I’ve had an interesting relationship with Hades. I purchased in Early Access in late 2019, on the Epic Games Store, when I felt it was already very hyped. I played about 20-30 runs (no clears) on 2 different saves (1 at work and 1 at home – this was before they integrated Epic Game Services for cloud saves), and moved on to other games.
When the game moved out of Early Access in 2020 – I was quite surprised at the big reception it had, perhaps even more so amongst game developers (at least those that show up in my Twitter timeline). This revealed a bias I had developed: I had subconsciously discounted the marketing opportunities of the “real launch” and the subsequent (well-deserved) critical acclaim.
I would though, love to see an updated sales figure, which would help better quantify what portion of lifetime sales are from “Early Access”.
Somewhat related: as of Mar 10, Valheim has sold 5.7M copies in 5 weeks of Early Access on Steam; what are the odds that it will have another massive adoption bump when it removes the “Early Access” label?
In any case – I got back into Hades back in January, with another fresh save. And I was truly hooked. As of this writing, I’ve spent roughly 200 hours, and have completed all achievements (it’s been a long time since I cared about doing that in any game – the last game I aimed for 100% was Red Dead Redemption a decade ago). I’m still doing 1-2 runs per day, mostly trying to beat my speedrun personal best – which, as of Mar 17, is 9m35s (the world record is 5m57s; my very first clear was over 40m).
Design systems
Let’s talk about the design systems that Hades employs to deliver a 200h gaming experience.
Within a “run” – leveraging randomization to create a unique experience every time:
- A full “run” consists of 30+ rooms across 4 biomes1, with 4 boss fights.
- Randomized room types – a “run” is constructed of a random collection of rooms (with some assembly parameters) :
- Majority of rooms are combat oriented, with some variation in enemies composition: standard enemies rooms, mini-boss rooms, boss rooms. There are also some special objectives that can be applied, for example “survive 45s” or “compete with Thanatos to see who has more kills”.
- Non-combat rooms: shops, fountains, story rooms (one per biome in the first 3 biome), Chaos Gates (which gives players the chance to take on some additional risk for some reward).
- Parameters: typically, biome 1 has 14 rooms; biome 2 is 10 rooms; biome 3 is 12 rooms; the last room per biome is the boss room, while the preceding one is a shop.
- Crafted room layouts and runtime enemy spawn behavior:
- Rooms are picked from a handcrafted pool (not procedurally generated).
- There are a (large) number of spawn points from which enemies can spawn; enemies spawn in waves; and spawn location is influenced by the player’s location.
- The result is that even when the same room is played repeatedly, the flow of combat is rarely exactly the same.
- Randomized room rewards – after the player completes a typical room, they are presented with 1-3 choices for the next room, with the corresponding reward (and sometimes indication of room type) displayed:
- “Boons” are usually the most sought-after, and directly shapes a player’s build each run. There are 8 “standard” Gods that offer roughly 150 Boons in total, including 28 “Duo Boons” (which require any 2 of the 8 Gods as prerequisites, 8*7/2=28). There are also 2 special Gods, Hermes (with a set of Boons unrelated to other Gods), and Chaos (from Chaos Gates, who grants bonuses after inflicting debuffs).
- “Hammer upgrades” significantly alter your weapon’s effects, providing another layer of build customization.
- Other items that impact the run: “Poms”, which level up your Boons; gold, which can be spent at the shops in the run; “Centaur Heart” which grants bonus HP.
- 4 meta-game currencies for permanent progression (which can impact a run, after certain meta upgrades).
- Heat system – as a significant end-game system, the Heat system offers players a variety of choices to increase the difficulty and modify a run’s experience, for example:
- Quantity of enemies, their HP, damage, attack speed.
- Armored enemies have special additional effects.
- Boss fights are modified and upgraded.
Outside a “run” / permanent progression systems:
- “Mirror of Night” – this is the main permanent power progression system, with 12 passive ability slots, and 2 choices per slot. These passives unlock a lot of power very early on – for example the 3rd ability Death Defiance grants 1 extra revive per upgrade.
- “Fated List of Minor Prophecies” – this is a quest system with 50+ unique quests. A typical quest is to acquire each Boon of a God at least once, and as such, quite directly encourages exploration.
- Weapons and Weapon Aspects – starting out with one weapon, players eventually unlock 6 different weapons, and each weapon has 4 “aspects” (variants with different passives or movesets).
- Keepsakes and Companions – “Keepsakes” are items that grant passives during a run (for example, the first keepsake listed grants bonus HP). “Companions” are a special type of keepsakes that grant a consumable active (e.g. 5 charges of an big AOE damage spell). Both are gradually unlocked by meeting with the game’s vast cast of NPCs, and progressing the narrative. In the end-game, keepsakes are integral to players crafting their desired builds in a run, as after each biome you can change your equipped keepsake, so there’s a light min-max game with keepsake management.
- Achievements – this is the distribution platform (Steam / Epic etc.) achievements system. Functionally it overlaps with the quest system above, but provides a different set of goals. In my experience this list was easier to finish than the quest system.
I realize this is a pretty dry list to read through. But there are a few things that jumped out. The first is that these systems are quite independent, and as a result multiplicative in their impact on replayability. The second is that each system is scalable in isolation, and once scaled up in content, gives a nice boost to overall replayability. I suspect this pattern is partly a reflection of the game’s public development in Early Access: new systems were layered on over time, and content per system were also added over time. (I haven’t gone back to check the patch notes to validate this guess.) In any case, this is an elegant set of systems, and collectively the game feels surprisingly content-rich given the small size of the dev team.
Experiential recap
Recapping my 200 hours with Hades so far, the game has consistently given me a smooth experience with clear progression goals to pursue.
In the very beginning, the game is primarily about exploration: pushing deeper into the biomes, overcoming the major bosses for the first time; seeing new Gods and their Boons; trying out different weapons. At the same time, the early meta progression was generous and directly lifting the player’s power, which meant the player was making deeper runs even without necessarily growth in skill (but usually the 2 were organically intertwined).
At some point, I ran into the final boss Hades for the first time (and beat him!). This significantly moves the narrative forward – without giving away too much, this is why I embedded the soundtrack at the top. The narrative momentum compelled me to keep playing – I needed to find out what happens next, and with every full clear, I learnt a bit more. I can’t emphasize enough how surprisingly strong the narrative hook was during this phase.
After beating Hades enough times, the main narrative concluded. At this point, I kept playing because there were still more gameplay content to experience – weapon aspects to unlock and upgrade; and the Heat system which rewarded the rare currencies needed for weapons. There was also a narrative epilogue, that essentially required grinding more conversations with NPCs and increasing the relationship with them.
There were also still quests and achievements to chase, and interestingly, chasing these quests often meant playing sub-optimally, for example picking a Boon option I never played before (to move towards completing a quest), even though there’s a more powerful option.
As an aside, after about 50-100 hours with the game, I switched my input device from keyboard+mouse to ps5 gamepad. I was motivated to do so because I was seriously hurting my wrists playing this game (the game’s frantic spamming is quite excessive). One lesson of this switch-up: at least in my case, understanding of game state mattered a lot more than execution ability, as I did a full clear in my very first gamepad run, despite noticeably fighting the controls as I tried to retrain muscle memory.
Up to this point, I hadn’t really done any theory-crafting, and was not thoughtful about builds. After venturing into some Youtube content, I found myself accidentally diving into speed-running. The 2nd 100 hours was thus spent on a mix of farming Heat levels, pushing high Heat to accomplish a challenge, and dabbling in speed-running. I found that I liked the game enough to always give myself a new immediate goal, just as I was getting tired of the grind.
Speedrunning
A section about speedruns specifically. Hades has an active speedrun community, and the game seems aware of the fact that speedrunning is a key source of community content (UGC). There are some nice nods in-game towards this: for example, right after beating your own fastest time, your character will say “I bet I can go even faster”.
As an aside, I’m the type of player that never theory-crafts builds, and rely on “netdecking” (to borrow a CCG genre term), i.e. referencing the community-discovered meta builds and strategies. So my venture into speedrunning was accidental, out of a desire to understand the meta. Once I tried executing some meta builds, I got some very addictive positive feedback as I saw my clear times dramatically decrease. At least for me, this was a very enjoyable loop, and I see it as a type of engagement lever for a pure PVE experience.
More broadly, I’ve found it interesting how the Hades speedrun community has kept engagement up, by constantly adopting new speedrun formats. What do I mean here? The main Hades speedrun leaderboard is the “Unseeded AnyHeat”, which translated to plain English is a competition to see who has the fastest time for a single clear (based on the in-game clock), at any difficulty, without manipulating the run’s RNG seeding. However, this leaderboard has gotten quite stale, as the meta has largely been solved (there is one particular weapon that is clearly the fastest), and the current best record has already been set to under 6 minutes.
If you are a speedrunner / video content creator, trying to improve your standings on this leaderboard is an effort in diminishing returns. Instead, you could switch your attention to the other leaderboards, for example, the high Heat leaderboards, or “Fresh File” (fastest time to beating Hades for the first time, from a brand new save), or 3 Weapons (3 consecutive clears, with 3 different weapons). These different leaderboards spawn their own unique metas. And it’s not hard to imagine new formats being invented – as long as there is a common interest in playing the game, and competition based on it, the community can make up new rules to play by.
In the grand scheme of things, this community is quite niche. The amount of people who are good enough, and care enough to record and submit their speedrun videos for this game is probably just a few hundred to thousand. But I think there are some useful insights here for game developers making PVE experiences and worried about long-term engagement.
- For those familiar with the game, I’m cheating a bit as I’m mentally treating each of the branches in Styx as 1 “room”. ↩