Meta progression in roguelites was fun for a while, but it's starting to feel unrewarding
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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?
Great post.
In addition to your points I would add a frustration of mine is having to fight the same bosses over and over again. Take Hades 2 as an example: you can choose one of two paths at the start of a run but will always have to fight the same boss fights. That sort of repetition in a roguelike is expected, I guess, but I just stopped playing the game because I didn't want to fight Scylla and Charybdis for the 1000th time just to get to the next boss for the 1000th time.
I suppose Dead Cells spoiled me a bit here: you had route choices and could skip boss fights if they weren't necessary for you current goals.
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Great post.
In addition to your points I would add a frustration of mine is having to fight the same bosses over and over again. Take Hades 2 as an example: you can choose one of two paths at the start of a run but will always have to fight the same boss fights. That sort of repetition in a roguelike is expected, I guess, but I just stopped playing the game because I didn't want to fight Scylla and Charybdis for the 1000th time just to get to the next boss for the 1000th time.
I suppose Dead Cells spoiled me a bit here: you had route choices and could skip boss fights if they weren't necessary for you current goals.
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.....)
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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?
While I understand what you're talking about, I would argue it's bad metaprogression that you dislike. I liked Rogue Legacy when I first played, but didn't enjoy the second one even though it's essentially the same. Let me give you an example of good metaprogression: Dead Cells.
There's the metaprogression that allows you access to new areas and new mechanics, but that's fairly quick compared to the length of the rest of the progression, and I would argue it's not the sort of thing you're complaining about.
What could be similar is the way you unlock equipment, although you don't become stronger with each run, you unlock more weapons. This gives you variety, but the vast majority of the progression happens in your head. If you have enough hours in Dead Cells and think the metaprogression is what made you so good at the game that you couldn't finish one level when you started and now you play for hours, do me a favor and start a new save. After being on the second cell I bought the game for a different platform, on my first run I got to the first cell.
Which brings me to the second metaprogression in the game, cells. They make the game harder, not easier, and it's the way to progress, you have to purposefully make the game harder to progress. IMO this is how metaprogression is supposed to be done, you need to be better, and when you think you're good enough to beat the game it lets you know "you've only just started".
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There’s a game where I could use some sort of meta progression (because I suck): Noita.
I’ve never made it deeper than the first three levels. I probably never will. So much cool shit down there that I’ll never see
The meta progression in Noita is so meta you don't even notice it. The meta progression is knowledge, the more you know the easier the game becomes. For example if you don't already know you don't need to collect hearts at the holy mountain. If you have full or near full health it's better to skip the heart, continue exploring and then come back to pick it up when you have low health, because it's also a full heal. More often than not I completely skip the first two hearts to see what the snowy depths have and then circle back to the mines to heal up on a second comedown.
But the game is pretty unforgiving so I usually recommend new players pick up tinker with wands and health containers mods from the steam workshop. Honestly tinker with wands should be always active because that perk is downright the best perk in the game, not just because it makes early game easier but because it also reduces pointless backtracking to drag wands into the holy mountain (without triggering the collapse) just so you could make the wand you want. It's not "how the developer intended" but I consider both mods something of a QoL thing, because if you know what you're doing then from a certain point onward health becomes effectively irrelevant and eventually you're going to get the tinker with wands spell. Lack of healing and lack of tinker with wands only makes early game harder, late game you're going to have other problems.
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For me, intend to dislike pure roguelikes because of the lack of meta progression. I tend to get a limited amount of time to play, so I don't like games that require a time sink to get enjoyment. And as I get older I'm getting less 'gud' at games too. This is the reason I avoid almost all multiplayer, most grindy single player (ubisoft) and pretty much all soulslikes.
I like the feedback loop of the game getting easier without me necessarily having to do the heavy lifting of getting better. And it doesn't have to be straight upgrades. Hades with its weapons is mostly sidegrades, and those are fun too.
I feel especially Roguelites are bad for limited playtime because they are often designed around having to do the same-ish thing multiple times to get enough meta progression to be able to finish the game. Like the game has content for 2 hours but stretches it to 15 because you need meta progression.
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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?
