that you've come to expect from a StS-like, but they also add their own gameplay concepts on top. There are concepts like poison, powers, exhaust, discard, etc. Instead of 1vX, there will be lots of XvY battles since you can recruit helpers and pets. Cards upgrade themselves after being used x number of times, and you get a choice between 2 upgrades out of a pool of 4ish per card. In terms of pure mechanics, you can tell they learned a lot from StS.
There will be mandatory battles, but idk if there are mandatory negotiations. Sometimes negotiations can solve problems, other times being able to negotiate or threaten people will make the combat much easier (convert their adds to your side for the fight, as an example). You can always choose to specialize in one side and try avoiding the other side. So one thing to keep in mind is to keep your decks somewhat balanced in power. To facilitate this, you maintain two decks: a combat deck like StS and a negotiation deck. Just like modern WRPGs, you can choose to fight or talk your way out of situations. It's very much event and NPC-driven, given that you can help, hurt, and kill various NPCs and they will affect your run in different ways with global boons and banes. You traverse back and forth on the nodes based on which sidequests you take.
In terms of the context around the game, instead of a tower you climb, you have a story and a world map of nodes. Click to shrink.I played a bit of the first character's campaign before deciding to wait for the 1.0 launch because I didn't want to spoil myself, not because it was bad.