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?
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 agree. I couldn’t finish Hollow Knight because my reaction times just aren’t what they used to be. It sucked because otherwise I love that game. I haven’t even attempted Silksong.
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…)
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!
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.
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.
The antithesis to what you and OP are describing would be The legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild. But even fans of that formula are tired of it after 2 games in the series because as much freedom as it gives you, it‘s overwhelming.
I think what I‘m trying to say is that trends have cycles. They come and go. What you said is a valid opinion that I can kot possibly disagree with. However, these down sides become more apparent with time until we‘ve had enough and move on to the next thing. I am sure we‘ll remember most of those games fondly one day regardless. Nostalgia will kick in one day and we‘re able to look past the flaws again.
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.
That link to the different player types was very interesting. I’m somewhere between an Achiever and Explorer. Probably more explorer, but I am a sucker for hitting the next level, gear upgrade, etc.
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”.
Not much to add, but this was true from the beginning for me. I have “Roguelike” excluded from my Steam searches because around the time Hades got popular it was a source of so much slop where you’d spend most of your hours in the first two levels. Many of those games I hated were highly regarded.
I sincerely wish these kinds of grinding games would keep the good name of Rogue out of their mouths. No, it’s not -lite, it’s the exact opposite of Rogue!
For a while, meta progression felt like a clever way to keep games fresh.
It always felt like a cop out to me, TBH. I’d rather you give me fewer tools and a lot of potential for synergy among them. Dead Cells definitely has more weapons than Dante has in DMC5, but the amount of shit you can pull off with Dante is insane in comparison because every weapon can do so much. People are still discovering new tech to this day: now that’s keeping things fresh.
More and more I feel like instead of removing the frustration, meta progression is removing the sense of improvement.
It always felt like this from the get-go. It needlessly muddies the water: am I progressing because I’m improving, or am I progressing because I’m unlocking more powerful weapons/perks? The answer is most likely a blend of both, but it’s never clear what’s the bigger reason.
I recommend Magenta Horizon or The Dishwasher if you want something similar to Rogue Legacy/Dead Cells without rogue elements.
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.
Sounds like regular progression?
That’s funny, reading your post I immediately thought of Ball x Pitt, before you even mentioned it.
That being said, I actually loved that game, and obsessively played it for 60 hours. I think it took me 3 or 4 hours to beat the first level, but to me it felt very rewarding. For me it was more about figuring out the right ball evolutions and character selection to beat a level.
That did change for the later levels. After a while it became too easy, and it just felt like grinding to unlock the next thing. The harvesting component was actually a refreshing break between runs, and probably kept me playing longer than I would have otherwise.
Same for me. The start of the game was great. The difficulty just right. But most of the new characters are too strong. I stopped playing after I unlocked the duo upgrade, because there was simply no challenge left. I enjoyed it long enough to still recommend it for the price, but i feel like there is so much of the game left and I am somehow sorry I will never play it…
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.
I very much dislike roguelikes. It always feels patronizing: aww too bad, if you were good enough you actually could have beaten the game, but let’s make it just a little easier. Then it takes so many runs to make an appreciable difference in my abilities or skills that it feels worse than grinding in an RPG (especially because at least with grinding I know I’m going to make progress…I actually might not make any difference with several failed runs).
I also think it’s lazy programming. The game is actually only an hour long or less but you get more time out of it because you need to repeat. Add the fact that roguelikes are almost exclusively procedurally generated and it just feels like a cash grab.
The ONLY roguelike I’ve played any appreciable amount is Hades, and I keep putting it down after a few hours of playtime to pick it up months later. They at least have a lot of interesting dialogue and some element of story but it’s not enough to keep me hooked.
Add the fact that roguelikes are almost exclusively procedurally generate
If they’re not procedurally generated, they’re not roguelikes. It’s a defining feature. It’s also not lazy to define a set of rules that generate good, interesting levels every time you boot it up. I’m basically the only guy who didn’t enjoy Hades, and a large reason why is that their level generation is sorely lacking compared to so many others (though Hades is more lite than like) I’ve played.
aww, too bad, if you were good enough you could have beaten the game, but let’s make it a little easier
Yeah, that’s pretty awful game design. Most of the ones i’ve played didn’t feel like that, usually you’d unlock new classes or something (I.e. sidegrades) or unlock harder difficulties.
And of course my favorite ones don’t have any meta progression whatsoever, the only progression comes from you learning about the game.
Ok, I’m intrigued. Any recommendations? I’d love to play ones where progression comes from learning about the game.
You’re looking for actual Roguelikes then. That’s what the genre originally was before it got bastardized.
One of my all time favorite games is Cultist Simulator, but I’ll admit it’s not for everyone. If you like puzzle type games and don’t mind learning about the world by reading lots of little snippets of flavor text, it’ll be right up your alley.
Also definitely check out Rogue (the og) and the first wave of games inspired by it. The meta-progression stuff is kind of a new wave thing.
As for newer games, Balatro is really popular right now if you’re into more ‘puzzle roguelikes’. Most of the things you unlock make the game harder rather than easier, or give you a different angle from which to play the game. There are a handful of things you have to unlock via meta-progression, but so far they seem pretty unintrusive.
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You could vary the genres you play more. I love Ball x Pit, but I don’t play a lot of rouge-likes, so I’m not desensitized to the mechanics as much.
I feel like this is why I dropped playing many rogue-likes and am currently addicted to playing arc raiders, as you lose so many things if you die and have to self-evaluate every single time you don’t get home.
I have to get home and survive in order to actually grow my character positively, where dying punishes me for losing (almost) everything and gaining very little experience points to allocate to my characters permanent buffs.
Most of the roguelikes that I really enjoy had unlocks that made the game harder, not easier. At best, the unlocks offer new builds, making the game easier in one respect but harder in others, giving you a new angle on things.
But then again, most of the ones I play are puzzle/strategy/deckbuilder type games. Kind of a genre of its own these days. (FTL, Slay the Spire, Cultist Simulator, Balatro, etc)
