also home to a marketplace where you have to use purchased in-game currency. Just something to keep in mind, despite it not being something you have to ever use. Also, that version doesn’t have access to basically any of the mods the java version has.
The drawbacks with Luanti are the fact that there’s a much more limited amount of content available in comparison to the behemoth mc. You have some games like VoxeLibre ( formerly MineClone2 ) and Age of Mending that are getting updated, but there are a lot more games not being updated because they’re either already completed or abandoned. You’ll also have some trial and error if you turn on a lot of mods for your save in any of the games because even if they say they’ll work in a game because dependencies are met, you still might have mods that instantly crash your save and give you an error that they won’t work for some reason or another. If you know lua you might be able to fix the errors, but do you really want to spend all that time fixing errors and getting a mod to work or would you rather just play without them? Same sort of problem, depending on the game, applies if you apply mods like Unified Inventory or any other Just Enough Items type inventory changing mods, like if you try on VoxeLibre. Haven’t figured out how to get Unified Inventory to work on there.
On the subject of specific games, for VoxeLibre ( one of the games trying to be a Luanti parity of minecraft ), you’ll probably be updates upon updates behind minecraft for a really long time or until the devs either quit or are forced to quit by macrohard/mojangles sending a cease and desist letter or something similar. Features that work just fine on mc, like redstone, might be buggy or don’t work the exact same on voxelibre. For example, due to differences in TNT explosion physics ( I assume ), TNT cannons don’t work despite the redstone for basic ones working just fine. Also, as a fault of Luanti in general, if you look in controls, your “Aux1” key is the sprint key in voxelibre, but absolutely nothing tells you that.
Just to avoid repeating the other suggestions here, Pathologic, less for historical significance or enjoyability and more for artistic significance for the time it was created. (note: I have not played it and probably never will)
Crash Bandicoot (the game) for technical achievements.
And I’m just going to mention Marble Marcher (play the community edition), a game with fractal-based physics (as opposed to basically every game ever).
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