[Rangers and Bonded Grief]

Okay so I can't edit my previous post because of this new account restriction (which seems like a pretty great way to make a lot of extra work for mods so that they can't attend to important stuff...), but it looks like what's happening is if your summons don't despawn, you get stuck in combat forever. OP, if you knock out a character, do they just stay down forever? Because in a fight shortly after this occurred to me the first time, Kana's chants would stop resetting to 0 and Aloth didn't get back up after being knocked out (despite having >1 health). Interestingly I was still able to save and rest.

 

Anyway, the solution people are floating for now is reload a previous save. That's about as unsatisfying as it gets, of course, but your game is basically borked when that happens. Actually, there's a pretty spectacular list of other game breaking bugs floating around on the steam discussion forums right now. I'm surprised these weren't attended to during the beta.

[Rangers and Bonded Grief]

It's a bug. A pretty excruciating one at that, since the penalty is SO enormous. Actually it looks like many in-encounter effects don't resolve properly at the end of combat (sup perma-bugs from the Ogre). We can only hope that it is addressed promptly.

[Your RPG system sucks!]

I think the OP has formed a lousy argument, but I certainly agree with him that parts of this combat feel incredibly janky and unwieldy. In big battles, it's sometimes hard to tell what's going on, for example, especially since the combat dialogue box is undercooked (no party member color coding?!). Plus the range on spells and general design of AoE make positioning your spellcasters a pain in the butt even if you have enough fighters to get some sort of melee wall going (and you won't during the start of the game unless your PC was a fighter to complement Eder).

 

They also failed to nail the encounter curve, IMO, which is why I think a lot of people are having problems with this game who would otherwise be cruising and loving their time with it. When you first meet Nonton in Valewood, he says something to the effect of "you should just skip this one, pal." But of course, lots of games of this type (most recently Wastleland 2) say stuff exactly like that as flavor, and the player is intended to be able to surmount those obstacles. Not here. The game does a so so job of distinguishing between that kind of RP flavor and real fourth wall breaking gameplay advice to the player. Ditto the first bounties you get, which are described as "tough" or whatever, but make the Raedric keep look easy by comparison and are not intended to be tackled when they first become available.

["Reach out for their soul"?]

Relax guys. This could not be any less of a spoiler.  It would literally be telling you more about the game to say that there are monsters in it.

 

In fact, if you're in to a really pure experience, this is a valuable question, because you should completely ignore these useless NPCs.

Anyway OP, these characters are kickstarter NPCs for the $1,000 backers. They are completely unrelated to the actual universe of the game, and they frontload it with a bunch of largely irrelevant filler text that doesn't help to develop the story or world, but will do an excellent job of confusing you while you're starting out. They also help to introduce a bunch of Godlike in a location that should have absolutely zero of them.

 

In short, they are 100% skippable, and if I could have spent an extra $5 on a DLC that deliberately removed them, I'd have done it.