Hades (video game)
Hades is an upcoming Roguelike action role-playing video game developed by Supergiant Games for release on Microsoft Windows. The game was released as an early access title in December 2018 with a planned full release in the second half of 2020.
| Hades | |
|---|---|
 Cover art | |
| Developer(s) | Supergiant Games |
| Publisher(s) | Supergiant Games |
| Director(s) | Greg Kasavin |
| Producer(s) | Amir Rao |
| Artist(s) | Jen Zee |
| Writer(s) | Greg Kasavin |
| Composer(s) | Darren Korb |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows |
| Release | Q3/Q4 2020[1] |
| Genre(s) | Rogue-like dungeon crawler |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Players, as Zagreus, the son of Hades, attempt to escape from Underworld to reach Mount Olympus, at times aided by gifts bestowed on him from the other Olympians. Each run challenges the player through a random series of rooms populated with enemies and rewards, and the player uses a combination of their main weapon attack, dash power, and magic ability to defeat them while avoiding damage to progress as far as possible. While Zagreus will often die, the player can use gained treasure to improve certain attributes or unlock new weapons and abilities to improve chances of escaping on subsequent runs.
Hades was developed following Supergiant's Pyre, a game in which they wanted to explore procedural narrative storytelling, but due to the nature of the main gameplay, found that players did not play through Pyre multiple times to explore this. The roguelike structure of Hades gave them the opportunity to tell these branching stories to the player over the course of multiple runs.
Gameplay
The player takes the role of Zagreus, the prince of the Underworld, who is trying to escape the realm to get away from his dispassionate father, Hades, and reach Mount Olympus. His quest is supported by the other Olympians, who grant him gifts to help fight the beings that protect the exit from the Underworld. He is also helped on his quest by notorious residents of the Underworld, such as Sisyphus, Eurydice, or Patroclus. The game features four "biomes", or locales of the underworld, such as Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of Styx.
The game is presented in an isometric view with the player in control of Zagreus. The player starts a run-through of the game by trying to fight their way through a number of rooms; the room layouts are pre-determined, but their order and the enemies that appear are randomly determined. The player has a primary weapon, a special attack, and a magic spell which they can use to take out enemies. Upon starting a run, one of the Olympians will provide a gift, a choice of three persistent boosts for that run that the player can select from; the gifts are themed based on the Olympian, for example with Zeus providing lightning damage effects. Subsequently, after clearly a room, the player will be shown the type of reward they may earn if they complete the next room or choice of next rooms, ranging from additional Olympian gifts, restorative items, in-game currency, a store to purchase improvements, or keys that can be used in the meta-game to improve Zagreus' initial attributes for the next run. Should Zagreus' health points drop to zero, he "dies" and ends up facing his father, removing all gifts granted from the last run.[2]
Between runs, Zagreus can explore the Underworld before setting on a new quest. Here, the player can use the keys to unlock permanent upgrades for Zagreus or order construction of new support features for the Underworld, or obtain new weapons. They can also have Zagreus interact with the various characters of the Underworld, which provide narrative elements to the game but may also provide quests with additional rewards.[2][3][4]
Development
Following the release of their previous game, Pyre, Supergiant Games was interested in developing a game that would help to open up their development process to players, so that they would end up making the best game they possibly could from player feedback. They recognized that this would not only help with the gameplay approach but also with narrative elements, and thus opted to use the early access approach in developing Hades once they had established the foundation of the game.[5] As Supergiant was still a small team of about 20 employees, they knew they could only support early access across one platform, with the intent to then port to other platforms near the completion of the game. Supergiant had spoken to Epic Games and learned of their intent to launch their own Epic Games Store, and felt the experimental platform was an appropriate match with Hades. Supergiant's decision was made in part due to Epic's focus on content creators, as Supergiant had developed Hades in mind to be a game favorable to streamers, which would be benefited through the Epic Games Store.[5] Supergiant anticipates that Hades will take about three years to complete, comparable to the development time of their previous titles.[5]
In terms of the game's narrative and approach, the Supergiant team had discussed what type of game they wanted to make next, and settled on a concept that would be easy to pick up and play, which could be played in very short periods, and had opportunities for expanding on after release, driving them towards a roguelike game, which have generally best utilized the early access approach.[5] The roguelike approach also fit well with their past gameplay design goals, where they aimed to continue to add in new tricks or tools for the player that would make them reconsider how they have been playing the game to that point.[5] Pyre had been an attempt to create a branching open-ended narrative, but once the game was released, Supergiant recognized that most players would only play through the game once and thus lose out on the branching narrative perspective. With Hades established as a roguelike, the team felt the branching narrative approach would be much more appropriate since the genre calls for players to repeatedly play through the game.[6]
For the setting, Supergiant considered revisiting the worlds from their previous games but felt a wholly new setting would be better. Supergiant's creative director Greg Kasavin came onto the idea of Greek mythology, a topic he had been interested in since his youth.[5] Originally, it was planned to have the game set in the ever-shifting mazes of Minos to support the roguelike facets but found it difficult to incorporate the branching narrative factors.[6] This led to them the overall concept of Zagreus attempting to escape from his father Hades. Kasavain compared the gods as "a big dysfunctional family that we can see ourselves in", and that by having Zagreus repeatedly try and fail to escape from Hades, it would provide both the type of slapstick comedy that he felt captured the relationships in this "family", as well as the player experience typically associated with roguelikes where one moment the player may feel invincible only to be quickly defeated and brought back to the start the next moment.[5][6] The Greek God narrative also easily informed the benefits that the player obtains as they progress through the game, representing the different powers of the gods, and various gameplay elements such as Trials of the Gods, emphasizing the fickle relationship the gods had with each other.[6]
In contrast to Bastion and Transistor, which were more linear games and thus had more control over how the player progressed, Hades presented the challenge of writing dialog for the multitude of routes the player could progress in the game. Kasavin and his writers draft out about ten hours' worth of dialog between Zagreus and the non-player characters based on a large number of potential chained events that could happen to the player. For example, while in a run, the player may encounter Eurydice, and on return to the main hub after failing the run, meet Eurydice's husband Orpheus, who, because of that prior meeting, asks the player to deliver a message to Eurydice the next time they encounter her.[6] These dialog events also tied into improvements at the hub once the player saw through the chain of events.[6]
Hades was announced at The Game Awards 2018 on December 6, 2018, and confirmed as one of the first third-party titles to be offered on the newly-announced Epic Games Store.[7] According to Geoff Keighley, the host and organizer of the Game Awards show, Supergiant's Amir Rao and Greg Kasavin approached him at the 2018 D.I.C.E. Summit in February about Hades and their intention to release it as an early access title on the same day of the Game Awards.[8] Hades was a timed-exclusive on Epic Games Stores, and the game arrived on Steam on December 10, 2019.[1]
References
- Bailey, Dustin (August 22, 2019). "The first Epic Games store exclusive, Hades, hits Steam in December". PCGamesN. Retrieved August 22, 2019.
- Frustick, Rush (December 7, 2018). "Hades blends God of War with Binding of Isaac in marvelous ways". Polygon. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
- Alexandria, Heather (December 7, 2018). "I Am Going To Play A Ton Of Hades". Kotaku. Retrieved December 10, 2018.
- Senior, Tom (December 10, 2018). "Hades is already a killer combat game in early access". PC Gamer. Retrieved December 10, 2018.
- Francis, Bryant (January 17, 2019). "Supergiant's fourth outing Hades introduces a more mature, organized dev process". Gamasutra. Retrieved January 17, 2019.
- Wiltshire, Alex (February 12, 2020). "How Hades plays with Greek myths". Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved February 12, 2020.
- Byford, Sam (December 6, 2018). "Hades is a new game from the makers of Pyre and Transistor, and it's out now in early access". The Verge. Retrieved December 10, 2018.
- Schreier, Jason (December 13, 2018). "How The Game Awards' Big Announcements Came Together". Kotaku. Retrieved December 13, 2018.