What about any combat situation that has nothing to do with a quest, will you engage in optional combat for no reward? Of course not.
If only reward for combat is a little amount of XP, I wouldn't engage in it anyway. Enemies should be obstacles on your way to achieve something. Placing random groups to fight as a means of leveling, because devs are too lazy to think of some more interesting ways to let players get XP, is just poor design in non combat-focused RPG.
Will you try to slip by every single combat situation unless it is a boss with good loot? Of course you will.
Again - if this is stupid filler fight out of nowhere, I would avoid it anyway if I could. But if these enemies look like they can have a good loot, or they are blocking some paths i would like to explore, I would fight them. And I'm talking about mindless monsters of course, because with sentient beings you can find infinite amounts of ways to make combat personal and interesting, so the players won't care about XP.
Those are choices that should be left up to the player, he should decide if he want/needs that xp or not, this decision shouldn't be forced upon him.
Not rewarding a player with combat xp is just as stupid as not rewarding a player with quest xp in a combat-focused RPG.
Lol, I never said anything about D:OS. D:OS is great heavily combat-focused game, fighting is the main selling point, while story is less important here. So of course it should have combat XP.
PoE and new Torment, on the other hand, will be more narrative focused games, where combat won't be a goal of playing, but one of many possible approaches, a way to get things done. And in that kind of RPG, lack of combat XP makes sense.
True for Torment, because it will hardly have any combat and will be almost completely driven by the narrative. It will only have quest xp and that makes sense.
Not true for Pillars of Eternity though, the game is combat focused, just like Baldur's Gate. Just watch the gameplay video; PoE has lots of combat, but no rewards. I can also dig out the videos where Josh Sawyer and Chris Avellone explicitly said that the gameplay will be focused on Baldur's Gate.
