How stop the respawns? I'm interested because sooner or later I'll play it and I don't like respawn.
For D2:ED I feel you are exaggerating when you quote that it puts the focus on fights. At the opposite they often put the effort on adventure like not many RPG have done before, at least WRPG. I mean adventure from a large perspective, that includes little tricks and puzzles, almost platform gaming, NPC to provide some dialogs and questing elements, some events, and so on.
Also many places get their bit of fights and their bit of non fights. They didn't hesitate lower a bit the realism to achieve this goal. So often at almost the same place you'll find enemy NPC and friendly NPC to provide the both fights and non fights, and despite often you can wonder why they don't fight each other because they are rather close to each other.