Red Dead Redemption 2 - Minimizing Kill Count

[Zapper]

I've seen talks about how people consider Arthur's body count unrealistic which is understandable but one thing most people never acknowledge is that you can finish most missions with killing extremely minimal or zero enemies (over 40% missions which doesn't have any combat at all, so I'm talking about the combat heavy missions only) just by knocking them out by pistol whipping or using lasso to tie them up and of course letting your AI companions kill them.

 

Again, I'm not talking about playing completely without killing but minimizing the amount as much as you can within realistic playtime (i.e. not spending hours on the same mission to achieve the goal).

 

The first real combat heavy mission in the game after prologue is 'Blessed are the Meek' where you break Micah out of jail. I played it yesterday from replay menu and to my extreme surprise it took just 5-10 minutes to complete with Arthur gunning down only 3 people. I literally pistol whipped my way to mission completion and Micah did provide good support.

 

Obviously a harder difficulty mode (with turning the survival aspect of gameplay up by lowering health, dead eye, lowering inventory limit to a handful of tonics, increasing shop prices or decreasing payout so that you have to focus on crafting etc.) would've been amazing in this game with much less but deadlier enemies in encounters that forces you to play tactically.

 

I'm curious if you guys have any input in this matter.

Edited August 9, 2021 by Zapper

[ballstorture]

2 hours ago, Zapper said:

 of course letting your AI companions kill them.

 

 

    Yeah I find this is pretty interesting,your gang members can be very very teffifying if you stick together,providing them with decent backup support.Like you said the Micah mission,I chose to only shoot back to those who tried to shoot him in the face just for distract their actions with sometimes small amount of headshots to enemies from the back-to my surprise he totally robbed the show and we actually managed to make out alive.

    I just want to say for me this is the best thing of the game when coming down to mission content.I ain't a high skill gamer by any regard,so most of the time it's very tiresome and painful to go through games that demand me to kill all of these enemies all by my own,even if all I need to do is "Keep shooting,nothing else!" things like this ain't sound that charming to me. Some people complaining about npcs act like your babysitter blahblah,well it's not like my character is the only one who have a gun that can end people's life,and since the context of this game never says you should be a ruthless degenerate all the time,so why the hell not?At least it's ain't me doing babysitter things for them.And I don't care how many people you managed to kill nonstop in a battle,hell all I know is when there are 3-4 enemies nearby rushing to me with bullet rains and if I ain't have a decent gun and deadeyes,I'll be a deadmen in seconds,at least sounds not that unrealistic to meActually when I used to play on console all I do was creeping behind their back searching for pockets,let other gang members do the show for most of the time.(thank you input lag:P)

Edited August 9, 2021 by Abel Tesfaye

[Middle Class Roadman]

Pistol whipping enemies unconscious still counts as a kill. 

[Zapper]

2 hours ago, Orbea Occam said:

Pistol whipping enemies unconscious still counts as a kill. 

The game is drunk then beacuse if you knock someone out he'll get up after some time and walk away.

 

[Badman_]

I just want to add that the body count is indeed unrealistic but I'm totally okay with that. The game is slow-paced and the characters are very well-rounded and convicing but I don't think it was ever supposed to be ultra-realistic, at least not in when it comes to the main plot. The world of RDR is a romanticized version of the wild-west. It can be very mature at times but it still treats gunslingers as some sort of superhero figure. I mean, just look at some of the missions like Red Dead Redemption, Jim Milton Rides Again or American Venom. The soundtrack, combat. It's all very cartoonish/exaggerated.

Edited August 9, 2021 by Wolfman_

[Flymystical-DJ]

This is something that always interests me when I pick the game backup and get readdicted for 40 more hours. It's so difficult to do so I only do it when I absolutely can but it feels so good robbing someone non-lethally or even tying up the two dudes that tried to jump you  

 

That being said, I'm not a fan of the pistol whipping technique or relying on the crew. It's too uncinematic and the trial/error or waiting involved isn't fun for me. I pistol whip when I can but running all over the place and pistol whipping dudes is goofy and distracting a dude specifically so your friend can blow out his brains from behind kinda just defeats the purpose. At that point it's more like a self imposed challenge rather than an attempt at alleviating some of Arthurs sins, the latter of which being what actually makes me interested in doing things non-lethally. 

Edited August 9, 2021 by Flymystical-DJ

[Zapper]

17 hours ago, Wolfman_ said:

but it still treats gunslingers as some sort of superhero figure

This is exactly what I was thinking the other day. In Django Unchained, Django kills like 40 people and that's a 2hrs 45mins long film with a focused plot and a singular escalation. Arthur actually kills similar amount of people in prologue which takes simialr amount of time. Now imagine if the film was 50-60 hours long. And Django, in real life, would most certainly be tortured and killed mercilessly by the plantation guys when he got caught after the shootout at the house. No bloody way they'd sell him to someone after what he and Schultz did so it certainly is stylizing to an extent like RDR does.

 

12 hours ago, Flymystical-DJ said:

That being said, I'm not a fan of the pistol whipping technique or relying on the crew. It's too uncinematic and the trial/error or waiting involved isn't fun for me.

I can certainly see what you're saying and I agree. Honestly a higher difficulty mode with lower number of deadlier enemies who actually behave tactically would do wonders to this game. I honestly don't know why they don't include higher difficulty modes, like Default, Hard, Survival. The only game they did that with was Max Payne 3 and that wasn't originally their IP.

[SneakyDeaky]

Even though you lose honor for this (which might be what you want anyway) but I find myself now shooting the horses of guys chasing me, they usually get bucked even if the horse doesn't die and you avoid adding to the kill count. (Unless the game counts horses as kills, IDK)

[CurieOlsson]

So, i've tried a "melee only/only kill when the game forces you to" run some time ago and figured some things out. (this was a few updates ago, maybe some things changed):

 

-Killing animals do count as "kills" in the compendium page of the weapon you used. Trampling animals with your horse will count as a kill for the previously equipped weapon.

-As far as I know in free roam knocked out enemies will always get back up once except if: 1 - They fall from great heights. 2 - They get killed by another npc while on the ground. 3 - They are put on your horse while not hogtied. In those cases you will NOT be awarded a kill, and even if they are dead and decomposing, the game will still count them as "alive" for the player (red reticle will still appear when aiming at them, kicking/shooting them will cause honor loss and a awarded kill). So if you knock and npc in the roof of a building and on his fallling trajectory he ends up hitting the pavement below - no kills awarded for you nor murder charges. Easy to test it out with Blackwater police. 

 

In missions it seems to work in a very different way: npc's seem to have preset health values and will DIE if you knock them out depending on the mission, however no kills will be awarded to you (if  you were unnarmed you will get awarded a knockout in your "fist" weapon). Knocked npc's corpses despawn really fast on missions. They don't get up and run, they straight up disappear.

Some missions do follow free roam rules: npc gets knocked out, still alive to game even it behaves as dead. But they are rare. Most missions with a npc that gets killed in one shot (most of chapter one, most missions with sniper enemies or forced dead eye sequences) will just have full lethal melee, and they will die if knokced out.

Oh, also, some missions require you, the player, to neutralize certain npcs, as your companions will be rendered useless against them. This specific situation never happened to me but can be seen on some of Eyezayar's "The goodest boah in the west" series.

 

 

TL;DR: Melee lethality depends on specific mission. Janky as f*ck.