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.

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.

Yeah I don’t really like the model where it starts basic and hard, and each failure makes it a little easier.

Feels like it would be more interesting if you started with high stats, and each successful run you had to remove or lower something. Sure, you won with 200 health but can you win with 100? Hades kind of had this alongside the upgrades as you go.

I didn’t like dead cells or rogue legacy that much because it felt like I would’ve won if I had grinded more, and that’s not what I want.

I feel like games are usually a mix of execution challenges and numbers challenges. In a pure action game or other games without progression (eg: chess) you win or lose from your decisions and input. But in numbers games, you win or lose based on the stats. There’s really no way cloud from the start of the original ff7 can defeat disc 3 bosses. The numbers just aren’t there.

Some rogue-lites feel like they’re trying to be execution games but have a less clear numbers check on top. Doesn’t always work for me.

I do really like the traditional rogue like Crawl: Stone Soup, though. No meta game aside from the occasional player ghost.

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.

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.

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.

I think a good evolution of roguelite meta-progression is actually extraction mechanics.

Like escape from duckov etc. is essentially a roguelite where you have to survive and extract with your meta items, which I think is better for keeping you on your toes and feels less “grindy” than traditional roguelite meta-currency.

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.

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. 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?

It was never “clever” or “keeping the game fresh”, all I see this as is a crutch for badly designed gameplay. “Ok but the game gets fun as long as you play it THE WAY WE INTENDED” no I’m sorry if you’re gonna keep the game’s actually fun part behind a 30-hour time gate, I’m refunding that shit. There’s been games that were fun, but I lost my safe file for and thus all the progression is reset and it’s just not fun to grind anymore, I’ll go play something that gives me the whole game that I paid for, right off the bat.

Got any recommendations for interesting procedurally generated games? I’ve hated them since the days of Hack// and Diablo 4.

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.

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.