Appreciate the thoughtful responses, and they all make some sense. For those who mentioned the time it takes to get to lvl 20 irl, or the norm of ending around lvl 10-12 for tabletop - well that's exactly why I want it to get to level 20 in the game. It's a lot easier for me to spend 125 hours in a game playing solo, then spending 100's of hours trying to coordinate schedules with my real life friends for a game of DND that makes it to 20. Oh well...
I did play the game in early access - I put in about 60 hours since they first launched it, though I will admit I haven't touched it since the early days. And some of the bugs would need to be ironed out, for sure, if they still haven't fixed them...
As for power creep/imbalances; that's a good point, but not an insurmountable problem. Neverwinter Nights would simply restrict what you could shape change into, for example. Spells like demiplane either wouldn't exist in the game, or would be predefined to a few selections, like shapechange. Melee characters can be bumped up using class restricted magic items to grant extra attacks, or what have you. Solasta made it work, more or less, and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous had some pretty ridiculously high powered abilities. However, to your point - you have to adjust the difficulty to fit your build for both of those games. I get that not everyone would enjoy that level of crunch.
And, balance really only matters in a multiplayer setting, more so with competitive. With single player, I don't really care if I develop amazing abilities and builds that let me wreck my enemies... that's kind of half the fun. And, that seems to be inherently the problem with many games recently. Trying to shoehorn in multiplayer features, in what is essentially, for me, a single player experience. Ah well...
Feels like a missed opportunity, but I can understand it.
