Just like Binding of Isaac, they intentionally put a soft-end low on the skill cap. I think it makes a lot of sense to put the bulk of the narrative progression under an early skill threshold; it mirrors the pacing of linear action games better than what we normally see in this structure, and it allows the bulk of the player base to feel like they’ve engaged in the game the high-skill portion of their friends have seen.
It wouldn’t work without the iterated opt-in difficulty mods (and the speed the game encourages you to increase the difficulty is way too gentle since it’s tracked separately for each weapon) but I think they promise harder difficulties to compensate for the explicit permanent upgrades at an adequate time.
Interestingly, people here are burning out before they hit the first end; my sense was that the Darkness buffs were noticeable enough and had clear enough resource goals to propel most players through the first end.
I think it’s better to think of the baseline stat loadout as the completed Darkness set, but I don’t think they did, or, they should have taken back control of enemy damage, health, and speed at higher difficulties because the structure encourages the player to find the easiest high-difficulty setting.
ok yeah i’ve hit a wall with the elysium bosses and agree that they have entirely too much health. the fury fights are at the exact right place where they absolutely shredded me before i understood their patterns but i can completely demolish them with practice. the hydra fight is full of so much random offscreen projectile shit that i inevitably fuck up somewhere in the 10 minutes worth of dodging. imo bosses having invulnerability so you can’t skip phases with enough damage sucks when “get beefy til i learn the patterns, then go glass cannon” is my preference in these sorts of games. don’t punish me for figuring out your metagame when figuring out the metagame is half the fun for me
also why add a boon that adds damage over time on knockback then make the only monsters worth using dots on immune to knockback?
edit: also also it sucks ass that the game is like Wow Look At Our Inclusive Character Design!!! but everyone is skinny and fit except the gluttony demons (this trope is in a million games and it always sucks!) in tartarus
edit edit: also maybe i’m missing something in the text but where the hell is the fandom’s takes on these completely chaste and sexless characters coming from? i guess “a bunch of artists make queer fanart & promote our very non-horny and straight game for free” tracks with "getting a bunch of fans to translate the text for free" lmao
what do you know, I came back to Hades after almost a year, played a couple days, and again it is making my wrists hurt. shame cuz I’ve got to the final boss a couple times now
edit: beat Hades on attempt 46, yes I’m quite bad at the game. anyways I think I’ve about exhausted my interest for now, the endgame is essentially “fiddle with this complex system to craft the perfect run (slash make a goofy build work)”
the combat is such a slog that it’s not really interesting to me to keep going. the voice acting and story kept me in it long after my interest in the combat had gone
I just completed my first run after starting the game on Friday. Reading this thread is good because it starts with a bunch of users piling on praise, followed by others describing why they can’t stand it. I think I agree with the criticism more than the praise. Most of the game is spent in combat and combat doesn’t feel good. There are times when I’m just standing in place, hitting my three-button combo several times, watching my stunned enemy’s healthbar go down, and wondering what I’m doing with my life… It’s similar to why I ultimately dislike Enter the Gungeon, but that game was able to surprise me from time to time. I do feel slightly motivated to keep going because I love watching numbers go up. My favorite part of the game is Dusa flying directly up and away from sight.
The bow basically obviates the need for paying attention tbh, my first few victories were with it, and I just spammed without a care, even with handicaps.
Wish it was slower and more tactical (But then, that’s Transistor, so I’m just wishing there were other games like Transistor)
played this for the first time, finally, yesterday.
my impressions of it are that it’s fine. like it’s solid and i can see playing it for a while. that said; on twitter it really seemed like people were projecting a whole lot onto the game and being kind of performatively horny about it and after playing it i now stand by this initial suspicion.
yeah literally never played and liked a game as queer-baity as this one, I think if it hadn’t spoken to me on an albeit superficial level about poor father-son relationships then I’d have been super put off. I ended up blocking a lot of users who put shipping fanart on my timeline because frankly these characters are skin-deep and designed to be yaoi lustable and it’s cringe
This is my least favorite Supergiant game. Simply because it is a Rouge-like game. Meaning it’s a time loop. I can’t progress without a dulling amount of repetition, which means the parts I know I have to replay and get bored with. The parts I’m struggling with I have to approach are fatigued having fought to get there. Everything fresh in this game fades with that idea, and all of the character moments are lost in how you have to access them via this insane system.
Games are fundamentally about reusing pieces so that possibility space is explored. Every game structure is a method to present that piece reuse in the most appealing way while the player is investigating it.
yeah but if the sole criticism is “it makes me retry when I fail” I’m going to make fart noises
Like, hades is definitely not even remotely a roguelike, it has more in common with every arcade game ever made before the invention of save files, except hades literally gets easier the more you fail, until you beat its half-hour campaign. the game making itself easier for you is what you get instead of the option to shove credits
edit: (by save files I mean Zelda saving your story progress, not arcade games saving high scores and settings)
I will say that I don’t like the fixed order of Hades’s stages, I think there are too few of them, they could have either made room for branching paths with alternate areas, or just randomized the order of them, or implemented any higher degree of randomness at all to truly push the rogue marketing, and I personally was not put off by the static structure of it so I didn’t mind learning it. If you don’t like the game then adding a shit ton of random elements and items and whatnot would ultimately not make it a better experience. I hate Isaac because its core gameplay ideas and visual aesthetic are offputting to me, even though its random builds leave a lot of possibility space
I’m kind of shocked at how little environment variety they got away with. I bet they planned for more but they got it into Early Access at a young enough stage that they realized they were better off adding more character abilities and narrative morsels than stages.
Hades was very obviously shaped into the eager-to-please personality of a responsive Early Access development.
nah. You have a point there, I just feel there’s a huge distinction.
I don’t think Hades is a bad game in any way. I just think I don’t love rougelikes past the 10 hour mark because I’m not good enough to beat them.