One of the reasons I'm super tired of levels and HP. Like in ass creed Valhalla, there's spots where you cross a river and identical looking archer mooks go from nuisance to deadly.
It's one thing if the ragged skeleton isn't as dangerous as the towering black iron hulk, but it drives me crazy when the visuals are irrelevant next to the numbers.
I get that it's easier to just slap numbers around to get more "content". And I get that a lot of people enjoy feeling like they're making progress even when it's just the numbers moving around. But man I am so sick of it. I vastly prefer something tightly constrained like Sekiro where I'm getting better as a player.
I had to stop playing survival-in-zombie-apocalypse mobile games because they do this. The same enemies on the same maps have different HP depending on your level, so for someone like me who would play on the easy setting if there was one (life is hard enough, when I play games I'm not looking to challenge myself, just for easy wins), who prefers to grind a little first and build up a nice camp and arsenal before I brave proper battle (my least favourite part), there is no point, because by the time I've done that I've levelled up several times (hard not to do at the start of a game) and the enemies I face become overwhelming and it becomes too stressful for me to enjoy (though so would fighting from the get go, so even if I play the "proper" way, I still don't have fun).
I get that many people thrive on that kind of stress and edge-of-the-seat-ness, and enjoy the brutal competitiveness of it all, but some of us just want to wonder around a world picking up shit at our own pace and occasionally shoot at something, and I wish they made more games aimed at us lol
I definitely had this experience in Valheim. I thought "oh cool, a neat grasslands! Oh ho, and here comes a little mosquito for me to ki....fuck"
And then you go into certain areas in Dark Souls or Elden Ring, and you're actually supposed to go through that. Fun times in Anor Londo.
Just Caelid things
Ditto for SMT Nocturne. Random enemy accounters can occasionally take initiative. Some spawns have extremely brutal movesets between crits, ailments and instakills (which are horrifyingly effective against player units in this game). Since it's game over if the main character dies, you could get booted back to your last save by an unlucky encounter with a half dozen demons dogpiling you before you have the chance to do anything. This can happen as early as the first city.
Later, this charming calcium man voiced by Keith Silverstein accosts you in a sewer to steal your candles, and he 100-0's your whole team in Phase 2 unless you learned Sukunda and fused Bicorn. The whole game's basically like this, it's hilarious.
This always makes me want to venture further into the area. Just running around trying to avoid taking damage.
But then you can't get out
Auto saves can be a blessing or a curse. Haha
Random high level area surrounded by low level areas be like
Ah, sweet memories of Gothic.
The opposite happens many times as well. Becoming too OP for an area/mission that it gets ridiculously easy
This is annoying too...
Xenoblade Series and their random level 90s just wandering just outside a level 20 area.
