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?
Metaprogression was always pretty unrewarding, dripping in upgrades and unlocks so you buy a game, but you don’t get the game you bought until 10-100 hours of time invested playing a worse and/or more limited game. It’s always been weird how so many people say they need progression to enjoy a game. Fun was always a better reason to play a game than progression. Fun is why better games have ways to rebalance to match the things progression adds along the way. It’s just a shame people will basically scorn most games that don’t offer some kind of cross-run progression nowadays, so devs are stuck doing something. Not just roguelites, either. Look at what’s happened to Diablo-style ARPGs, where the addiction mechanics have pushed things to where people want seasonal resets so they can meaninglessly re-grind, because the fun has shifted to grinding loot (and trading), and the game doesn’t matter once you have enough that loot isn’t changing things for you. People don’t even want significant gameplay, as it just slows the grind. Then the inevitable endpoint of unlock/progression based play is horde survivors, where the games have openly admitted the actual play isn’t even the point anymore. It’s just builds, unlocks, and grinds, watch it go.
But I never really got people acting like you can’t tell how you’re doing in a game as things shift, or they can’t engage with systems because things get added, or a win doesn’t feel like a win. It’s not usually that hard to tell how you’re playing or how stuff works. These things are rarely that unusual, and if winning on easy isn’t good enough for you, look for the higher difficulty. If there’s no option to adjust difficulty and give a good play experience, that’s the problem, not the progression. Difficulty always needs options, and people should play at the level where the game feels good to them, not get stuck trying to prove something by defeating the game. Just like devs should not take a lazy, one-size-fits-all path, especially if that path means more experienced players only get a less interesting game.
Finally, contrasting “sideways” unlocks to power progression is often a deception. Many games with sideways unlocks gain a great deal of power/easing from adding options, synergies, and opportunities. Then people try to act like the experience is more pure than some other game where things get easier just from stats. Yeah, stat upgrades are obvious, but you didn’t start in the same place as before when you’ve altered the game and drop pool to your advantage.