Watch the full interview video above on the PC Gamer YouTube channel, if you prefer.
There are many goofy placeholders across Slay the Spire 2, MS Paint-style art pieces that stand in for the finished products that will come later as development progresses through Early Access, which Mega Crit says the game might take between one or two years.
The deckbuilder’s ending is one of the biggest temporary pieces, with all runs culminating in a cutscene with a mysterious figure called The Architect, presumably the designer of the spire. The Architect exhibits indifference to your appearance at the end of Act 3, shrugging off damage before insta-killing you. An end screen then displays the aggregate damage players have dealt to The Architect, which now totals more than 99 billion. It’s all very “To be continued…” in presentation.
Speaking with Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano about what form the eventual ending to Slay the Spire 2 will take, the studio understandably isn’t revealing narrative details, but did provide some thoughts on its process and timing.
“I do want there to be a better ending,” Yano tells me over a video call. “I do want it to be more extravagant when you win. And I do want the showdown to also be a pretty big deal, we’ll say.”
Yano says that the ending(s—he used both singular and plural when speaking to me) aren’t completely set in stone, and adds that he deliberately wanted them to be shaped by players’ responses to the initial launch.
“I do want the endings to be pretty, pretty serious business, but they aren’t too designed at this time. I wanted to see the reaction that people have towards the narrative elements to the game that we’ve brought in. I like to read what people’s theories are on what the characters are, if they’re good or bad, and things like that. And so we’re kind of just seeing what people like, what characters people are attached to. And while we do have kind of like a canonical idea of what is going to happen, we do make minor tweaks to make sure that the ending kind of meets everyone’s expectations, and also a little curveball, you know, every now and then, but positive curveballs.”
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The first Slay the Spire culminated in Act 4, which players had to unlock by completing Act 3 with all three characters. Players then had to collect three keys as they progressed on new runs, opening a new path to a challenging miniboss that preceded the true final boss of Slay the Spire, The Corrupt Heart. Though Slay the Spire 2 inherits many aspects from the first game, it’s unclear whether the sequel will adopt this same structure.
Will players fight The Architect directly, or is he just an gatekeeper stand-in for a bigger final boss? (Image credit: Mega Crit)
Fittingly, Yano suggests that an updated ending might be one of the later things to be added to Slay the Spire 2. “I get the feeling it’s going to take a good while for the ending to show up, just because, you know, we have a few other types of content that we want to make. We want these alternative acts and the characters, we want to experiment with the game modes. I think once those are done, we’ll probably think about finalizing an ending, probably as we go into V1.”
Other roguelikes have taken the approach of adding an ending later in development, notably Hades and Hades 2.
