This article. Holy shit how anyone can have this level of patience is mindblowing to me:
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 no-kill playthrough as a way of showing the world that he refuses to be forgotten.
Sometimes, though, forcing a no-kill 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 no-kill playthrough, the last option seems like the most one to pick, 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, though, 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 like they’re supposed to at that point. 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 by force. It doesn’t work.
I just…wow.
