Modern version hades art9/2/2023 ![]() Zeus is about lightning, Poseidon about water. In the mechanics of the game itself, the gods lend Zagreus their powers – boons – for each run through the Underworld. “You can think of them as a powerful crime family, because there’s no one who’s going stop them from doing whatever they want,” says Kasavin. They’d be a big dysfunctional family unit, fighting and bickering and using their support of Zagreus against each other. You feel clumsy and stupid and you hopefully laugh at yourself.”įrom there, the dramatic role of the gods became clear. One moment in Spelunky or FTL you feel on top of the world, and then you make some bone-headed mistake and throw it all away. We were interested in that light-hearted tone because I think that the Roguelike experience has a slapstick quality. “And it seemed really funny! These slapstick failed attempts to get away, and your dad just makes fun of you and says I told you so. ![]() ![]() Zagreus was a perfect subject: the lack of stories about him and his father gave Kasavin space to imagine new ones, and the repeating Roguelike structure slotted neatly into the idea of him running away after a blow-out fight with his dad, then failing and finding himself home again. ![]() Like, woah! What’s that about? Then I researched Hades more, and it turns out there are very few stories told about him.” “I ran into this detail that there’s this little-known god called Zagreus who, according to some, is a prototype of Dionysus, but there’s also a shred of evidence that he might be the son of Hades. As the project kicked off, it saw him reading Siculus, Ovid and Hesiod, writers he’d never read before, along with several different translations of the Iliad and Odyssey. Hades’ gods and heroes might speak in modern language and provide a backdrop to a hack and slash game, but you can feel it’s all underscored by Kasavin’s real passion for Greek mythology, which began when he was a kid. “We were struggling, trying different actors, and one day Darren says he’d try something, and I’m like, ‘What! What is this?! I thought it was perfect right away.’” says Kasavin. Cocky-but-charming poshboy-Brit Zagreus is voiced by Supergiant audio director Darren Korb. It sounds so fitting! But Supergiant soon found they were struggling to fit the narrative design into it and to develop an interesting protagonist. “The labyrinth was going to be a shifting environment, a maze, different every time, and at the centre of it was a minotaur you have to hunt down,” explains Kasavin. At first, though, the game was going to be set in Minos’ labyrinth of the minotaur. Hades’ Greek mythology setting came soon afterwards, along with the idea that players would wield powers defined by various gods, who’d also be characters. “Whatever form the narrative would take, it was meant to make moments of story that’d intersect with the action and help contribute to memorable runs,” says Kasavin. But the studio loved the narrative design they created, so they decided their next game would refine and be in a genre much better suited to it: the endlessly repeatable Roguelike. Pyre may as well have been just as linear as Bastion and Transistor. “Man, we did all that work to create truly branching open-ended storytelling, but Pyre feels like a game that you’d only play once,” he says. It was well received, but I get the sense that Kasavin is a little disappointed with some of the creative decisions he and team made for it. This sports-cum-strategy game, which was released in 2017, is wrapped inside a choice-driven visual novel about a bunch of fantasy jocks who have been banished into purgatory and must travel the land to play other crims in the hope of cleansing their souls. This article was first published on February 12th 2020, but we've brought it back From The Archive to celebrate Hades' launch on Xbox Game Pass for PC. Hades’ Sisyphean-twitch-action, in which you take repeated runs through the Underworld in an attempt to escape your hellish dad, is brought to life by a setting within the rancorous interplays between the gods of Greek mythology, and dynamic story design which responds to your progress. “And it turns out, it immensely benefits from it.” I have to agree. “We were really curious to see if narrative could fit into an Early Access experience,” writer and designer Greg Kasavin tells me. But in a Roguelike? And what’s that? They intended to put Hades in Early Access? Could they ever fit with the kind of rich characterisation and storytelling that made Supergiant’s name? Across Bastion, Transistor and Pyre, they’d found they were pretty good at telling stories. When Supergiant Games started to make Hades, their Roguelike action-RPG, they had plenty of experience making narrative games. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |