Hades 2, as is Supergiant’s wont with these sorts of roguelikes, had a long and extended early access period—which also means that it had a lot of patches, updates, and fiddling in its guts that might’ve soured players who were falling into comfy rhythms.
After all, if you’re getting cosy with certain boons in one run, it’s easy to feel like the wax wings have been melted out from under you when a patch snatches that away. Talking to our friends over at GamesRadar, creative director Greg Kasavin seeks to soothe that particular ache:
Kasavin uses the example of the Smithy Sprint, which was cut from the game during the Olympus Update. For context, at one point in time Smithy Sprint created a blast after sprinting for one second at the cost of 10 Magick. After the update, it got renamed to Smithy Rush, which instead causes a blast if you dash near a foe on a specific cooldown.
Kasavin explains: “In the particular case of Smithy Sprint, we wanted something simpler and easier to use for one of the main Boons from the god of the forge, though as part of that we moved the general concept of keep-sprinting-for-a-big-blast to be integral to the Black Coat weapon’s Aspect of Nyx. So, please check that one out if you haven’t! I really like using it personally. Sometimes ideas for Boons and abilities find new homes in this way!”
This was Supergiant’s general MO. If the dev team felt like a concept was overpowered or not working in its current home, they’d simply take it and put it somewhere else, which happened with “all sorts of different content all through Early Access, based on a combination of our impressions and goals for the game.”
In other words, “sometimes interesting Boon ideas or good lines of dialogue and so on end up getting iterated on, but we think it’s important not to be too precious about these things when they exist in service of a cohesive whole.”
Sometimes that iteration is a complete shake-up of the game’s ending after launch—it’s an interesting quirk of game dev, especially early access game dev: While there’s plenty to be gained from letting your players have-at, you’re also exposing them to a version of the game that’s (by definition!) a work in progress, and, well. Players have opinions about balance patches sometimes. Strong ones. Still—better to rip off the band-aid, I’d say. It occasionally even goes well, too.
