World of Warcraft doesn’t treat the player character’s level as how strong or experienced they are. instead, it treats it as “where in the difficulty curve of the game is the player right now? how much should I challenge them?”. that means that characters actually get weaker the more they level up. when fighting the same enemies, the player character will have more trouble if they’re a higher level. PCs also unlock more abilities by leveling up, which makes them more complex and difficult to play

and I think that that’s a very interesting approach, and actually a very good one. and it’s strongly influenced my perspective on other RPGs because WoW is the RPG that I’ve connected most with out of anything (except maybe Skyrim, which does roughly the same thing). genuinely, I want to see more RPGs take this approach

I have a draft of a whole like 7-paragraph essay on this but I’m starting to think it’s not worth it lol so just have the 2-paragraph version instead

one of the things that I think RPGs flounder at is making the player feel as if they’re more powerful at level 20 than they were at level 1. if at first they were fighting level 1 tavern rats, but now they’re fighting identical-looking level 20 sewer rats, then are they really getting stronger? and why can’t they fight the identical sewer rats at level 1?

World of Warcraft avoids this entire problem and I think that’s a very good idea

now just imagine if the game could dynamically raise or lower your level based on your performance to find the ideal difficulty to challenge you at every point in the game. and de-emphasize level in the UI so you don’t feel like you’re being punished by having it lowered. I think that would be perfect