What is the point of playing non-lethal?

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I only ever when none lethal when its a mission option, but even then i went with the .50 cal nerf dart sniper rifle.
 
Some cut feature is a good guess, yeah. I bet there's a hidden achievement for a pacifist run too.

There's also some quests that do note if you don't kill people. Or one, at least. A certain NPC you have to get out of somewhere will say something along the lines of "and no blood was spilled, that's good" if you use non-lethal takedowns. I mean, I guess the person could say that as well if you do kill people and it's an oversight but I just happened to feel sorry for the people I had to get rid of so I used non-lethal sneaking and felt kinda good for getting that comment.

Maybe we'll be wiser come February... One can dream. :sad:
 
There are many instances during the story where non-lethal gives different dialogue. It's way more than just few side gigs. The game actually takes it into account, which is something never seen in any game ever, so people don't think about it.

Umm, seen before lots and not just recently.
 
It appears to be there solely for 'roleplay' purposes, but as someone who sees no point to roleplay if the game doesn't react to what you're doing at all...meh. Like there's a couple of instances where you're expressly asked to not kill that's reacted to, but all of the people you optionally choose not to kill are not acknowledged at all. I didn't expect massive story changes because that's unrealistic but perhaps a dialogue line or two from a character noticing V's pacifism if you get far into the game without killing anyone. But the game is lackluster on this issue in general.
 
In games where most enemies are humans I really appreciate it when there are systems where you don't have to kill everyone you fight. That said, non lethal does come off as kind of an afterthought in this game, because for the most part there is no difference between lethal and non lethal force, just different weapon mods.

But you rarely ever fight anyone who is just "doing their job" in this game, almost all the enemies you face are murderers themselves, so there isn't as much of a moral dilemma to killing in combat. Oftentimes when you're playing the pen and paper versions of games like Cyberpunk or Shadowrun when you're breaking into a place the security guards are just people who have to serve their corporate masters to put food on the table. It's a much bigger moral question there if you simply murder them or go out of your way to subdue them somehow.

One big thing that kind of bugs me about non-lethal is that it's extremely easy to kill an enemy by accident. Moving the body and the game decides you dropped them too hard, or accidentally swinging one more time while they were already collapsing, or any number of things will kill people who are passed out. So if there is some kind of achievement for not killing anyone it would be nearly impossible to obtain without doing a headcount on every single enemy after every single fight and loading if one of them is dead.
 
It appears to be there solely for 'roleplay' purposes, but as someone who sees no point to roleplay if the game doesn't react to what you're doing at all...meh. Like there's a couple of instances where you're expressly asked to not kill that's reacted to, but all of the people you optionally choose not to kill are not acknowledged at all. I didn't expect massive story changes because that's unrealistic but perhaps a dialogue line or two from a character noticing V's pacifism if you get far into the game without killing anyone. But the game is lackluster on this issue in general.

Yes, there is no reason at all to have all those fancy choices if the world isn't really reacting to what the player is doing.

In some parts, the game seems to be a gigantic draft of what the final product should be.

And there is a lot of generic things that should be changed in the final product, like the guitar songs - there is just 2 or 3 of them. Some NPCs are very well made, while others is like playing a Playstation 2 game - the disparity in quality is very annoying.

The main campaign parts really shine - the scene with Silverhand on the roof is mind blowing in terms of texture quality. But there are some parts full of generic animations, bad AI and sad textures (because when you see it, it makes you sad).

I usually get this Yakuza 0 feeling about this game - but only the bad parts, like animations, some generic soundtrack, generic phrases, characters speaking without moving mouth and so on (but Yakuza 0 was made to japanese audiences, had a very limited budget and wasn't meant to be a AAA title).
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One big thing that kind of bugs me about non-lethal is that it's extremely easy to kill an enemy by accident. Moving the body and the game decides you dropped them too hard, or accidentally swinging one more time while they were already collapsing, or any number of things will kill people who are passed out. So if there is some kind of achievement for not killing anyone it would be nearly impossible to obtain without doing a headcount on every single enemy after every single fight and loading if one of them is dead.

The other problem with this system, for me, is the fact that you HAVE to kill the enemy to get experience, street cred and the money reward.

So, for a pacifist runner, there is the problem of kiling the guy with an unwanted critical hit, while for the murderer runner the issue is forgeting to kill the guy and lose the experience, money and street cred.
 
The other problem with this system, for me, is the fact that you HAVE to kill the enemy to get experience, street cred and the money reward.

So, for a pacifist runner, there is the problem of kiling the guy with an unwanted critical hit, while for the murderer runner the issue is forgeting to kill the guy and lose the experience, money and street cred.

What?? This is not true at all. I am on mostly non lethal playthrough, especially after installing the special Kiroshi mod that made all of your weapons turn non lethal. You still get exp each enemy down, hacking, crafting, etc. More rewards for some jobs (especially that specified on not killing the target). For Street cred, as far as I know, you get stret card exp from the missions/jobs you finished & the random crimes encounters that you cleared, nothing to do with how many enemies you kill/not kill during combat.
 
The game gives you a fair amount of options for playing non-lethal, flashbangs, non-lethal takedowns, you can even get cyberware to make your smartguns non-lethal. But what is the point? It doesn't seem to affect anything in the story outside of maybe one fight and it doesn't seem to affect anyone's opinions about V. Just something I noticed today. It might be cool if there were things that got affected by whether or not V actually gives a damn about human life.
seroisly just dont play non lethal. it will just leave you out of the bounty rewards and any cyberphyco missions where there wanted alive whatever fixer will pay the same either way. i tried to have mercy on sasquatch after the clip i seen in an old gameplay clip suggesting that theres a point where she will come back if left alive and a few days later the game was beat and i found out she has a $30000 bounty that i didnt get
 
Not gonna scroll through the thread in case it's been said already, but many missions go different if you go non-lethal.
Huh really? Give me an example.
I mean, I played 100% non-lethal, and the only one, that maybe was different was Judys story, cause I had no lethal weapons on me then, but I assumed it would end badly either way.

Aside that. I took out Placide non-lethally, I get a msg that his number is not assigned anymore.
To be fair, I dont have many other instances, where the game clearly didnt give a rats ass about going non lethal... But I also cant really say that it didnt. It just didnt seem to acknowledge it.
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One big thing that kind of bugs me about non-lethal is that it's extremely easy to kill an enemy by accident. Moving the body and the game decides you dropped them too hard, or accidentally swinging one more time while they were already collapsing, or any number of things will kill people who are passed out. So if there is some kind of achievement for not killing anyone it would be nearly impossible to obtain without doing a headcount on every single enemy after every single fight and loading if one of them is dead.

I didnt even realise that. So far I always assumed, that people who ended up dead after gun fights (as I literally have pax on all my guns) were killed by friendly fire... thats actually absurd. I mean, the amount of times, where knocked out people, you try to put down gently decide to bug out and teleport 2m into a wall and die, or just straightup turn into an exploding blood baloon I cant count...
Which means nice, playing non-lethal from second one meant nothing in the game.
 
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So... just slaughter everyone because it's the easy path and there are no consequences, and in fact greater rewards for carelessly murdering all but a select few people... and even there you'll sometimes get full rewards anyway.
 
non lethal or not the result always the same no punishment and reward
i kill everyone to get some exp even the enemy on the ground who still life, and again not make any diffrent on the gameplay
i prefer to get exp from every last of the enemy
 
That's not true, at least not totally, or at least as a netrunner. You get the full bounty for leaving them alive and the full xp. They only thing you loose out on is a little bit of Street Cred, and that's only if you were going to get a headshot. It considers non-lethal as bodyshots.
You get more xp if you then kill them afterwords, you get cold blood xp as well, which is another thing you can't reliably use in a non-lethal playthrough until you get the perk to let you get cold blood stacks off of crits.
 
Has anyone tried finishing the skippy mission where you hand in skippy back to her then completed the cyberpsycho missions? Could get skippy unlocked maybe and able to make legendary class??? Just a thought?
 
What's the point of playing non-lethal?
  1. Cyberpsychos for Regina
  2. I get to make more finishing kills. I enjoy that.
 
With my driving skills - I'm kinda relieved there's no point to non-lethal. I can stealthily take down an entire army. But 10 seconds behind the wheels of a car and the population decrease of Night City starts to make sense. As I can't even turn around a corner without causing unintended pedestrian genocide. Even in the slowest car with the best handling, trauma team knows they will have to work overtime that day as soon as I open the door to my car.

I really do try not to murder the innocent when driving. But it's like Pol Pot all over again every damn time.
 
I had this one cyberpsycho quest where I was asked to bring him in alive. I installed non-lethal mod on my weapon and took him down. After a while I looted the area and found an encrypted message that I accidentally closed instead of decrypting it. Couldn't find the message on my endless list of shards so I decided to reload a save and repeat the thing. This time I didn't bother to mod my weapon and I killed him dead, then decrypted the message. What happened was my fixer never mentioned anything about it when I returned the quest to her on both occasions. Later I read somewhere on the net that it doesn't seem to make a difference for that particular quest chain whether I take them alive or dead.

Another mission later on had this monk fellow that I was saving. The quest giver asked for no bloodshed and it was OK by me as I always favor non-lethal stealth takedowns. I used non-lethal takedown on all the enemies on the map and hid their bodies in safe places (not in containers as the area didn't have any) but upon saving the hostage I got yelled at for shedding blood.
Apparently that was another mission where non-lethal mattered none. Pretty sure you can't talk your way through that mission but there's a slight possibility I could have managed to distract the enemies to open a safe way to the hostage. Too bad I don't have a manual save from that part to check. Guess that's a thing for the later play through.
 
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