"In most modern games, there would be fewer enemy types and the rooms would ramp in intensity by combining monster types together." This is a very interesting

"In most modern games, there would be fewer enemy types and the rooms would ramp in intensity by combining monster types together." This is a very interesting observation. It seems that modern open-world RPGs (Skyrim, for instance) have opted for larger and more elaborate worlds at the expense of enemy variety. This is probably the result of the "territory race" that has been taking place in the genre for well over a decade now: each new RPG is expected to have a world twice as big as the last. The player's sense of novelty, and of world scope, is more easily cued by landscape ("room") variety than by enemy variety -- and so, focusing resources on landscape variety usually yields better payoffs. Even still, I can't help feeling that something has been lost along the way. While I am extremely pleased with the immensity and variety of modern-day world maps, I do notice the emptiness of them, or the repetition of NPC and enemy types. (While enemy level-scaling is a nice feature that keeps enemy encounters relatively fresh, it can also be a crutch that keeps developers from thinking about variety of encounter design).