\n
Hades is the best game ever made! In this article, we\u2019ll discuss why Hades is actually the Best Game of All Time, and why you should play it, based on my completely unbiased and objective opinion that I am sure 100% of readers will agree with and will generate commentary only telling me how perfectly correct I am.<\/p>\n
Hades is the Best Game Ever Made<\/h2>\n We\u2019ll go over how the game changed concepts midway, forced the studio to redevelop their engine, spent two years in Early Access, launched as an exclusive on the \u201chated\u201d Epic Games Store, but still managed to win universal acclaim and even snag a Hugo Award, the only videogame to have ever done so! <\/p>\n
This is the fourth in a series of articles exploring how many games have gotten impressively huge and committed fanbases, and what it\u2019s great about each of them. If you haven\u2019t noticed it yet, the title is not serious!<\/p>\nHow a team of inspired Devs left EA to make Supergiant Games<\/h3>\n Hades was first announced during The Game Awards 2018, by an official trailer directing viewers to check out playhades.com and giving immediate Early Access to the Epic Games Store. What you may not know, is that the developer realized mere minutes before the trailer was shown that their main URL was a 404 (page not found!)<\/p>\n
The game\u2019s developer, Supergiant Games, is a small independent studio active in California since 2009, who enjoyed some moderate fame from their 2011 title Bastion. The core team that developed Bastion came from EA after watching smaller developers successfully innovate with titles such as Plants vs Zombies or Braid, and feeling they could not really do that at a large profits-focused entity. Working out of a rented house with just 7 people, they managed to pull off a successful game in just a couple of years. <\/p>\nFrom here, the developers would go on to make Transistor and Pyre, which also received positive reviews and managed some decent sales, in addition to a few minor game award wins. This enabled the studio some growth, but it still remained very small, keeping both art and music in-house.<\/p>\n
It is the small size of the studio and the multi-hatting of each developer that led to the confusion around launch time, as everyone working on the game is also managing the website, trailers, promotion, Epic Game Store integration and even Social media, all while the heads of the studio were attending The Game Awards in person! <\/p>\n
They claim that the rest of the team in the studio managed to pull some magic, keep the game off leaks, get the main URL online and magically nobody noticed that their title had been announced about 20 minutes early on the EGS homepage. That immense streak of \u201cmagic\u201d or \u201cluck\u201d would carry on throughout development, turning around impossible odds. <\/p>\n
A long Early Access and the Covid Curse as a Blessing<\/h3>\n Early Access is a double-edged sword for a developer and publisher, and sometimes for players too! While EA can give dedicated fans the opportunity to give valuable feedback and improve titles they are excited about, the availability of a public alpha with lots of bugs and the obviousness of the game as an incomplete and imperfect product can severely hurt its appeal, turn off potential full game buyers, and make the developer look bad. <\/p>\n
The Hades development team approached Early Access with a lot of enthusiasm, but they would soon discover that their really engaged fanbase had extremely high expectations for the product, and it put a huge amount of pressure on the team to live up to those standards.<\/p>\n
\nWe have an active player community out there, that we\u2019re keeping an eye on and interacting with ona d aily basis so that does change things. They have a lot of feedback, I think they have high expectations for us, so I think we do feel a certain amount of pressure to live up to and exceed their expectations really.<\/p>\n
Amir Rao \u2013 early 2019<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt was that commitment to exceed expectations that made the studio really engage with player feedback and do deep dives into the data, noticing that the playtime was extremely high and people were replaying the same sections long after it should have become \u201cdull\u201d or \u201ccompleted\u201d. These dives were incorporated into development roadmaps, and there was a constant feedback loop between players and developers that kept things moving well beyond it\u2019s initial 1 year Early Access estimate.<\/p>\n
The feedback would eventually become overwhelming, prompting the studio to amend its feedback intake and become more selective about what to take onboard. As most successful developers discover, sometimes the player base doesn\u2019t really have all the answers, and it\u2019s the studio\u2019s own creativity that should drive decisions forward. <\/p>\nBy December 2019, a year after the game had been announced and entered Early Access, the team had completed multiple large updates and taken an immense amount of feedback to the point Hades was \u201cThe biggest game SuperGiant has ever made\u201d. But by now their exclusivity with Epic was done, so they had the opportunity to add the game to Early Access on Steam. <\/p>\n
This should have simply rolled replayability adjustments and inclusions, but it instead added the huge realization that the game needed multiple localizations, new payment processors, etc to accommodate the more international Steam audience. They even bundled in Pyre with the early access to attract more users to try it out on Steam. The positive reviews quickly piled up, and everything looked rosy! But then\u2026 the pandemic happened.<\/p>\n
In early March 2020, their team set up for remote work from their homes, using Zoom as everyone else did during that time, and discovering just how much they actually needed the office. Since the SuperGiantGames team was a small studio and used to \u201cmaking do\u201d, the lockdowns didn\u2019t shut down development in the same way that many larger studios experienced, and the team had the added benefit of radically increasing its feedback pool. As the lockdowns extended into the year, more users were online and playing games thanks to \u201cworking\u201d from home, and new feedback kept coming in. <\/p>\n
This is where the development team realized that their previous engine, working on C# from the XNA framework, was not up to par for their performance goals. So, they used the extra development time buffed in by Covid and remade it to Native C, which of course also allowed them to make the game multiplatform, announcing a Nintendo Switch version with even multiplatform progress!<\/p>\n
With this done, and giving only one hour\u2019s notice, the game officially launched in September 2020 on three platforms (steam, epic and Switch), after almost 2 years in early access and 3 years in development. And it would be an absolute smash hit<\/p>\n
How Hades Reinvented Roguelikes<\/h3>\n Now, understanding the lengthy development process, the challenges and the lucky breaks the developers got is one thing. But there\u2019s a secret to all successful and memorable games. They all, invariably, create something rare. That uniqueness isn\u2019t always something completely new, it can be a masterful amalgamation of many concepts. In Hades\u2019 case, it is the absolutely astonishing feat of effectively reinventing Roguelikes. <\/p>\n
Much like every game we\u2019ve touched in this series, Hades\u2019 success is the result of the passion of its development team, and their flawless execution of their vision, which becomes enthralling to the player. From its phenomenal and compelling artwork made almost entirely by one in-house artist, to the binge-worthy music score dreamed up by no other than Zagreus\u2019 voice actor Darren Korb, Hades is demonstrably a work of love. <\/p>\nThat love and its effective redefinition of the genre begins with the story. The game\u2019s setting being Ancient Greek Myth comes from its creative director\u2019s personal interest in the subject and the way the stories of these Gods have survived millennia. It actually originated as a different idea related to Minos and escaping that Labyrinth. But as production got further into the game, the team\u2019s objective of creating branching narratives became too difficult, so the entire game setting was shifted to the \u201cFamily of the Gods\u201d approach, forcing more work but ending up with a better end product.<\/p>\n
\nAs the person doing the writing, I was very drawn to a particular angle on Greek mythology. What I\u00a0feel\u00a0is often\u00a0lost in the shuffle\u00a0is that\u00a0the gods are a big dysfunctional family that we can see ourselves in. I think part of the reason these characters have survived for thousands of years is because they relate so strongly to so many people and they relate not because they are gods but because they are human. So we wanted to explore some of that. It\u00a0felt rich with potential for us, so yeah we started making it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Greg Kasavin interview with GDC<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd of course, the core of the game\u2019s appeal is in the interactions of its fast-action gameplay, its roleplayish narrative paths and its unexpectedly deep but accessible mechanics. It takes a lot of nuance, a lot of refinement and a lot of commitment to balance those well, which is also the result of hundreds of hours of development preparation and focus.<\/p>\n
\nWe\u2019re really drawn to making a game that felt very immediate, that you could pick up and play in short stretches or play as for long as you wanted and still have a compelling experience around that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Greg Kasavin interview with GDC<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe magic is that Hades effectively delivered that combination in a way that felt so so fresh and so perfectly balanced that I honestly could not stop playing. <\/p>\n
I typically dislike roguelikes because I don\u2019t like to lose my progress and redo the same areas over and over. Hades solves this problem by introducing a satisfying sense of progression with an unlockable arsenal of weapons, purchasable keepsake items to benefit an escape attempt, permanent character upgrades, and a story progression with the NPC\u2019s you can find in Hell. <\/p>\n
Instead of a classic roguelike where I get to just repeat the game upon death, I developed a strong investment into these ways you could progress, and it gave me reasons to continue trying, \u201ctricking\u201d the RPG player in me to persevere through my attempts, and invest myself into its beautifully curated world and characters.<\/p>\n
Hades keeps growing beyond a single completion, and even beyond fifty. The balance and interactions of weapons, powers and builds were so masterfully done, and the subtlety of choice made me feel a lot more control than I had previously in games in the rogue-like genre. Hades was also not easy, but not incredibly difficult, with only some specific fights giving me trouble and always in a way that I felt I could actually overcome. This low-skill floor and high-skill ceiling approach defines accessibility in a very satisfying way. <\/p>\n
Discovering secrets and unlockables became a small obsession and drove me to continue playing into possibly meaningless challenges, because I was sure Skelly was probably hiding something else. But the story of the game, was an unexpected surprise for many.<\/p>\n
The Missing Link<\/h3>\n While it\u2019s true that many Rogue-Like games have phenomenal mechanics and excellent gameplay, none pair that with Hugo Award storytelling, that puts Hades into its own category. It\u2019s not only the combat and builds that keeps you come back for more, but at some point you begin playing for the story as well, weaving into an expertly crafted blur of awesomeness. Do I keep playing to see what happens to Zagreus next? or do I keep playing to see if I can perfect this spear build? The answer: Yes.<\/p>\n
Because Hades does not only live and die by its combat and mechanics. It possesses a story that gets deeper and deeper. The further into the game you go, you sort of get lost in the whole thing, spending hours and hours playing. Where you might only spend 30 minutes playing another rogue-like after work each day. It\u2019s something you don\u2019t expect from a rogue-like, or at least, you didn\u2019t expect it before Hades.<\/p>\n
Hades, has in this way, raised the bar for future rogue-likes, a genre that has seen few titles since its release. It\u2019s almost as if there was no way to top it, so very few have tried. However, we do see more and more games adding roguelikes mechanics to them, and this is by and large part of the success of Hades and other popular titles in the genre. So in some ways, Hades has changed the development of many modern games.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re enjoying our current series Best Game Ever, be sure to not miss Elden Ring is the Best Game of All Time, Dragon\u2019s Dogma is the Best Game Ever and Divinity: Original Sin 2 is the Best Game Ever.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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