#hades vg

[celepom]

LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Wonder which of Zagreus’ sisters is the protagonist? My guess is... Melinoë, goddess of the restless dead.

[beguilingcorpse]

my sister got me a hades poster and it's my new favorite thing in my room

[klauswalz]

Video Game Meme / Soundtracks [4/5]

[galedekarios]

among mortal men you’re far the best at tactics, spinning yarns, and I am famous among the gods for wisdom, cunning wiles too

[xolaanii]

HADES 2 REVEAL TRAILER dev. Supergiant Games

[bubblebuttgames]

GAME INFORMER #366 - THE MAKING OF HADES II

"The sorcerous Melinoë gazes with intensity toward her goal - and the audience!" says cover artist and Supergiant art director Jen Zee. "She's determined, focused, and powerful. Hecate, Melinoë's mentor, can be seen in the distance wielding her torches and gazing toward the moon. Standing on the precipice of the Crossroads with back turned, she is flanked by her trusty familiars, a hound and a polecat."

COVER STORY - HADES II

Supergiant Games is making its first sequel, and we visited the developer in California to find out why it wasn't quite ready to escape Hell and move on. We played the game extensively, spoke with the team about bringing the follow-up to life, looked ahead to the game's future, and lots more. If you're playing Hades II in Early Access, consider our cover story the perfect companion piece

Platform: PC

Style: 1-Player Action

Publisher: Supergiant Games

Developer: Supergiant Games

Release: May 6

BASTION. TRANSISTOR. PYRE. HADES. Supergiant Games built its name on four distinct, critically lauded titles, giving them a pristine track record few developers can boast But the thrilling roguelike action of Hades catapulted it above the rest to become the studio's most successful game and biggest mainstream hit. Four years, hundreds of runs, and thousands of hours later, the fanbase still can't get enough of Zagreus' adventure and Supergiant's captivating vision of the Greek Underworld.

They're not alone. The folks at Supergiant felt it still had more stories to tell, more places to explore, more deities to meet, and, most importantly, a new perspective for players to view it all. That enthusiasm inspired the studio to tackle its first sequel, Hades II. With players now taking it through its paces in Steam Early Access, we visited Supergiant Games to learn how it came to be and what to expect as it evolves over the coming months

LOOKING BACK AND MOVING AHEAD

Creative director Greg Kasavin declares Hades as "our most successful game by any sort of measure." A litany of industry awards, strong sales, and a passionate fan following have backed up this claim, earning Hades a place among the gods. Yet despite this overwhelming success, Supergiant remains the same as it ever was: a small team (currently 25 full-time employees) driven by a passion and enthusiasm to create unforgettable experiences that stay true to their personal tastes and interests.

When it came time to decide what the next project would be, they approached it as they always do by asking one question: what idea excites them the most? Knowing that they'll be spending the next several years of their lives working on it, making sure the game captures the team's collective passion ensures the best execution and, ultimately, the strongest product. Though it weighed various pitches and ideas, Supergiant had already recognized the potential to expand Hades' world even during the first game's development

"There are so many characters from Greek myth that we're very excited about that simply didn't have a place in the story of the original game," says Kasavin. "You've got these really big names like Apollo or Heracles and stuff like that. And they don't appear in the original Hades, not because we weren't excited for them, [but] just because we were focused on other characters..But we always wondered: how would we portray some of these other characters?"

Greg and the rest of the team soon realized it had much more it wanted to say with Hades. Speaking with five of the original seven employees who have been with Supergiant Games since the development of 2011's Bastion - Kasavin, studio director Amir Rao, art director Jen Zee, composer Darren Korb, and voice actor Logan Cunningham - all of them expressed excitement about returning to Hades' world for their own respective reasons

For Kasavin, Greek mythology's rich and expansive lore offers a multitude of storytelling possibilities. For Zee, the principal artist behind Supergiant's signature art style, redesigning beloved characters was as exciting as illustrating new ones. Korb looks forward to adding new thematic and tonal layers to Hades existing soundscape that exemplifies the new presentational direction for the sequel. Cunningham, the voice behind several key characters, including Hades himself, teases a new direction for the ruler of the underworld.

For Rao, however, he tells me this is the studio's opportunity to define, in their eyes, what a sequel looks like. Supergiant has been a one- and-done studio since its inception, to the point that some fans believe the studio has some sort of policy against making sequels. Kasavin says this has never been the case. Rather, the reluctance came from the studio's desire always to surprise players; sequels are known quantities. At the same time, the idea of making a sequel at a conceptual level became an alluring challenge in itself.

"We made four original IPs in a row," says Rao "We are unpracticed at making a sequel [laughs]. So, this is our first time doing it. We had to reflect on what are some of the sequels that we loved? And what did they do to move the game world and mechanics and design and story forward?

To that end, Supergiant examined the team's favorite sequels that expanded on their predecessors in meaningful and dramatic ways while still retaining the elements that had worked before. Rao cites Portal 2 as an example, and he also names Diablo II as a personal inspiration, particularly his love for the magic- based sorceress class - a specific trait that would later prove a vital ingredient. As the team decided on ideas and priorities, Greg formulated the story and lore that would best fit these concepts. The journey would take him to lesser-known edges of Greek mythology and the discovery of another long-lost child of Hades himself.

MAKING A NEW MYTH

[miel128]

im allowed to be crazy

[harusuki]

"DEATH TO CRONOS."

"DEATH TO CRONOS."

[ikakalaka]

"Stygian Blade" (Aspect of Poseidon)

Hades, 2020

[noxtivagus]

ffxv makes me so emotional oh my god 🥹🫶🏼

[allsystmsred]

its just past 2am. and i just had my first clear of hades.

feels good man.

[beguilingcorpse]

i really thought that the resident evil 4 remake was going to be my most anticipated game of 2023 and then supergiant games was like nice try. bisexuality comes first

[youngbloodbuzz]

In your videogame phase,I have to ask what you're playing

ooo at the moment i just started pathfinder kingmaker! but since starting the vg phase i've gone through like stardew valley, fallout 4, hades 2, GRIS, for the king 2, mlb the show 2024, nhl 2024, mass effect trilogy (i'm in the middle of ME3 right now and procrastinating finishing it lol), horizon zero dawn, cyberpunk 2077, baldur's gate 3, civilization 6, elden ring, and bloodborne and that's all i can remember off the top of my head rn lmfao as you can see it's got me in a vice grip since the start of the year

[galedekarios]

🤔⛵🤔🌊🤔

[ggghoulish]

VG boys in the style of Hades !!

[sapphire-weapon]

Hi! I had a question, how much would you take into the consideration the statements of developers when talking about the analysis’s of video games?

For example, I was having a conversation with someone regarding whether Laura from SH2 was real or just another manifestation. The person that I was talking to agreed with all my analogy but then disregarded it because apparently one developer said she was real. I’ve also had this type of conversation within RE fandom where they constantly bring up developer points rather than reading the text and it is frustrating because there’s no way for me to sort of answer back to a developer statement. I don’t know how VG development work, but surely there’s hundreds of them all working together and many would have different interpretations/opinions, so is it worth just looking at the text than the opinion of one developer?

It depends on:

1. The publisher

2. The studio

3. The person who said it

If it's an indie game, you can pretty much take anyone's word as canon law. Like, SuperGiant Games only has 26 people total working on their games. If literally any dev says anything about Hades, it's as good as the information being in the game itself, because every dev was involved in every stage of production.

If it's something like The Evil Within, which was developed by a Japanese studio (Tango Gameworks) but published by an American publisher (Bethesda), I don't necessarily take Pete Hines's word as law (Bethesda's PR guy) because not only did he not actually work on the game, he doesn't even speak the language of the people who actually did.

If it's something like Final Fantasy VII Remake, and it's Yoshinori Kitase talking, you disregard everything he says because he fucking lies. He lies for sport. He loves lying about his projects. Nomura is honest maybe half the time. Hamaguchi is generally pretty honest.

If it's Resident Evil, the actual literal only person whose word I would take as Word of God is Shinji Mikami -- and that's only for the games up to and including OG RE4. And that's because he was the creative lead in charge of the series from the time of conception (the first RE1 was literally all his idea) through the GameCube release of OG RE4.

Anyone else working on RE? Throw out their opinion. It's garbage. Because there are hundreds and hundreds of people working on those games, and several of them are always in development concurrently, and there's no one central figure overseeing all of it anymore. Directors, producers, developers -- all of them come and go from title to title, with no sense of consistency between them.

RE is too fuckhuge and labyrinthine and does not, at any point, ask or require its player base to look outside of the games to understand what's happening. There are series that do do that. Final Fantasy is one of them. If you don't read the Ultimania or some of the novellas that get released as supplementary material for the games, sometimes huge chunks of the plot will come off as total nonsense. RE doesn't do that.

And so, when these games are being made, the only things that the current development team use to craft the game and the story are the games that came before them. None of them are combing through marketing materials and interviews and manga adaptations and what the fuck ever else. They're looking at the other games.

So, in fact, RE's plot and characters actually make more sense if you ignore literally everything the devs say.

When it comes to RE, if it's not in the games or CGI movies, it's not canon.

Period.

It has to actually be in the games. I should be able to put a game in and find the exact quote a person is talking about. Because if it was that important to know and that universally agreed upon by the bulk of the people working on the game, it would be in the game.