@JasonBlaze

You're not the only one who doesn't like killing innocent mobs haha That actually got changed a while ago though. If you are good-aligned, you no longer get sent to kill good- or neutral-aligned targets for quests and expeditions. Instead it'll ask you to spar with them until either you die or your target concedes and declares you the winner.

The area I assume you are talking about, by the way, is Hlua Orphanage. We did mark the children and cute little creatures in that area so they can't be designated as quest targets at all, not even for global quests.

@2 @3

Me too. Killing innocent people makes me feel bad even though it's just a game

@Firefly, interestingly enough, none lethal combat and other none lethal options do get used in several missions in the game, as well as in  quests.

For example, in the pixie mission I just wrote, you need to catch pixies without killing them, while in one of the Bandell dwarf missions, various dwarf npcs are put under a malign influence, and you need to knock them unconscious.

the only problem at the moment, is that either using a catch option, or using none lethal combat knocks the target unconscious and so the player is not able to get stuff off the opponent's corpse (that's why in the pixie mission, you catch the pixies rather than fighting them, since you need to retrieve things from them).

so yeah, the game does sort of have none lethal combat, but only in specific places or at specific points where it makes sense to do so.

To be honest, I don't know if I'd want a more permanent none lethal combat option, because at the moment, none combat activities and ways of gaining exp are a unique part of the game in and of themselves, and something which is only going to grow as the game expands with more activities, along with the pilgrimage system, that is why there are actually achievements for getting a character to specific levels without fighting, because combat in the game is just  one option for advancement, and it's intended that there be many others.

While I am definitely in favour of reducing the amount of random slaughtering in the game, EG the fixes to the quest system and the none lethal combat in missions, I like the idea of different avenues for advancement, rather than having the experience of someone wanting to engage in combat being essentially the same as someone who did not, just with a "falls unconscious", at the end of fights instead of killing the enemy.

@firefly, there are actually several things here.

First, capture and none combat missions are more than possible to add more of, there are already some, and likely will be more in the future. There aren't any missions in the zoo yet, but it'd totally be possible to have some missions to catch escaped animals, or maybe find supplies to feed existing animals, the same way we're planning some missions for Hlua orphanage involving crafting toys for the kids there.

I also happen to  know that once the faith system gets added, several of the god's pilgrimages will revolve around none combat activities , and one indeed (which I've written up texts for), involving interacting with monsters without fighting them.
While autoquests and expeditions likely will remain combat heavy, even if the combat is either of the form: "go and kill this evil thingy", or "go and spa with this good/neutral thingy", also bare in mind there are the repeatable junkyards which simply involve running into an area finding pieces of dangerous magical junk and clearing it up, so even if you were trying to play without fighting, you could still get your daily blessing and quest point rewards too.

Oh this makes me so happy!
I hated, and I mean h a t e d, killing the orphans. Sometimes I would just lose global quest I could have won, because I couldn't stand killing them.
Love this new change, because I can kill trolls and things all day, but not the bunnies and toddlers.

@mirage, I'm sorry you didn't know about this fix, it's been in the game for about two years or so I think.
Note that you still will get global quests etc where your sent after rabbits, random children etc, but your object is to spa with them to improve your combat skills, so at the end of the fight you get:

"target slumps in defeat."
And there is no corpse, though as was said above, the toddlers and babies in Hlua orphanage are exempt from being quest targets even in this way.

@Jayde, myself I'd look at this the other way up.
Rather than saying: "well it doesn't matter because it's just two clumps of code interacting", saying: "Lets think how those clumps of code might matter", gives those clumps of code a bit more personality.

Yes, from a mechanics perspective, there is no difference between a level 5 toddler and a level 5 gremlin, however letting you kill the one and not the other actually makes the players think of the difference more, and makes the game feel more immersive.

This  was one reason I'm really pleased  Erion went with the liberation idea for slaves and prisoners, since even in games like Alteraeon, it always bothered me that you read some npc description of a mistreated slave, and all you can do is kill them, since from a coding perspective, that goblin prisoner really is no different to the goblin guards.

@Gcw, my point exactly.

If you're asked to kill a toddler in an autoquest, then either you have to really get in to the idea of child murder, or just say "hay its a game!"

of course it is! a game, in practical purposes nothing will happen if you kill that Toddler, heck, even in the game's world that toddler will repop in the area soon enough.

However, the more invested in the game's world and characters  you are, the less like a game it should feel.

You could theoretically just call everything in the game "mob 1", "mob 2", etc and write descriptions of:
"there is a mob here waiting for you to engage in statistical combat with it",

but that would get pretty boring pretty fast.

@Jason, you're not the only person to have an issue with the hole child murder thing, hence it having been changed a couple of years back.

As to games dealing with "god", well that's a little harder.
Erion doesn't have "god", in the Jewdao/Christian/Muslim sense, but it does have gods, albeit in Erion (speaking as the one who is writing the actual cosmology for the game), the gods are usually the servants or emissaries of more cosmic celestial or infernal powers, who remain nameless and unknowable.

So, not really different from say the works of Tolkien or most fantasy authors on that score, and so probably okay with most religious people who aren't ridiculously dogmatic.