I’ve long been a critic of experience point / levelling systems in RPGs because of this. They optimise for wanting to be a sociopath. The guy who slaughters everything possible becomes the most powerful.
I noticed something similar. A while back, I figured that a game’s quests didn’t technically require you to kill, so I tried to play the game with a pacifist character—basically, set up so he can’t fight, but has skills in persuasion and sneaking around. But for some reason, the game forces you to fight even when the storyline doesn’t literally require it. (The game was Morrowind.)
I had a related experience with Knights of the Old Republic. One of the storyline quests is to “sneak” into the enemy’s base and steal a special item. I took that literally and used my rogue’s special abilities to sneak past all the enemies, and even pilfer the special item undetected, but then that triggers a scripted dialogue with a guy near it and makes you fight a boss. Turns out that “sneaking in” means openly fighting a dungeon of monsters in the base...
I even tried the pacifist approach in … Hitman 2, where I would try to kill the target by tricking other enemies into to shooting him dead.
(I went through a pacifist phase, if you couldn’t tell.)
I noticed something similar. A while back, I figured that a game’s quests didn’t technically require you to kill, so I tried to play the game with a pacifist character—basically, set up so he can’t fight, but has skills in persuasion and sneaking around. But for some reason, the game forces you to fight even when the storyline doesn’t literally require it. (The game was Morrowind.)
I had a related experience with Knights of the Old Republic. One of the storyline quests is to “sneak” into the enemy’s base and steal a special item. I took that literally and used my rogue’s special abilities to sneak past all the enemies, and even pilfer the special item undetected, but then that triggers a scripted dialogue with a guy near it and makes you fight a boss. Turns out that “sneaking in” means openly fighting a dungeon of monsters in the base...
I even tried the pacifist approach in … Hitman 2, where I would try to kill the target by tricking other enemies into to shooting him dead.
(I went through a pacifist phase, if you couldn’t tell.)