I'm not sure where, but I think on one of the streams (July 18th I think?), it was mentioned that a design goal of the game is to always have a way to avoid combat - at least with intelligent characters.
Are you sure about this? Is it confirmed that combat can *always* be avoided in some way? [I try to listen to all the streams, but as I'm hearing impaired I don't always catch everything that's said, and even the CC (which is not always available) quite often doesn't keep up or gets things very wrong.]
That said, avoiding combat might possibly require you to make roleplaying choices you would otherwise would not prefer.
Yes this is something that bugs me greatly, but I can't see any way a game can be made to avoid this.
You can enter turn-based mode at any time during exploration, as was shown off on the gameplay streams, and advance time in 6-second increments.
Yes, but once you enter TB mode, can you then freely exit TB mode without having taken any actions or having advanced time? In other words, can this be realistically used as a way to pause the game (stop time from advancing) and allow you to leave your computer and go do something else?
