Meta progression in roguelites was fun for a while, but it's starting to feel unrewarding
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You just made me appreciate Slay the Spire more with the boss choices for each act. I didn't realize until this comment how refreshing that is. Even Hades 1 had some variety in the first two boss fights (which fury was showing up, what kind of heads Lernie had.....)
Hades 2 lets you amp up the difficulty to vary the bosses. By the 1000th attempt, you would likely be playing with them on their hardest and most intersting mode.
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I have a very low opinion of "sidegrades." Games used to give you all their options up front.
This overwhelming trend during the past 15, 20 years to trickle-feed the player unlocks does untold harm. For one, players are rarely ever talking about the same game because everyone is at different points in the progression. The actual game doesn't start until the final thing is unlocked and this is often a place that most players will never reach.
Can't tell you how much advice I've read that goes something like "use X with Y" where at least one of those is locked behind 50 more hours of progression and my eyes once again roll all the way out of my head. As a developer, don't you want players to experiment with the things you put in the game?
Can't tell you how refreshing it is to play a game like NetHack where I can install a fresh copy and not have to worry about managing my save files because everything that's in the game is... in the game. Also, a quick study can start winning games much sooner because their options aren't all gated behind arbitrary time sinks.
But even just.. skin selection in multiplayer. Games used to give you ALL of them from the start and players could just, you know, pick the one they liked. This whole 'grind to show off how cool you are' is a dark pattern to coerce players to spend more time on the game than they want to.
You know what this is, is developers are catering to diamonds and they forgot that some of us are spades.
You describe while I can play Diabolo II hardcore, but get bored of 'rogue-lites' that have 30min or 1h loops.
You can always do solo self found for the "true" challange or do selffound for different experience.
The character is only reliant on itself and the stuff you find/farm. The "side-grade" comes from finding build-enabling uniques.
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Hades 2 lets you amp up the difficulty to vary the bosses. By the 1000th attempt, you would likely be playing with them on their hardest and most intersting mode.
But Scylla and the Sirens featuring Charybdis doesn't feel as different to me as say the Collector vs the Champ. I like the randomness and didn't realize until this comment- though you could argue the music for the Scylla fight is random at least!
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But Scylla and the Sirens featuring Charybdis doesn't feel as different to me as say the Collector vs the Champ. I like the randomness and didn't realize until this comment- though you could argue the music for the Scylla fight is random at least!
I think the harder versions add a lot of variabilty to the fight. The "default" Scylla fight is almost an afterthought after your first dozen times, but the harder version is immensly more complicated. Same goes for prometheous + spoiler, etc.
I think with a hundred more runs, these would also get old hat, but thats true with hades 1 as well. If you run the bosses 112 times there, the occasional "surprise" boss isnt really that intersting, especially if you've seen them 35 times. Seeing ol' "muurrder..." occasionally was novel, but only to a point.
The story beats and quips kept things fresh for me in hades 2, to be honestly. The sheer amount of dialogue and charector building kept pulling me along as much as the mechanics of the gameplay.
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For a while, meta progression felt like a clever way to keep games fresh. You’d unlock new gear, perks, or passive bonuses between runs, and that sense of forward motion made failure feel productive. I still remember how ground-breaking this felt the first time I played Rogue Legacy. The game nearly made me look forward to losing, limiting any frustrations I would get from losing. Over time, however, the novelty has worn off. More and more I feel like instead of removing the frustration, meta progression is removing the sense of improvement.
Having meta progression means that you come back stronger after every run, this completely blurs self-evaluation. You lost but you feel like you played well. Do you just need to unlock more stuff or are you not understanding something? It's really hard to say. How do you improve if you don't know how well you are doing? Losing is the usual way for a game to tell you you are doing badly, but this is thrown out the window in games with a strong meta progression. I personally often end up assuming I just have to grind more, which isn't a great feeling. And then, when I succeed, it doesn't feel rewarding because I know I only succeeded because of the meta progression.
Having this meta progression as a crutch also stops you from engaging deeply with a game's mechanics. Not only can you continue playing badly and win eventually, it is also hard to build fundamentals on what is essentially moving ground. Is 100 damage good? Now maybe, but that might not be true soon enough. I've recently had this problem with Ball x Pit, for example. I didn't engage with any of the stats because they all changed so fast that I didn't see the point.
I'm mostly referring to progression that makes you more powerful. I still very much like sideways unlocks which can serve to ease players into the game or to bring more variety in as the game goes on. I think Megabonk handled this pretty well recently, for example. Does meta progression still feel rewarding to you?
I don't like the ones that are meant to be replayed over and over to progress at all.
I like the ones that are a whole new experience each time. I'm not even sure if these are truly rogue likes, but they get lumped into them
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For a while, meta progression felt like a clever way to keep games fresh. You’d unlock new gear, perks, or passive bonuses between runs, and that sense of forward motion made failure feel productive. I still remember how ground-breaking this felt the first time I played Rogue Legacy. The game nearly made me look forward to losing, limiting any frustrations I would get from losing. Over time, however, the novelty has worn off. More and more I feel like instead of removing the frustration, meta progression is removing the sense of improvement.
Having meta progression means that you come back stronger after every run, this completely blurs self-evaluation. You lost but you feel like you played well. Do you just need to unlock more stuff or are you not understanding something? It's really hard to say. How do you improve if you don't know how well you are doing? Losing is the usual way for a game to tell you you are doing badly, but this is thrown out the window in games with a strong meta progression. I personally often end up assuming I just have to grind more, which isn't a great feeling. And then, when I succeed, it doesn't feel rewarding because I know I only succeeded because of the meta progression.
Having this meta progression as a crutch also stops you from engaging deeply with a game's mechanics. Not only can you continue playing badly and win eventually, it is also hard to build fundamentals on what is essentially moving ground. Is 100 damage good? Now maybe, but that might not be true soon enough. I've recently had this problem with Ball x Pit, for example. I didn't engage with any of the stats because they all changed so fast that I didn't see the point.
I'm mostly referring to progression that makes you more powerful. I still very much like sideways unlocks which can serve to ease players into the game or to bring more variety in as the game goes on. I think Megabonk handled this pretty well recently, for example. Does meta progression still feel rewarding to you?
Anything will get less fun the more often you do it. This is more of an issue when a genre becomes popular and everyone tries to capitalize on this.
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I don't like the ones that are meant to be replayed over and over to progress at all.
I like the ones that are a whole new experience each time. I'm not even sure if these are truly rogue likes, but they get lumped into them
Hades feels like this to me. In fact the game dialogue seems to enforce this. I guess that's why it's considered a rouge-lite?
