I think there are a few schools of thought towards this type of thing. Me personally, I would want a challenge despite my due diligence and I’m often the person disappointed when I nuke a boss.

However, you will have people that intentionally do the extra stuff so that they are op. Those individuals would hate that if they spent a lot of time doing this and the boss isn’t a breeze they would feel as if their time was wasted doing that content.

A game that comes to mind that recieved a lot of flak for that kind of scaling was last epoch. Every boss gets a shield as you lower their health and it makes having powerful gear, especially in lower areas, feel like less of a boon.

Personally, I think the answer is to move away from pure stats being the indicator of difficulty. Just bumping up health based on level would make a boss feel insane if you dumped most of your levels into less combat oriented stats in the games that have them. So you would feel weak despite being “high level”. The answer to it is having mechanics of a fight be challenging despite your level. If you mess up or ignore a mechanic, you are punished. However, if you’re strong enough you can afford to make those mistakes more often while the fight isn’t just a push over.

This, of course, requires way more effort and actual game design with fun combat so that the game doesnt make bosses feel like a chore or just gimmicks. The easy answer is to just buff stats, which is why most games just make enemies a sponge in high difficulty.

The long dark is one of my favorite games of all time and I have to say, I don’t know how you can say just the cover photo looks similar. Here are some very similar things I noticed:

1. You have a picture of an in game menu that looks exactly like TLD
2. The way the flare and torches are handled is wildly similar, especially in your video where you are holding off wolves.
3. That frozen body with snow all over it? It literally looks like it was copy pasted from TLD.
4. You mention that there will be two modes, story and endless, very much like TLD too. I would wave that as a coincidence if everything else, including the name of the game, feel like a rip of TLD.

I can’t just look at these things and think it is a coincidence, they are all so similar.

I would have been more likely to wishlist and had less of a negative reaction if you:

1. Didn’t act like there is nothing similar between the games and owned up to the fact you were inspired by such a masterpiece of a game.
2. Actually was bringing something new to the table here, most of your trailer is showing everything I know from TLD, if you have new proprietary systems and ideas, like cooking why aren’t you showcasing them? All I see is an animation for cooking.
3. The game looks really rough at the moment, and I respect the ambition. However, when I seen 2024 as the release date and this is what there is on show, I can only assume the rest of the game lacks the same polish.

I do wish you luck, but in my opinion as someone from your likely target audience I would not purchase your game.

No, they aren’t. DLC is an expansion upon the content. The best case scenario for mtx that do not affect gameplay are cosmetic only.

If a game in any way has anything else than cosmetic mtx, the game is worse.

“But you don’t have to buy it!” Is how I often see them defended, the subtext being that, if I don’t buy them it doesn’t affect my experience.

Here is the secret, games with mtx are designed to have problems and they sell you the solution. They are designed WORSE intentionally, so you will spend money to bypass the inconveniences. Often your time.

A perfect example is something like long standing games selling boosts to max level. They’re aware the old content is dead, and they’re aware the only people playing it are the people who don’t want to spend money. Why don’t they fix that?

The answer is they did, they decided that inconvenience was acceptable in their game in order to convince the player to spend money.

MTX is not content, often it’s used to bypass content or save time. DLC is content. DLC often expands upon the experience of the game. MTX worsens the experience of the game just buy existing. Dlc doesn’t change your experience if you don’t purchase or use it. MTX changes the game at a base level no matter if you spend money or not.