However, the designers liked the idea so much that it ended up staying in the game (which turned out to be a very positive thing).

Tim Cain (Fallout, The Outer World, Troika Games) shared another interesting fact on his YouTube channel. His games are generally open-ended RPGs that give players a great deal of freedom. According to Cain, the pacifist, peaceful run where you don’t directly kill an enemy wasn’t originally in the plans for Fallout, it was just an accident, but the team latched onto the idea and it ended up officially making it into one of the best CRPGs.

“It was an accident in Fallout. We had designed the game and done the main quest and everything. And at one point, I think someone in QA said, ‘You know, you can play without killing anyone. It turned out that it was a side effect of most of the dialog playthroughs that no one died,” Cain said in the video embedded below.

The developers then explored the possibility and eventually supported the peaceful approach, and Cain prioritized pacifism in his later games, expressing his appreciation for the challenges behind peaceful playthroughs because it is also a form of role-playing where the player interacts with the game on a deeper level and requires creativity from the player to complete the task from start to finish.

Cain also revealed that one of the game’s possible endings (where our character kills the Vault 13 guard) was inspired by a near-omnicidal game designer who raged against unkillable “important” NPCs. This may have been a form of revenge on his part. He presents all of this in an entertaining and understandable way, so that everything from design decisions to programming tricks are easily consumable, and the behind-the-scenes secrets that the veteran developer shares with his audience are easy to watch.

So pacifism was seen as an innocent opportunity, and it ended up being a good decision to leave the most pacifist solution possible in Fallout, but of course it wouldn’t be fun if it wasn’t hard to play through the story that way.

Source: PCGamer