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The Difficulty Paradox
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this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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I really don't agree with: get stronger must also have world get more difficult. This is how you get scaling difficulty, where you never feel like you're going anywhere, because every upgrade is made pointless by enemies just becoming more dangerous in turn.
Bullethell rogue likes like vampire survivor are getting it pretty right in my opinion. Just have the chance to get ridiculously powerful, but take a bunch of tries. Then add in Hades way of not ending the story with your death and failure, the nemesis system which is sadly patented and you'd have a fairly ideal game where some things will inevitably kill you, but you will get better and the small stuff will only get you still, if you are not paying attention.
But in the other case - you get stronger but the world doesn't get stronger around you, say you keep fighting the exact same lame enemies as in the beginning - then why even continue playing?
The greatest challenge was right at the start. Unless the later parts are exceedingly brief, just letting you bow out on a power rush, why have all those later parts that just end up being trivial?
Shouldn't the former difficult enemies at least become the trash and new, tougher, enemies get introduced to uphold the difficulty as your new abilities and upgrades make the old ones trivial?
It depends on the type of game I guess. I like the way Final Fantasy 13 did it when you arrived on Gran Pulse. Everything was there from the start of the chapter, there were some enemies you could handle, some that were a challenge, some that were out of your weight class and some that would wipe your team without even noticing you were there. You had to pick your battles and know when to bail. Despite the problems that game had, you could at least feel yourself getting stronger while the world stayed roughly the same.
I agree with you actually. Bethesda level scaling is probably the worst example of what you're talking about.