Sorry about not seeing those questions & thanks for putting them up again
Quick response is:
To the first two, no (though you have an array of creatures you can summon) and yes.
The World design is such that it starts all nice and open in a green area with people feeling relatively happy. It all goes down from there, so the later areas become more grim, dangerous with plenty of nasty surprises, though there are the occassional safe harbors. There's quite some visual variation which is something I'm glad of.
Funny that you mention swamps, we had swamps, cool ones at that but somewhere during the production they were cut.
Combat is definitely more tactical than just click & be done with it and can get quite intense. You're pretty agile and jumping around/evading definitely gives you an edge. For the lesser agile players among us there's a pause command to give you time to reflect and select which skills to execute but I can confirm that the battlescape is err... very dynamic
Next question - that's sadly not the case.
Next - It's a world in which dragons are considered the ultimate evil, so there's different "things" in the world aimed explicitely against dragons.
Next - There's a skill called "world of the dead" which allows you to become invisible for some time and sneak around.
Cheers
