Avowed

just watched a video where angry Joe had avowed #1 on his most disappointing game list for this year

quote:

---

Avowed is great. It’s a beautiful game. I don’t know what your talking about with gear issue

---

The game has level scaling, but negates the purpose of its own level scaling system by introducing this weird gear scaling system that is a constant push/pull between you and the enemies.

If your gear is of higher rank, you do a damage buff, and the enemies don't hit you as hard. If their gear is higher, they do more damage to you, and you do less damage to them.

The gear scaling system makes it impossible to find higher rank gear out in the world. Gear you find in the world scales to the rank of the highest piece of gear that you already have equipped, so you are forced to either constantly upgrade your existing gear or to buy at least one piece of gear from a shop (which is extremely expensive).

Completing quests gives you XP which basically means nothing, so invariably you will hit a wall where the enemy gear starts to outrank yours. The game cannot possibly predict at what point the player will have enough resources to upgrade a specific piece of gear, so you are continually funneled into arbitrary choke points where you have to stop doing what you are focused on and just score every inch of the map for every single resource node enough times to finally get enough resources to upgrade gear so that you can continue the game.