The last post on collectathons seems to be taking off even worse than my usual games posts normally do but I want to continue rambling a bit about Remnant 2, since I’ve still been on that train.
First, I think it’s longevity with me is because it shares some key characteristics with another of my all-time favorites and so I want to compare those a little bit out loud here. Nioh was another series where I was pretty lukewarm on the first one but fell completely in love with the sequel. In a nutshell, the perfect mix that hooked me with Nioh 2 was solid, tactical single player gameplay, a higher-than-moderate level of character and build customization, and seamless multiplayer. The last of those three was what locked it in for me; I was almost ready to stop playing having finished the campaign once but the ability to join others’ campaigns to help them along while also making progress to your own world character and world states made it supremely replayable for me.
This also describes Remnant 2. I have my single-player campaign & adventure mode where I can progress and explore at my own leisure, and at any time I can take a break from that to join someone else’s campaign where I’m collecting useful items and resources and getting faster-paced team gameplay. In both cases I completed the main campaign on the lowest difficulty solo and then alternated between solo campaigns on higher difficulties with forays into multiplayer, where I can push the higher difficulties more comfortably and see slices of maps I haven’t seen yet. Remnant 2 doesn’t quite have the same comparable tactical complexity that Nioh 2 does but there is ample strategic complexity with regards to crafting a build using the equipment and classes you’ve gathered.
Nioh 3 has been announced so the clock is ticking down to the next iteration. I can’t say I don’t have reservations though, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty was incredibly disappointing and while I hear Rise of the Ronin is pretty decent, its Steam reviews are plagued by people complaining about performance problems. Waiting for a more reasonable price on it before I try it out.
Occasionally when I’m bored at work I’ll pull out my phone and take a look at the Steam forums for whatever game I’ve been playing. Almost always, this is a bad idea because you’ll find some of the most braindead takes on games this way1. Rarely, as for this post, you can maybe at least find something worth thinking about amongst the dung.
On the Remnant 2 discussion forum there’s presently someone vehemently, stubbornly arguing that people who look up build guides online are cheaters who deserve to be banned and ostracized. This is prima facie absurd, and we can make a pretty plain case for why.
This isn’t something we have to go all the way back to first principles to justify either. We can infer that Remnant 2 is inherently, deliberately intended to be a community-driven experience for anyone who wants to get the most out of the game. There are multiple items whose method of attainment is deliberately obscured in a way that seems plainly intended to be solved by the greater community of players, and there is no better example of this than the Polygun.
The Polygun is a secret weapon which requires finding and shooting a series of 13 cubes hidden around the Labyrinth map. First off, finding any of the cubes is not something most casual players are going to know you can even do2. Then, all 13 of the cubes needed to be found3, several of which require finding and accessing several hidden areas around the map and one of them includes accessing a completely different hidden zone which has a completely different set of hidden access requirements4. And then you had to figure out the correct order to hit all the cubes in. By the way if you die or stop at a World Stone the entire process resets so the correct sequence will require you to both be running back and forth across the entire zone and doing some dangerous, tricky platforming5.
Since I didn’t go through the process of solving this mystery myself I can’t say how much of a proper breadcrumb trail there is but I do know that finding the correct solution was the collaborative effort of over a dozen people.
One of the reasons I still enjoy following Maximum and the World of Warcraft Race to World First6 is that they frequently give interesting insights into how high performing players think. One recent recurring topic is the differences in the strategy crafting between the top two guilds, who have to fully develop strategies on the fly in order to be the first to beat the apex raid content, and virtually every other guild behind them, who primarily compete and function by straight copying the strategies employed by Liquid or Echo.
Many high performing guilds behind Liquid and Echo create extensive documentation on all manner of micro and macro strategy copied directly from Liquid and/or Echo—positioning, cooldown timings, class and spec distributions, and so on, and some of it gets really into the weeds without necessarily understanding why something was done where. There is almost certainly some degree to which not having the will or resources to be able to fully craft self-original strategies is both a hindrance to being competitive for apex performance and, in some sense, playing a different game, but also that’s an aspect of what you have to do in order to compete for just third place. There’s all manner of degenerate gameplay Liquid and Echo et al. do to be at the top, and emulating them is what you need to do to get close to them; in both cases7 if you don’t do it someone else will and beat you.
But even apex strategic performance on the frontier edge both requires and begets collaboration. One thing I touch on very briefly in the Skill Issue Issue was that there seems to be a community-organizing tendency amongst the most passionate.
Provisionally, I think there’s probably a social element as well: I’ve observed that a lot of high level players either find their competitive drive by having friends that play (or a community to show off to) or have enough of a competitive drive that compels them to make the friends they need to have high level practice partners.
And this is one of those things that seems more true to me the more I think about it.
Our stubborn arguer argues that anybody who has not crafted their own personal build is a dirty, build-copying, low-skill cheater. The above illustrates both that high-performing players are more likely to be collaborating and more likely to be sharing (or at least seeking out) pre-existing high-performing strategies. Furthermore, you’re likely to never be the best at what you do if you’re doing it by yourself.
But we can keep going, let’s talk about metas. Partly this is an excuse to cram in a short aside about Geoguessr8.
Geoguessr is somewhat unique among games in that its players use the word meta a little bit closer to literally, inasmuch as “meta” is shorthand for something like meta-knowledge. Watching Geoguessr pros do their thing is marvelous, and only becomes very slightly less marvelous when you learn some of the tricks they use to identify locations quickly.
There are many geographical clues like types of vegetation and mountains, and you can learn specific regional visual quirks like what sorts of road line markers different countries & regions use, you can get lots of information from telephone & power poles, and there’s entire Google docs for things like bus station markings in Norway. But then there’s also information about the game that can point you in the right direction. There’s basic meta-knowledge that can help like knowing what countries Google maps does and doesn’t have coverage for, but advanced players can also get clues to where they are from things like what Google car the camera is mounted on or what year the image is copyrighted. Geoguessr players will memetically call both “meta”, but the latter is much more literal in that it is using information about the game to identify locations.
The more traditional use of “meta” in games refers to how gaming communities arrive at consensus around the relative strength of certain playstyles. This style of “meta”—finding information, techniques, items, characters, etc. that are especially lindy—is common in just about literally every game that more than one person has taken seriously. Some people will try to get a competitive edge by developing and hiding valuable information, but most people’s impulse is to share9 and many other players’ impulses are to seek out shared information. There isn’t really a reasonable definition of cheating that includes seeking out information on what works well.
Games having a meta can be good or bad, and there’s cases where being negative about the way a meta is evolving is more justifiable than throwing a tantrum that people are looking up build guides. Like tier lists10, metas can be bad when they guide game balance decisions poorly11 or when they reflect too limited of a data set. As a player trying to enjoy the game casually, it can sometimes be too tempting to fixate on what are (or are perceived to be) the best builds, strategies, or tools when you might otherwise prefer a different playstyle. Better game designs will accommodate more varied viable playstyles.
Sometimes meta fixation can be taken advantage of to find ideas that others hadn’t considered more seriously in pursuit of a competitive edge, but often the meta will naturally shift over time, especially when it’s being pushed by the most competitive subset of players. Calling back to the WoW RTWF example: Liquid and Echo are at the forefront of developing new strategies while their trailing contemporaries are sort of doomed to copy what they’ve developed; higher echelons of players will generally be what develops the frontier of a game beyond its existing meta and be the source of what other players will lean on and consider the present meta.
But also like who cares? How you play and enjoy games really doesn’t matter much, most especially when the manner in which you enjoy them only affects you. Remnant 2 is not a competitive game by default. There’s co-operative multiplayer but, as such games should, the game gives you the tools to remove offensive players from your lobbies whether they be cheating or just higher or lower level than you’re comfortable with. Any sense in which the game could be made competitive (eg speedrunning) will have community-agreed-upon rules that are free to include or bar any given way of playing. It’s peak pedantry to demand everyone enjoy games in whatever specific way appeals most to you.
If cheating is how you enjoy games that’s fine, though you should probably expect others default won’t want your cheats in their lobbies. If you like looking up (or writing and sharing) builds or guides, that’s extremely harmless. There’s a fair argument to be made that you might get more out of an experience by crafting your own builds and playstyles or exploring as blindly and spoiler-free as possible but there’s plenty of circumstances where putting in that work would make you enjoy a game less too12. Remnant 2 has a natural tension between having an enjoyable exploration experience but also not wanting to feel like you missed out on an item hidden away in some corner because you didn’t know which elevator had a hidden passage below it.
To me, learning about a game as a meta-exploration is just as enjoyable, in both senses of “meta”.
This isn’t helped by the fact that trolling and baiting is soft-encouraged because there’s profile badges that mark you as an idiot and you get (quasi-worthless) Steam points for this.
The first one is the only one sort of in plain sight that you’re likely to stumble across by accident.
And I can’t be sure that there’s any indication that there’s only 13.
To even access this location you have to collect the correct archetypes (and level them to equip the correct skills), weapons, and accessories—some of which aren’t easy to find on their own and at least one of which (the long gun) requires yet another doing-a-thing-to-do-a-thing to access a hidden chamber—and I have no clue how you’d even begin to understand that you need to do any of this. There’s a visual indicator that you’ve equipped a correct combination of things, which you could conceivably do by accident, but then there’s no indication where to take them.
This gives you access to a final hidden archetype and a couple easter egg items in addition to one of the cubes.
And there’s another arguably worse secret item that involves completing a quest that requires several specific world zones & conditions and requires completing the whole go without dying which in turn requires either some immaculate play over a long period of time or carefully rolling a perfect set of world states to complete. The Polygun you can at least get just by knowing the whole process from start to finish (and having everything to access the Backrooms).
The RTWF refers to the race to be the first to finish each new Mythic Raid that’s released. It’s baseball-esque; the moment to moment is sort of mundane but there are intense periods of excitement and you can also follow along with daily recaps (the races typically go on over 1-2 weeks, I recommend Dratnos & Tettles’ recaps). Mostly these days, I follow WoW via the PoddyC.
For example, splits are an ongoing arms race amongst Liquid and Echo. Because of the way loot works, each player has to prepare multiple identical copies of the same class and spec (I can’t recall the precise number but iirc the number is something absurd like sixteen), and these characters are rotated through the lower tier raids in order to funnel gear efficiently in a way that maximizes item level going into the mythic raid.
You have to do this since Normal and Heroic raids have lockouts such that every individual character has a limited shot at loot from that raid per week. Most serious high-end raiding guilds do alts and splits; I remember it being a thing back when I played during WotLK. Normally you might have a few alts do this over several weeks to speed things up a little bit but, since it’s a race that will be over in less than a few weeks, Liquid and Echo effectively have just the one week that matters and need to go to such extremes to maximize it. Nobody outside of Liquid and Echo are doing splits with sixteen alts, but if you wanted to actually begin to compete with them it’s something that you’d have to seriously consider doing too.
Their splits are crazy enough that it’s almost entirely the only source of burnout wrt players voluntarily leaving the RTWF. And keep in mind having the characters prepared between patches in the same expansion means having to have best-in-slot gear from the Mythic raids of the previous patch for all of those characters.
Haven’t been playing it but it’s been recent regular entertainment on YouTube.
See: every fan wiki on the planet.
Often tier lists and metas are interchangeably connected.
Probably the most infamous case study of this is Dota vs League of Legends. League of Legends very early on arrived at a developer-proscribed team composition meta with regards to what roles go in what lanes, and this eventually became ingrained in their design choices. Dota, on the other hand, never did this by explicit design, and how many of what heroes do what roles and where were all decided on by evolution of player strategies over time.
There’s a common argument that I think is weak but also just doesn’t require justification that people with limited time will want to (feel justified to) play a particular way. Again, I think the argument just more practically ought to be “lol who cares” and leave it to the whiny arguers to actually bring a justification for why that ought not to be.