Hades is the Best Game Ever

Hades is the best game ever made! In this article, we’ll 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.

Hades is the Best Game Ever Made

We’ll 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 “hated” Epic Games Store, but still managed to win universal acclaim and even snag a Hugo Award, the only videogame to have ever done so!

This is the fourth in a series of articles exploring how many games have gotten impressively huge and committed fanbases, and what it’s great about each of them. If you haven’t noticed it yet, the title is not serious!

How a team of inspired Devs left EA to make Supergiant Games

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!)

The game’s 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.

From 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.

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!

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 “magic” or “luck” would carry on throughout development, turning around impossible odds.

A long Early Access and the Covid Curse as a Blessing

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.

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.

We have an active player community out there, that we’re 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.

Amir Rao – early 2019

It 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 “dull” or “completed”. 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’s initial 1 year Early Access estimate.

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’t really have all the answers, and it’s the studio’s own creativity that should drive decisions forward.

By 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 “The biggest game SuperGiant has ever made”. But by now their exclusivity with Epic was done, so they had the opportunity to add the game to Early Access on Steam.

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… the pandemic happened.

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 “making do”, the lockdowns didn’t 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 “working” from home, and new feedback kept coming in.

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!

With this done, and giving only one hour’s 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

How Hades Reinvented Roguelikes

Now, understanding the lengthy development process, the challenges and the lucky breaks the developers got is one thing. But there’s a secret to all successful and memorable games. They all, invariably, create something rare. That uniqueness isn’t always something completely new, it can be a masterful amalgamation of many concepts. In Hades’ case, it is the absolutely astonishing feat of effectively reinventing Roguelikes.

Much like every game we’ve touched in this series, Hades’ 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’ voice actor Darren Korb, Hades is demonstrably a work of love.

That love and its effective redefinition of the genre begins with the story. The game’s setting being Ancient Greek Myth comes from its creative director’s 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’s objective of creating branching narratives became too difficult, so the entire game setting was shifted to the “Family of the Gods” approach, forcing more work but ending up with a better end product.

As the person doing the writing, I was very drawn to a particular angle on Greek mythology. What I feel is often lost in the shuffle is that the 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 felt rich with potential for us, so yeah we started making it. 

Greg Kasavin interview with GDC

And of course, the core of the game’s 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.

We’re 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. 

Greg Kasavin interview with GDC

The 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.

I typically dislike roguelikes because I don’t 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’s you can find in Hell.