I play Hardcore only. I have a thing where if you have a difficulty slider then the intended difficulty is the highest it can go. For me that’s hardcore.
That being said, if I play hardcore and I want to just build up the realm I can’t very well enter that same realm with a new hardcore player because of the scale of the enemies. I already have a problem with enemy scaling. It’s lazy design and Outward did a tremendously better job of dealing with this by making certain enemies harder than others so that character growth felt earned. Scaling as it stands is exactly why I never finished the Witcher 3. Because as a famous Witcher I constantly felt myself loosing immersion when Geralt couldn’t fight an enemy because it was too high a level for him that he barely scratched it at level one, but one shot it at level 15. Dumb design. Dumb, dumb, dumb. A decade or two old at this point.
My old solution was to create a brand-new realm every time I started a hardcore player and to front load the old equipment into a non-hardcore realm so my new hardcore player could retrieve it. But this felt unearned, so I stopped doing it.
While I know you won’t get rid of scaling because its central to your combat system, even in 2.0 I’m guessing, please can we at least fix the problem of hardcore players being unable to enter the old realm without getting creamed the second they set foot in it because there only exist’s level 8 enemies? I’m really tired of creating brand new realms just to level up my hardcore player.