But this sounds pretty dire, I won’t be able to try it until it’s selling for peanuts on Steam.

XP for dialogues was kind of bad, now that I think about it. I read very, very quickly, and voice acting is almost never good enough to justify my sitting there and listening to it unless it’s a conversation between major characters, so I make good use of subtitles and dialogue skips during my RPG playthroughs. It’s why a lot of the more gamey approaches to conversation you describe have never bugged me all that much . Vampyr’s subtitles are really, *really* bad, though, because a line of dialogue will be cut up into two lines of subtitles, not one, and so you can’t skip dialogue without waiting for the second line. Obviously *that* didn’t last long and I just ended up mashing the space bar during incidental conversations because I really didn’t care what the buffet NPCs had to say, only wanted to clean out their conversation options for the XP, and couldn’t face sitting through their actual spoken dialogue to get it.

Life is Strange wasn’t great – I especially despised this “how do you do fellow kids” approach to being hip and modern and referential – but it had some genuinely interesting choices.

What you describes sounds like a more casual take on Pathologic idea but worse and more boring. XP for dialogues caught my eye though. I hate the idea. In a story-focused RPG dialogue is a reward, not something you suffer through to get XP. Good RPG quickly teaches you to talk in a more or less natural way. Even in old Planescape Torment which had too much text for its own good you can see that: you don’t have to exhaust every NPC dialogue option because of fearing to miss some quest or XP reward. Modern Obsidian games are little worse in that regard, in Tyranny I have to exhaust at least follower dialogue to get all the relation bonuses, but at least those people are interesting to talk to. It happens with other NPCs too but even there you always have a bunch of questions that you can ask anyone and you’d know if this particular NPC can give you some special answer. Another example I can remember of is Mass Effect 1 that gave you some XP for any dialogue but it was insignificant compared to combat XP. In a way it’s similar to Dragon Age 1-3, in each of those games you get XP for getting new codex pages.

Also I’m used to needing a reason to skip combat in games. Sounds sad.