Unless I'm wildly miss remembering, the campaigns in Disciples 2 don't have any random elements. So a level designer, intently put around your capital only starting level enemies. The only thing a new player needs to realize is to not start a new fight before revisiting the capital and healing up. Later you can offset that, with healing potions, healing skills, healing spells. I don't remember any problem with difficulty in any of the Disciples games.

If you haven't played any strategy/RPG games, then it's not a matter of difficulty, it's a mater of you not having played that type of game before. The first platformers I've ever played are Super Mario Bros/Mega Man 1 for the NES. And those aren't easy games, but I don't remember ever calling them difficult just because I didn't understand that you can run in Super Mario Bros, or how to select a different stage in Mega Man. I remember repeatedly playing the Guts Man scene over and over, because I couldn't get past the beginning where you have those moving platforms that occasionally drop you.

So, in other words, you don't know what you are talking about. One person complains about it, and it grows to "people".
You even give examples how people can fight enemies they would have a difficult time beating in the games you cite. We aren't talking about super-overpowered mobs either in Disciples 2. Level to 2 and all the ones around the start point are doable. It is hardly a design flaw that one has to wait to level up once to kill a few of the mobs near the start. it's a well-balanced game, kill about 3 other mobs and you are now level 2 and can beat the rest. Move out a little further and now you might need to be level 3 for some mobs, while others might still be beaten by a level 1! How is that "poor design"?

Sure, if implemented correctly then this could work great, while perhaps adding even more to the atmosphere. But I think it's going to be quite the challenge to not mess it up, especially with an xp/leveling system. Sacred for instance
has a completely open world, with the starting area containing easier fights, and further out containing impossible higher level enemies. The idea is that the main questline gradually takes you through the world avoiding the impossible fights. But the problem is that if you explore a bit and try to beat a few of the more difficult monsters then you can easily raise your level to a point that the remainder of the main questline is simply trivially easy to complete.

Incidentally, Elder Scrolls Online also has an xp and level system in an open world, but it gets round this problem with enemy scaling done in a smarter way than in Oblivion. A skilled lvl 20 player has a reasonable chance of beating an average lvl 50 player for example. And monsters have no level at all, their health and damage instead scaled to your level similar to how a lvl 20 and lvl 50 player's stats are scaled to match when they fight. So the same mammoth strolling outside Eastmarch can kill you almost as easily when you are lvl 20 to when you are lvl 50, the difference being that a lvl 50 player will have more advanced abilities to easier kill the mammoth.
It's a great approach, and I'd love to see it refined further and implemented in an open world single player game.

Also, what you suggest is very similar to the approach of Sunless Sea (which I'd like to recommend very highly). It's a massive world, with fascinating places and dangers to discover, but it quickly becomes clear that you have to be very well prepared if you want to venture out into the unknown. Staying close to the home port and running a few local errands you are relatively safe and can build up your supplies and skills to prepare for longer voyages.

I don't remember meeting any enemies in Zelda that I just couldn't handle. Zelda games are pretty smart about gating their progression. You can't get into harder dungeons/areas unless you have a specific piece of equipment, and when you have that piece of equipment, you can handle the enemies there.

Similarly, a lot of A/RPGs (I remember specifically Diablo 2, for example), that had characters that warn the player that going beyond a point is dangerous and you need to be experienced first. Sometimes they let you go even if you aren't experienced, but the warning is still there. It's not the most organic method to handle it, but it works.

The problem with gating harder areas with harder enemies is that the player will have no way of knowing whether they're failing due to their own lack of skill, or because their character is simply not meant to go to that area at that time. Someone mentioned ESO dealing with this well, but I had the exact opposite experience (but this was a few iterations ago, so it may have changed). I moved from one area to another, and then the enemies were suddenly astronomically harder. I had been playing for a while, so I was still able to sometimes beat them, but I would be using up potions, avoiding enemies until my health, magicka and stamina returned to full, trying to use my horse and simply run to the towns and upgrade equipment, etc. It was only much later that I realised that the area before this harder one had another path to an easier area which the game probably expected me to complete first.

I absolutely understand the complaints people have of games being dumbed down, and hand-holding and so on, but a well designed start area, and a little bit of tutorialing for the absolute beginners isn't antithetical to that. Loads of FPSs I play these days have a bit at the start where I am instructed to walk around with WASD and look around with the mouse. Loads of adventure games have me click to look at something, and click to interact. At this point, all this stuff is second nature to me, but I don't begrudge the game that. I go through with it, or skip it if I want to.

I would actujally consider this stage to be poorly designed. Right at the start, the game throws you into the deep end with a gimmick that will kill you if you fail it; that's a bit much for someone who's never encountered it before. After that, the level simply abandones the gimmick.

Contrast this to Ring Man's stage from Mega Man 4: Here, when you first encounter the gimmick, it's over solid ground. If you fail it, you don't lose a life, and you can keep trying until you get it. Then, the gimmick appears with eemies and in contexts where you lose progress if you fail it. Only *then* does the game start putting you into situations where failure kills you. Of course, the game then mixes things up, with a variant of the gimmick, and while it does appear in a dangerous situation right away, there's at least another platform that disappears in a similar fashion right below, plus the player already knows to expect something along these lines.

It is pretty clear that Capcom leaned better level design between these games.

From reading the reviews, the game has permadeath, which is enough of a reason to avoid that game. Personally, for a game of this sort, I prefer to have death have minimal or no consequences, so it ends up being more of a "let's not go back there" thing rather than a "have to restart the game from the beginning, losing all progress" thing.

(Incidentally, in Dragon Quest 1, you lose half your gold on death. Many games use the "reload last save" on death rule, which while sometimes annoying, is much better than deleting the player's save when this happens.)

Well, you could take the approach of making the difficulty difference extreme. In Final Fantasy 9, for example, there is a point early in the game where a moogle warns you not to go outside at a certain spot in a dungeon (and I believe the moogle acts as a save point here). If you actually go outside, you will encounter a monster called a Grand Dragon that will use an attack that does over 2,000 damage to your party, wiping out everybody not wearing the Coral Ring (which a first-time player is decently likely to have at this point), and will then attack the survivor for, again, 2,000 points of damage. (At this point in the game, your characters have a few hundred hit points each.) I think this is enough to tell the player not to go there.

Incidentally, Final Fantasy 5 does this a bit; there are areas early in the game that have strong monsters that people warn you about. The difference here is that, while the attacks aren't as exaggerated (and only hit one character at a time), the enemies in question are hard to damage. (Well, there's one enemy in a desert that doesn't follow this pattern, but it's at least possible to survive the attack at a reasonable (for that point in the game) level.) Of course, the game then plays with this by giving you an optional dungeon where most of the encounters are easy, but there's one enemy that will hit for over 1,000 damage (if it doesn't run away), and which you will have trouble doing the 1 point of damage necessary to kill it. (Oh, and you still get ABP from the battle if all the enemies run away.)

Both these games are quite linear (at least at the point in question), but they have side areas with enemies that are very strong for that point in the game. Here, however, a smart player might be able to figure out a way to kill them early and reap the rewards (though in the FF5 case, the rewards are not that great in one case, and don't require killing the enemy in the other).

Games should allow you to skip these sections.

Alternatively, the developer should put a shortcut in the tutorial, one that is easy but requires knowledge of the game that the tuturial hasn't yet told you about, so that players who've already seen it can skip it that way. (I have heard of a game actually doing this.)

There is a manual save mode in Sunless Sea, so you don't have to play it with permadeath if you don't want to. But even with permadeath mode your successor can benefit from your progress in several ways. For instance, a town house in Fallen London is quite expensive, but once you've bought it then you can leave it in your will for your next-of-kin (i.e. the next player character). And I think you can leave ship parts and such as well, giving a new captain a significant early game boost. But like I said, if it's not to your liking then you can just turn it off.
Mostly I like to recommend the game due to it's rich atmosphere and incredible writing, which I'm pretty sure is the best I've ever seen in a game.

This comment made me think of a difference between Japanese developed and non-Japanese developed RPGs, even when they're in the same style. If you look at non-Japanese RPGs, like Wizardry 1 or Bard's Tale 1, you notice that the game can be rather rough for players who are just starting out. On the other hand, take a look at Dragon Quest, or even Elminage Gothic (which is *not* an easy game, trust me), and we see that the starting encounters can be easily won at level 1, making the games more accessibe to newcomers.

(One exception I can think of: the Etrian Odyssey series. At least in the DS entries (haven't played the 3DS ones), the start of the game can be a little dangerous; I remember EO3 having one particularly nasty normal enemy on the first floor.)

Absolutely, but the examples you are providing already include an in-game character mentioning that those areas are hard, so that would be ok. However, if the player is just playing organically, and suddenly comes across an enemy that is hard to beat (or even worse, that seems almost possible to beat), without any warning, then I'd again say that is not good design.

As for tutorials, as far as I've seen in recent years, most tutorials are skippable, or involve doing stuff that you'd have to do in any case to progress (in an FPS, even if the tutorial didn't tell you to move with the WASD keys or look around with the mouse, you'd do that by yourself).

Sunless Sea is another example of a game that gates difficulty in a helpful way. You're on a ship, and you need fuel to move, and you need food to feed your crew. The further you go from home base, the more in danger you are of running out. It's possible that you might come across an island that gives you one of these things, but it is never a sure thing, so very early on, players understand that if they've expended half their fuel, they should probably turn back.

As you progress, your equipment is improved and your stores are improved, and you feel brave enough (and are well equipped enough) to go further.

This reminds me of those boss fights in RPGs that you are supposed to lose. If the fight is clearly unwinnable (enemy has some ridiculous attack that wipes out your party), it's fine. If the battle is meant to be barely winnable and gives you a reward (for example, frue destruction Gades from Lufia: The Legend Returns, though that battle requires a bit too much luck to win in my experience), it's fine. But if the boss isn't that dangerous, but has a ridiculous amount of HP, then it's a problem. Dragon Quest 7 is guilty of this; there's one supposed to lose fight where the boss doesn't seem that dangerous (the boss has Explodet, but that spell is survivable, and there are ways to counter it), but which is given a ridiulous amount of HP (I believe 0ver 65k, and I don't remember if this boss has hidden HP regen on top of it), so that you can't win the fight in a reasonable amount of time, but could end up wasting a lot of time on this boss, thinking it's winnable.

In other words, the developer should make it obvious when a fight is supposed to be lost for story purposes.

(Incidentally, Lufia: TLR has one fight of this type that is easy enough that a first-time player is quite likely to win the fight anyway.)