Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Killing shouldn't be the solution for everything!

To be fair that is already the case.
In D:OS there were quests that you would get the smallest amount of XP by just killing the guy. Larger if you bring them an item or other NPC which in turn was locked behind a speech check. (There is one with a troll for example)

Personally I find one of the better side quests in D:OS 1 was the Victoria quest. In that quest you had charisma option, stealth option and combat options. If larian can apply that sort of trichotomy to more of their quests the game will be all the better for it.

@madscientist
Mutually exclusive quests have also been confirmed. An example they show in some of their pre-alpha footage involves working with or against the dwarves in one of the towns. As to wether any of these options are more or less combat or dialogue heavy we can't say yet.

That being said the footage and presentations larian did before pax (pax was combat focused) mentioned many aspects that lend to a more character and story based gameplay (both the origins and the tags system can add a lot of gameplay that is less combat focused)

Take for example a character who is in your party but was secretly hired to kill you. In this scenario convincing them to join your side makes as much gameplay sense as killing them. It just depends how you play your character.

There are probably going to be unavoidable combat sections (bosses, unthinking hostile creatures, ect) but as long as there are a multitude of situations that can be accomplished without a pile of corpses I'll be happy.