Leveling up in video games?

Recently somebody involved in the development of Cyberpunk 2077 asked a hypothetical regarding how headshots should work in the players interpretation of what their "dream RPG" would be in relation to differences between player level and enemy level.

Honestly it would depend on what type of game it is we are talking about whether it is a sort of turn based strategy type game like Fallout or Original Sin or whether it is more of a first person/third person action oriented shooter however I would say generally if you are using an arbitrary level difference as your primary method of gating off content you probably need to rethink your design.


But it does raise an interesting question, what purpose do levels serve in a video game any more? Are there better methods? Too often I see in video games and RPGs level used as an arbitrary way to gate off certain content requiring the player to grind out levels to match that of the enemies they are about to fight in order to progress, yet no effort put in to making those levels actually mean anything. Take for instance a game like Baldur's Gate, in that game there is at least some context to what your level and attributes mean in regards to your relative power to the rest of the creatures in the world, you know that bandits, goblins and kobolds are lower level enemies, more advanced enemies like mind flayers and beholders are higher level enemies, you know that when it comes to attributes 10 is average, 18 is exceptional (to give context if your character had strength of 18 they would have strength relative to that of an Ogre) and anything below 9 is below the average range, however in most modern RPGs levels have no real meaning beyond "higher numbers = better", levels seem to be only used as a method of gating off content rather than giving context to how powerful your character is to the rest of the world as low level enemies are identical to high level enemies with the only difference being how much damage they can dish out and take, the only difference between bandits in one area and bandits in another area is the arbitrary number value floating over their head, attributes as well have been devalued as most simply require you to pump points into your primary damage stat and health stat at the expense of all others and by the time you end the game your main stats are 10x what your other stats are, in the end you wonder why bother with a leveling system at all if the only thing that changes is that bigger numbers get exchanged in the combat log?

So I will put it to you, how would you answer the question posed by the Cyberpunk dev and how do you feel about current leveling schemes?