10 Open-World Games That Punish You For 100%

The original release of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is infamous for de-incentivising veering off the critical path if you want an even remotely challenging experience with the main questline.

Due to the abundance of side quests, high XP yield, and respawning enemies, it's incredibly easy to accidentally overlevel yourself, enough that fans have even gone to the lengths of creating their own guides for how to avoid doing so.

Overlevelling can make combat intensely boring as you rip through enemies with a mechanical efficiency, while gaining little of interest from their drops.

It is a game that absolutely doesn't require grinding from the player at all, and can arguably become so easy through progression as to feel almost broken.

Even if you deliberately ignore some side quests you actually want to play and consistently run past enemies, you're still going to almost certainly have an easy time with the main campaign, so if you try to do everything, it's going to become a cinch to the point of tedium.

Thankfully the 2020 remaster reworked the enemy scaling system to offer more pushback, even if it's still far from perfect.