Summary
Sure, video games tend to gravitate toward the more physical activities. Fighting is usually, and sometimes literally, the name of the game. But some of us are of the sort who don’t like when the computer-generated people are sad or hurt, so what options are there?
Aside from putting another700 or so hours into your favorite farming game, you can rest easy knowing many of the action-oriented games out there offer the ability to avoid combat. Maybe not for the whole game, but it’s still a nice gesture to be able to give yourself a reprieve from the punching for a bit.
There’s no getting around it. In The Witcher 3 and its predecessors, you’re going to fight things. Often brutally, sometimes tearfully. But that doesn’t have to be how it goes every time.
Whether through using Geralt’s literal powers of persuasion or simply the right words at the right time, you can resolve many quests without drawing a drop of blood. Whether that makes things better than the alternative can be up for debate because apparently happy endings are for chumps and Mario games.
The Deus Ex series has put freedom of choice at the forefront since its first game in 2000, a quality that has remained in its subsequent prequels Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. So you may usually keep your hands happily clean in this cyberpunk dystopia.
In each game, you nearly always can avoid combat via several methods, including talking. Human Revolution keeps this going with an interesting dialogue system that sometimes tasks you with tracking the person’s responses to make an educated guess on what you should say next. You didn’t ask for this, but it sure is fun.
Alpha Protocol
Sega’s delightfully janky espionage RPG Alpha Protocol sees you as newly-recruited spy Michael Thorton unraveling mysteries and punching dudes in the neck. Some agencies have their own preferred methods.
But while enemy encounters are guaranteed, not all of them are; you cancomplete the entire game non-lethally, but even beyond that, many encounters can be resolved peacefully or bypassed entirely based on your way with words or even past decisions. Maybe a friend will take out all the enemies for you, so it’s not like you’re the one fighting, but it still counts.
It’s hard to imagine a Fallout game without violence; super mutants alone would just feel so lost and confused. But Fallout: New Vegas is one of those that, while not avoiding combat entirely, lets you use any number of tools to weasel your way past plenty of encounters.
Through successful use of your speech and barter skills, you may let your silver tongue slap your conversation partner into oblivion well before the bullets start flying. Obviously, it doesn’t work everywhere, but how many other games let you talk down the final boss? Shouting Alduin down in Skyrim doesn’t count.
If you’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3, you’ve probably lost a battle that was totally not your fault and reloaded to see if you could find another way. The game thrives on these choices, where “another way” could mean anything from sneaking around to offering to write smutty fanfiction.
There’s no way to completelyavoid all combat in Baldur’s Gate 3, which is likely one of the most popular search queries regarding the game (safe for work queries, anyway). But every class and race has its own special dialogue options that can accomplish several feats from skipping battles to getting your very own adorable owlbear cub.
While subsequent games in the series have changed up dialogue systems, Dragon Age: Origins retains a solid persuasion skill that will often allow you to take a more peaceful route through uncertain segments. This includes sneaking through a prison because these games always have you sneaking through a prison.
Dragon Age 2 offers an interesting twist, as you can sometimes resolve a situation based on which personality you’ve established for the player character Hawke in dialogue up until that point. The idea of a sarcastic Hawke solving anything is frankly worth it.
All three games in the original Mass Effect trilogy offer you different ways to persuade people through charm or intimidation, depending on the morality level of your Commander Shepard. Naturally, this occasionally includes more peaceful options for volatile situations.
It can also depend on past decisions. This builds up to somebrilliant moments in Mass Effect 3where, assuming you made the proper choices in past games, you can basically end centuries-long wars by yelling, which is the ultimate kind of fight to talk your way out of.
Baldur’s Gate 3 ran with this, but developer Larian Studios' other games had to walk first. Divinity: Original Sin 2 offers its own unique persuasion skill, where every type of character can use it in their own way.
In certain dialogue choices, you pick which of your character’s attributes you wish to apply to the persuasion check. This adds some interesting versatility and ultimately allows for multiple characters to occasionally smooth talk their way to a peaceful resolution.
In a game without an actual combat system, you’d think there wouldn’t be a need for sweet-talking around fights in the first place. But you’re able to still find yourself under attack, and in a game where you can identify as anything from a communist to a full-blown fascist, you’ll likely stare down the barrel of several fists.
Talking your way through Disco Elysiumis as intricate and robust of an experience as its story and characters, with nearly any of your often unintelligible attributes equally likely to get you out of a jam. Just don’t be surprised if you aren’t quite certain you made the right call at first, unless the call is singing karaoke.
Undertale’s pacifist route is practically the embodiment of this idea. You must commit early on to never harm another character, and as you play, you’ll discover a truly remarkable amount of clever ways the game lets you resolve combat nonviolently.
In a way, you aren’t even technically talking your way out of fights, you’re talking your way through them, and every enemy has their own special method you need to figure out to successfully finish fighting them without fighting them. Each is like a mini-puzzle that you figure out while navigating through a shoot-em-up-style battle window.
