Originally Posted by Slapstick
The game starts out fairly hard but then drops off in difficulty once you start leveling. It's almost as if you outlevel the content.

I think maybe they had a lot more content in act 3 at one point, cut a lot of it out, this leada to compression of the leveling timeline without rebalancing the previous content. Thus, you level to quickly. It's supposed to be a longer road to 12, but 15% of the content was cut and leveling rate escalated as a result.

Pure speculation of course.
Your first point is correct because that was the case with DOS2 as well. Difficulty in Fort Joy was higher than the rest of the game because you were more limited in your capabilities. I think Larian games just have difficulty curves which flatten around the end of the first third, and then begin to descend at the midgame.

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