Disclaimer: Greg Kasavin is the former executive editor of GameSpot. Mike Hahardy also previously worked for GameSpot.
Hades recently left Early Access and released version 1.0 on PC and Switch, and players have been digging into all the little details sprinkled throughout the game. Now, in a brief Twitter thread about a tremendous reactive narrative moment, the game’s writer has shared some insight into the philosophy behind the game’s writing.
Polygon‘s Mike Mahardy noted on Twitter that Megaera, one of the Fury bosses in the game, chastized him during a fight for taking her own after taking on so many upgrades from the mirror in Zagreus’ room. So, out of curiosity, he reset his upgrades and fought her again–and found that she actually acknowledged that he’d done it after their discussion.
Yet another wonderful Hades detail:
Upon beating Meg, she told me it didn’t really count, considering I had an advantage from the mirror’s upgrades. Out of curiosity, I spent a key to reset and clear the upgrades, beat Meg again, and she ACKNOWLEDGED IT.
This game. pic.twitter.com/j1b61MBYXf— Mike Mahardy (@mmahardy) September 24, 2020
Greg Kasavin popped up in the responses to offer some more insight, revealing that there are different variations on the discussions you can have with Meg back in the House of Hades after all of this transpires, too.
There are also three different variations of the follow-up event back at the House of Hades depending on where your relationship with her is at at the time.
— Greg Kasavin (@kasavin) September 24, 2020
In a follow-up, Kasavin explained the simple philosophy underpinning the game’s writing, and said that an Early Access release made it easier to keep fine-tuning the characters and their interactions. The game sold about 700,000 copies in Early Access.
The mindset was pretty simple: What would these characters talk about and what would they notice? Add those interactions.
Early Access meant we could hurtle forward. Our players liked the characters for the most part so we kept developing them.— Greg Kasavin (@kasavin) September 24, 2020
According to Kasavin, the game continued to add new check conditions as it grew, and by the time of full release it was quite hard to track everything.
It’s a simple system at heart, we just kept adding more types of conditions to check against as the game grew. We didn’t have any visualization of the event connections, though, so it got trickier to manage everything as our content expanded. Couple of complex subplots in there.
— Greg Kasavin (@kasavin) September 24, 2020
Hades earned a 9/10 in GameSpot’s review, and its writing was singled out as one of its best qualities. “What sets Hades apart isn’t just that it’s a great roguelike with the kind of repeatable depth that makes it engrossing to play for hours, but also how it uses its structure to tell an ongoing story about family, secrets, and resolution,” wrote reviewer Suriel Vazquez.
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