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?
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.