Why should the game not treat the completion of a quest and the hypothetical fight with the quest givers as separate experience events?
For me it is a fundamental system question of if a game is giving experience per action (combat, dialogue, ect) or if it is giving experience per milestone (quest)
Those issues comes from dark age of RPG. In the first Dungeon Master book there was a number of XP for every creature. This system was extension of chess-like war games. Yes, Dungeons&Dragons was a fantasy remake of tabletop military war-game. Replace canons by wizards with fireball so here we go. Removing a statue from the game board gives points towards victory.
However in role-play game focused for role playing the core system which rewards by dead body giver wierd outcome.
Someone here mentioned Deus-Ex. That is great example of new point of view. Player has targets and playground so he has non-linear chance to achieve those targets.
As long as we want to be game more role playing there should be target oriented reward system rather then dead body counter. Story might be bloody, oor story might be about sneaky investigation. One way or another reward for reach the target should be same amount of xp. There one issue with rewarding for non-bloody players. We get used that heroes steal stuff. In fact majority of hero's income is made by stealing from killed bodyes. There should be a way how to deliver item reward for those who fallow non-violent path.
Lets say, there are Immaculate order. So hero kills Immaculate on sight, steal his stuff and proceed to the end of story. That is the only way how to get reward. In theory, player could use charisma and sneak skill to achieve a target. Player could discover nature of order so fooled followers would see their mistake, revolt and leave the order. So their lives will be saved. That is a story! Currently, player is punished for non-violent path.
If anything should be new in DOS2, omit new races, omit new skill, omit most of was introduced. Develop a wide dialog net which allows different approach to the story. And make it so that all approach will get same XP reward and very similar item reward. In extreme there are two games types - hack&slash vs point&click adventure in one game.
Same as Larians implemented insane rule -
you can kill anyone. Now they should implement another one -
you could not bleed-out a living creature to proceed. However you migh hire a story driven NPC non-controllable mercenary or poison a food to remove certain subjects. That would be the innovative approach.
