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I wonder if it will correlate to the distance the planets are from the center / settled planets? So the further out into "wild" space you get, the higher the difficulty level.
idk how I feel about them showing the level in the UI, though. Elden Ring has scaled areas but you find out by showing up and then getting wrecked, which adds to the story of your playthrough. with levels being shown in the UI, you can just choose to avoid the higher level places early and lose out on that kind of learning-by-exploring.
I haven't played Elden Ring (not my cup of tea tbh) but a game that I have have played that also does this is Witcher 3, and it has the same natural feeling progression of doing content at your level as you go through the story, but some things "out of the way" are leveled way up. Never played it super deeply, so I'd guess some of those higher level things are there to come back to during the end game, which to me solves a problem Skyrim had where you could just start a new game and then go slaughter some falmer in a megadungeon before stepping foot in whiterun. Like sure that's fun to just roll up some flames to the face of everything in front of you, but it took them years and adding in a whole survival system to give a feeling that you need to slow down. Witcher 3 just sort of had this naturally as it was a very well paced and let the story breathe and let emotional beats land and sit with you. I might just be huffing my own supply of hopium right now, but I do hope this is true of Starfield as well.
I'm not saying ER will be for you (it isn't for everyone) but it isn't the "hardcore" game you might envision. The souls games being hard in general was mostly a meme that went too far. It's honestly probably easier than The Witcher 3 (except for a few optional things). If you do decide to play it, just keep in mind things don't need to be hard. That's just a sign that you should go explore somewhere else. Once you level up some more, get new equipment, and level your equipment, it'll make things easier.