I appreciate your suggestions and detailed reply. That mod looks spicy haha!

The games I mentioned do have a significant combat elements in them - but the combat isn’t the reason I play them. I don’t mind combat provided that combat isn’t the whole focus, and that the difficulty can be turned down to “cheat mode” the combat and just get on with it. Hell, I’ll break them down, cause this thread has traction and maybe it’s interesting to you and others :)

Chronotrigger is a SNES era Japanese RPG – lots of plot, story, time travel shenanigans, branching story with multiple endings, and also encounters with monsters which are handled with turn-based menu driven combat (so combat isn’t button mashing at all!). It’s old now, but still very good. My favourite trivial example of attention to detail, particularly in the context of time travel shenanigans: there’s a chest in a cave that you can access in multiple timelines – open the chest in the past, and it’ll be empty in the future; so open it in the future first, and then go back to the past and open it again and grab the contents twice! Etc. Here’s a classic bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_JEhBGDsrY – minor spoilers.

Tales of Symphonia is a GameCube era RPG – unfortunately it has real time combat, complete with button mashing – combat feels like an arcade. But on the easiest setting, you sort of let your AI-controlled companions manage the fight, and you can just mash one attack until combat is done. The rest of the game is mint though, with a lot of inter-NPC dialogue, exploration, a good story, good voice acting (for its era), etc. You have no idea how much time I spent finding recipes for cooking in this one while ignoring combat haha. Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tAYiO8NSLU

The Witcher 3 is a semi-open world fantasy setting – third person view, swords and sorcery stuff. It has a big focus on monsters, so you do have to go out there and hunt them. But it’s not just random encounters. Each monster has a story, and a reason you’re hunting them. It’s probably the gold standard in open world exploration - or maybe it was before Baldur’s Gate 3. Since you recommended romance – there’s a bunch of endings with different partners – here’s one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ_FkPNdNcs

Outer Worlds is a first person shooter with exploration elements. On the easiest difficulty, the combat sort of slides off of you, and you can focus on the exploration side. It’s kind of a “ship and crew” feel that evokes Firefly (the TV show) where you go around collecting companions and solving the mystery of this corporate hellhole of a solar system. It’s well crafted and I hope there is more like this out there somewhere. It sort of scratches the Mass Effect itch, while being entirely different in story. Samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taHXNV7kFcE

Mass Effect is a third person shooter with major RPG elements. Half the time you’re bombing around in your moon buggy looking for crashed satellites, or trying to romance the aliens you picked up, or trying to cure a plague or find out what happens if you endorse a product in a shop… In many ways, it set the gold standard for character oriented RPG interactions, with meaningful choices. Even the NPCs in the background are always having conversations that you just want to stop and listen to. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M

There was a Mass Effect trilogy re-release recently, where they got updated to be able to be played on the current generation of platforms, so I replayed it. Combat in Mass Effect 1 is still boring, but I’m going to scan every planet for anomalies, and drive my little moonbuggy around doing jumps trying to unveil the map of each little area of interest, damnit! And Mass Effect 2 is such a great experience that even the combat is acceptable. I shot the “kid” in my replay of Mass Effect 3 and didn’t know they made that do a thing and was so pumped by getting an unexpected ending compared to my first playthrough years ago. Sample with combat, cutscene, romance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5gqrsFLhqo