Moving From Gratuitous Violence To Diplomacy

In 2023, the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 surprised everyone from the players to the developers themselves. While many factors could be considered for its success, I later noticed one point that intrigued me. At its core resides a system with a solid turn-based combat system, there are many situations to completely forego using said combat system and instead rely on different conversational skills to deliver a convincing argument or threat. Not only that, but the many humanoids of various levels of intellect have their reasons for seeing you, the player, as a threat. The characters’ individuality is further strengthened through naming characters and including tiny bits of leading narrative, such as a stick drawing of a happy goblin family in the body of the goblin you just killed.

To further explore this insight into player and enemy interaction, I decided to look into how Disco Elysium, Undertale, Pathfinder: Kingmaker and even Diablo 2 have systems that allow different game approaches. While some are developer-intended approaches, often players attempt to find non-violent approaches to otherwise violent games.

Disco Elysium takes diplomatic resolutions to the next level with its aesthetic approach to skills and stats, turning most actions into a battle against yourself. Some combat encounters exist, but the main focus is on dialogue and carrying yourself according to whatever attributes and skills you felt were most apt for your role as a detective. Disco Elysium, however, is also heavily praised for its weight in words and story. Not everyone can create the quality and length of script this type of game requires, but that does not mean the only other approach is performing violence for levels.

Undertale on the other hand surprised audiences with its distinct gameplay routes. Monsters are by default afraid of the player and may inadvertently attack them, and the player has various options to talk it out with the different inhabitants for a peaceful resolution through monster-related actions, such as bathing with a bathtub-like monster. Taking a more pacifistic approach allows the player to meet a variety of monsters, engaging and bonding with them for a warm experience. Another approach is to attack the monsters, defeat them and acquire EXP, which in Undertale’s case stands for “execution points”, to gain LV, which stands for “level of violence”. The violent approach effectively depletes the locals from the area and causes otherwise friendly characters to plead or bargain with the player in hopes that they would stop their violent killing spree.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker pits you into the boots of a ruler, with one choice relating to human-eating trolls looking to rid themselves of their status and instead become worthy vassals to the newfound king while limiting themselves to consuming the deceased instead of the very recently deceased. An evil alignment option exists to allow them to reach a more legitimate status as citizens, but the game feels this option is only fit for distinctly “evil” characters since the alignment system treats fraternizing with monsters as being inherently evil.

Sometimes, experienced players may add additional constraints to their playthroughs, which can be seen as branching of the speed running(the act of reaching a certain game state or game completion as fast as possible) community attempting pacifist runs of different games. Even Diablo 2, a game fully built around the mass destruction of enemies has speedruns for pacifist categories. However, it is debatable whether reflecting enemy damage counts as pacifism, but if that’s as close as you can get, then I will give them the benefit of the doubt.

From Baldur’s Gate 3 to Diablo, monsters have vastly different labels attached to them. How do the players then make these distinctions? What’s the difference between a deadly monster and a possibly deadly monster with family and friends? Does adding a name into the equation humanise monsters, or is it the presence of speech, or intellect? Which monsters or creatures are okay to kill, and which ones cause a guilty pang in the player? I would argue that a hypothetical “corpse of Gaz’zik” has more effect than just a “goblin corpse”, especially if your character had the insight to notice in a conversation with Gaz’zik that they were very much afraid of you.

Games often allow us safe environments to experience horrifying realities of war, terror, discrimination, and colonialism without causing apparent issues, but I feel it is important to give more room to alternative approaches in games. How would players approach more peaceful alternatives to colonialism in different games, such as Minecraft? Rewarding players for non-violent approaches in games is simple enough since in games we can have many tangible rewards outside of monetary gain, such as relationships, achievements, and other similar measures of progress. Try to think about the game you last played, how much violence is involved, direct or indirect? Are there any ways you could add a peaceful approach to it if you had the resources to do so?

Special mention to the Tampere University course “The Future at Play: Games for Sustainable Development” for inspiring critical thinking on games and their sustainability.

Games mentioned:

Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023) by Larian Studios
Undertale (2015) by tobyfox
Disco Elysium (2019) by ZA/UM
Diablo 2 (2000) by Blizzard North
Minecraft (2011) by Mojang Studios

Photos:
Screenshots from Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019), taken by the author.
Screenshot from Undertale (tobyfox, 2015), taken by the author.

You might also like

---

More from Features

---