'No matter what we changed, somebody was going to get mad:' After hearing what an Obsidian dev went through to get RPG difficulty right, I get why nobody's ever gotten RPG difficulty right

In a talk at the Game Developers Conference, Obsidian senior systems designer Robert Donovan spoke about dialing in the difficulty of The Outer Worlds 2⁠—a great game you ought to play⁠⁠—but one I found to have a particularly noticable reverse difficulty curve.

Instead of the challenges ramping up as you get more familiar with the game, RPGs tend to start out hard and get easier. They're fantasies of growth and accumulation⁠—number go up⁠—which runs counter to a game getting harder as it goes on...