IDK, did you go back to lv 10 zones in EQ when you were 50 to feel all that power you now have?
The difference is in EQ and many other games you didn't have to set out to prove you're actually gaining power. A significant upgrade would be more powerful, something you could see and feel or parse.
In Diablo 3 and plenty of similar games an upgrade in the middle of a dungeon would be a noticeable difference, sometimes even so much as to necessitate upping the difficulty.
In fact, upping the difficulty is a tried and true method of making power increases felt and noticeable, especially at lower levels.
In Diablo 4 in my limited playing it was just always sorta a similar challenge, even at lower levels with what I thought would have been major upgrades. Even respeccing because I got several big upgrades that were better for a different build, and stuff just sorta died at similar rates in slightly different ways.
Made me wonder if they had "dynamic" scaling based on character power, not even level, but I figured I was just imagining things because that would be a retarded way to completely homogenize game difficulty into a very mediocre experience.
The interesting thing is you keep making comparisons to EQ, because you're right, all their open world mmo style gameplay is eliciting such comparisons, but not good ones.
It's like they took the worst aspects of both mmos and arpgs and combined them and thought it revolutionary to do so instead of realizing they were just making a strange stone soup.
They very well could have made a smaller, more linear and higher quality story experience and then had end game content that was more open world. Or made an open world and gameplay tailored for more mmo style gaming.
Instead, they seem to have fallen for their own open world and mmo hype that is over a decade old now where companies think just making something open world or multiplayer is inherently just better without much extra effort.
I mean, yeah, exactly they tried to do an open world mmo style games with level scaling. Which is retarded. But they probably tried it because gamers think having lower level zones in an MMO are wasted if they aren't being recycled for end game use?
Gamers getting exactly what we deserve, I guess.
Gonna be funny watching all the hardcore gamers try to shift to a narrative that having a game they could play with their normy Uber casual-gamer wives is what they actually always hoped the Diablo franchise would become.
