For the umpteenth time, peaceful solutions often give you more xp than violent ones and often also have other benefits. Why is this so hard to understand?
Baldur's Gate did this almost perfectly.
Lol, BG was all about fighting. Stealth and diplomacy were almost non-existent.
Of course it was mostly about fighting, because it is a combat based game. There were many dimplomatic and non-violent ways of ending quests, many of which gave the player much more XP than a violent solution.
And anyway, in most of games when peaceful solutions give you exp, you can still go back and slaughter enemies, and get exp again.
There are ways to prevent XP double-dipping for those who cannot control themselves after turning in a quest. "Designer is lazy or incompetent" is not a good excuse.
Balancing combat and other approaches XP is very hard and complicated. Removing combat XP is simple and fair solution. You finish quest - you gain xp. Doesn't matter if you used stealth, diplomacy, or just slaughtered everything.
It's only a problem if the designer is lazy and/or incompetent.
What about any combat situation that has nothing to do with a quest, will you engage in optional combat for no reward? Of course not. Will you try to slip by every single combat situation unless it is a boss with good loot? Of course you will. Will combat feel unfulfilling because the game will force combat on the player in certain situations and not reward him accordingly? Of course it will.
... But you seem to know better, D:OS can apparently never be a great game because it rewards the player for combat and in turn doesn't make half of the game completely redundant.
