Joram, well he simply means that there's no such things as simply a fight or a brawl in most RPGs. Everything is a fight to the death. In a pub in real life, or at a sporting event, you get people fighting each other, but the vast majority of the time it doesn't end with one of them dead and the other guy looting his corpse and stealing his clothes. Someone may try to steal my phone off me and I may punch them in self defence, I certainly wouldn't murder them and then steal their trousers!
Haha, exactly. I wouldn't have said it better myself.
If it is handeled like in Piranha Bytes games, as the OP has requested, then that is fine by me.
I just hope that people don't start requesting pacifist playthroughs including elaborate stealth mechanics. Don't get me wrong, I like games that offer pacifist playthroughs, but I am tired of people requesting this feature for every single effing game on Kickstarter. Original Sin does need it nor should it have this feature.
In Gothic/Risen (two more games inspired by Ultima VII) enemies were divided into two cathegories. "Monster" enemies fought to the death and could only be defeated by killing them. They also killed you, if they defeated you. But there were also "Human" enemies, which were left with 1 HP after defeating them, fell to the ground unconscious and could only be killed if you performed an explicit coup the grace when they were lying on the ground. These enemies also did not kill you when they defeated you, and instead took your money before leaving (for example).
True, unless the human NPC is tagged to die on defeat, which generally only applies to human enemies that attack you on sight and cannot be interacted with.
Yes, as I mentioned the human/monster distinction was a simplification on my part.
Ignoring Risen's combat system quality, which is not everyone's cup of tea (I liked it, however), it was one of the games that did non-lethal combat right, but it was strictly tied to NPC attitude system (beaten up NPCs did not like you), which is not present in D:OS, I think, and could be a potential difficulty to overcome.
BTW, I'm not so big on pacifist playthrough too. If You go adventuring, you should expect to fight a lot!
