LEVEL SCALING (SOMETIMES)
The very point of RPGs is that you’re in control of a character that you get to make more powerful throughout the course of your journey. The more you level up, the more you feel like you’re capable of taking on new, tougher threats. But if the easier threats in the game are leveling up with you, are the tougher threats even tougher? Aren’t they all just the same? What’s functionally the difference between a level 2 enemy and a level 50 enemy if they’re all equally challenging? And, most importantly, in such cases, are you even really progressing? Sure, the numbers are going up- but you want beating a level 4 enemy to be easier when you’re level 8 as compared to when you were level 2. That’s the whole point of leveling up after all, right? Something like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one of the most egregious examples of this, while more recently, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has also rightly caught a lot of flak for similar systems. I get that games still needs to be challenging, but rather than just making all enemies as tough as you, a game can always just have both- which seems like such an obvious thing to say. Games like Bloodborne and Dark Souls do this very well, where they present challenge in the form of newer, tougher enemies, not by making enemies that already exist even more challenging. In those games, you can feel a sense of progression, a sense that you’re getting better and more powerful. A sense of pride and accomplishment, if you will? Even a game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which does have level scaling, manages to strike that balance better- because it doesn’t make weaker enemies more powerful, it just spawns a higher number of tougher enemies the more powerful you get.
