Careful difficulty tuning is essential for fun gameplay. If an open-world game provides traditional exponential power and difficulty curves, and the game fails

Careful difficulty tuning is essential for fun gameplay. If an open-world game provides traditional exponential power and difficulty curves, and the game fails to guide you to the right content at the right time, you'll end up facing challenges which are too easy or too hard to be fun. Hollow Knight navigated this problem quite skillfully, but even in that game, I ended up effortlessly skimming through a few areas because I happened to leave them too late. What a waste of hours of content! I'd like to see more open-world games experiment with a flat power curve: simply throw away the idea that the player character's numerical power should increase as the game goes on. If Super Mario World had increased the player's jump height or hit points based on the number of levels completed, it would have made the game much worse - so why do we tolerate the same thing from Castlevania and Final Fantasy? Players might miss the (artificial) feeling of mastery, but I don't think it's worth the cost. Finding better ways to achieve that same feeling would be an interesting design challenge!