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Kyle Hinkley (A.K.A The Weirdist) manages to exploit Fallout 4 ‘s mechanics enough to complete the game without killing anyone – all on the hardest difficulty.
Since Fallout 4 came out in November, players have been searching the wastelands of the action role-playing game, constantly discovering new ways to play and the best exploits to take advantage of. It was only a matter of time before someone managed to find a way to beat the typically combat-heavy video game without killing anything.
Not only did Kyle Hinkley (A.K.A. The Weirdist) complete Fallout 4 without killing anything whatsoever, he did so on the game’s hardest difficulty: Survival. In July 2015, Fallout ‘s Game Director, Todd Howard, told The Guardianthat the game would be mostly completable without killing anyone, although he made sure to state:
“I can’t tell you that you can play the whole game without violence – that’s not necessarily a goal of ours.”
By all means, Howard is correct,goes to great lengths to make players kill things such as Super Mutants, Synths, or even fellow humans. There are many times where it seems unavoidable to avoid the killing of various creatures but as Hinkley has proven, there are ways around everything.
Responding to Howard’s statement in an interview with Kotaku, Kyle Hinkley claimed:
“The thing about Todd Howard is, even he doesn’t know what his games are capable of.”
Hinkley has put many hours into his playthrough, which he has cut down into a 37 part series on his YouTube channel. After being forced to restart the game, following a mistake in faction choice that claimed 6 lives, the YouTuber created the character Dizzy, who would go on to be the biggest pacifist the wasteland had ever seen.
With her high charisma stat, Dizzy travelled the world of Fallout 4 , talking her way out of all conflict and influencing enemies to turn on one another. Although Dizzy herself is a pacifist, she was responsible for her fair share of deaths. Unlike the game’s predecessor Fallout New Vegas , players aren’t given the option to talk themselves out of violent encounters and so Hinkley was forced to get creative in order to keep his in-game stats from registering any kills.
Escaping the vault was easy enough, Hinkley avoided the radroaches by trapping them in certain areas of the map and managed to kite any unavoidable enemies into areas where NPCs would help dispose of them. To gain XP ordinarily earned in combat, Kyle rebuilt the same objects in a settlement over and over again until he reached level 10 – which is high enough to allow purchasing of some of the important perks that the gamer would need such as “Wasteland Whisperer” which provides a chance at managing to calm down enemies.
“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.”
While it’s true that Fallout 4 isn’t the most pacifist-friendly game, it wasn’t ever designed to be. The latest entry into the popular franchise made a point of having excellent gun combat, inspired by Bungie’s first-person shooter, Destiny. What’s more, developers Bethesda introduced many new mechanics such as gun modificationthat would mostly go to waste in a run where a player makes little use of weapons.
Fallout 4 is available now for PC, Xbox One and PS4.