There are lots of arguments around level scaling; I think on the whole I dislike it, but primarily for aesthetic reasons. It isn't so much about what the game does, but about how it feels to be in some of these situations. There was a relatively famous run - for Alliance players, at least - through a writhing zoo of Level Fuck You crocolisks to get to some seaside fort with a Gryph point. You had to unlock it for each character, and so it was sort of a rite of passage around… level twenty, maybe? It's been a minute. All I remember is the terror.

I understand the other side of it also, but unless these enemies feel different at different levels, mechanically distinct in some way, ultimately it homogenizes space. The metaphor is unwieldy, but let's try it: there are a lot of coffee blends you can buy, and the vast majority of them are indistinguishable from each other. This is because to the extent that they include different beans, each one has individually been tormented by a roast designed not to reveal it, but to make it a uniform industrial input. I understand the practicality, but the things that have stuck with me over the years are those which established stark deltas of various kinds. There are "chunks," for lack of a better term. They are chunky. They have texture.

They're the ones with all the data, though. And there's lots of ways to paper this over and reintroduce that texture, just in corralled domains they can control; Gabe raves about flying his dalgon all over the place; he wants his dalgon to take him away. Before the pleasure centers of my brain were destroyed, rendering the genre utterly beige, I was the lore/explore/crafting Palineer who named buildings and random props and had my own secret purpose. It's like I was trying to get a writing credit on the game. Maybe I always thought it needed a little filling in.

(CW)TB out.