Hades 2 - now in early access

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Gravemind said:
I do not feel like reading through the last 7 pages.

Is there anything worth checking out with Hades 2 or is it just "More Hades" from a gameplay standpoint?

I don't care about the gay Tumblr artstyle or character writing or any of that. The first game was fun in spite of it. I just want to know if the second game does anything to make itself stand out in the gameplay department.
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tl;dr, from what others say so far it's worse since it's slower. But with EA things can massively change per update
 
New update adds a lot but their new Athena design (and voice actor) is very...shall we say, androgynous.

Dionysus has a bulge the size of his head, which was amusing.
 
Man that is fucking uuuuugly

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It's funny to see Narcissus still doesn't have art. Kind of hoping they keep it like that because the concept art they've got is a massive step down in comedy.

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Prometheus' fight is whacky. I feel like I'm getting wailed on by some MMA freak with a pyromania fetish. I've been trying to put my finger on what makes this game so tedious compared to the first, and it's in part how little of the stage is usable during boss fights. Everything is on fire, getting bombed, covered in sand, or a mess of projectiles. Even Lerny's punishment stage with all lava heads felt more navigable than Eris or Prometheus.
 
Hades 2 will leave early access in a few hours.

I haven't played at all. The uglification of the Greek gods aside, I'm curious and concerned about the story. One thing I really liked about Hades 1 is how it justified its roguelite format. It's an expression of Hades' and Zagreus' stubbornness and selfishness, and the player's stubbornness as Zagreus, but even if there was a way to permanently kill Hades, Zagreus would abhor the idea. And yet even after their relationship improves, they have a believable reason to continue fighting. However, in Hades 2, every second spent not building up to permanently killing Chronos is a second wasted. So what comes after that? Multiple timelines? "Actually he's still your grandfather and also the gods deserved this for what they did to Prometheus and humans uwu"?
 
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I had basically 100%-ed what was available during Early Access so I'm almost completely done now. I've been messing around with side challenges and haven't gotten to the final-final ending, so maybe my quibbles and loose ends with how the Chronos story seems to resolve will get addressed there.

I still think gamers who bitch about wokeshit are reaching with this one and are just looking for a reason to provoke/be mad. There's very little here that doesn't have at least a theoretical basis in the extremely broad and fluid mythology of the ancient Greeks, and the stuff that is just flat out creative license (like the use of Tarot) no one has voiced any issue with. The only piece of art I really, truly object to is Athena. The rest of them are fine. The gods whose appearances have a strong cultural basis are fine. The ones that they had some room to have fun with are also fine.

I *just* noticed, a hundred hours in, that Hermes is Asian. He's the god of foreigners, translators, and international exchange, so hey.

Rhialtokourai said:
I haven't played at all. The uglification of the Greek gods aside, I'm curious and concerned about the story. One thing I really liked about Hades 1 is how it justified its roguelite format. It's an expression of Hades' and Zagreus' stubbornness and selfishness, and the player's stubbornness as Zagreus, but even if there was a way to permanently kill Hades, Zagreus would abhor the idea. And yet even after their relationship improves, they have a believable reason to continue fighting. However, in Hades 2, every second spent not building up to permanently killing Chronos is a second wasted. So what comes after that? Multiple timelines? "Actually he's still your grandfather and also the gods deserved this for what they did to Prometheus and humans uwu"?
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To answer the question about "what comes next":
Yes, multiple timelines and "possibilities" are part of the worldbuilding of this story, suggested by both Chaos (who can't control time, but can create little pocket universes as experiments) and Chronos. The final task of the story is to locate the Moirai and I imagine they will be involved in cleaning up the multiverse aspect.

Overall I found the story to be satisfactory. It's got a little less cultural backing than the first Hades (Zagreus was strongly established as a birth-death-rebirth god, Melinoe is more obscure) and some purists I'm sure will bitch at the Cronos/Chronos swap, but it's fine. It does what a sequel is supposed to do.
 
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ProphylacticMagician said:
This is the goodest game ever, and if you don't wanna buy it because of the obese nigger vitiligoddesses (greek) you're a heckin' chud who won't let people enjoy things.
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I’m a race and gender sperg as much as any but the attempts to make culture war hay out of this game are kind of pitiful. All that’s happening is people are posting bait like this on the Steam community, people either ignore it or respond “okay, don’t play it then” and the world keeps turning. No one is thinking about the heckin’ chuds anymore.
 
A Sentient Cloud said:
I’m a race and gender sperg as much as any but the attempts to make culture war hay out of this game are kind of pitiful. All that’s happening is people are posting bait like this on the Steam community, people either ignore it or respond “okay, don’t play it then” and the world keeps turning. No one is thinking about the heckin’ chuds anymore.
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I just don't see the issue with people expressing their dislike of something they find tasteless. You can enjoy the game and accept that some people really hate the idea of taking figures that were depicted as Greek by Greeks and “interpreting” them as brown. That being said, l don’t think getting yourself seriously riled up over some pixels is a good thing either.
 
ProphylacticMagician said:
I just don't see the issue with people expressing their dislike of something they find tasteless. You can enjoy the game and accept that some people really hate the idea of taking figures that were depicted as Greek by Greeks and “interpreting” them as brown. That being said, l don’t think getting yourself seriously riled up over some pixels is a good thing either.
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Have you played the video game that you are writing paragraphs about in a thread devoted to it?

I can go into a whole sperg about how the “classical mythology belongs to white people and depicting these figures as looking different from the people who worshipped them thousands of years ago is wrong in some vague historical or cultural way” thing is for retards who don’t know anything about the subject they’ve decided is the hill they’re going to defend until they fall, but I’m on mobile now. Suffice to say, it’s a stupid hill to die on.

I'm being a spaz, I know. Sorry.
 
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A Sentient Cloud said:
I still think gamers who bitch about wokeshit are reaching with this one and are just looking for a reason to provoke/be mad. There's very little here that doesn't have at least a theoretical basis in the extremely broad and fluid mythology of the ancient Greeks,
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What's the broad theoretical basis for turning half the greek gods into niggers
A Sentient Cloud said:
“classical mythology belongs to white people and depicting these figures as looking different from the people who worshipped them thousands of years ago is wrong in some vague historical or cultural way” thing is for retards who don’t know anything about the subject they’ve decided is the hill they’re going to defend until they fall,
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I guarentee you this moron unironically believes in the black athena movement.
 
Rhialtokourai said:
"Actually he's still your grandfather and also the gods deserved this for what they did to Prometheus and humans uwu"
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Supergiant is incapable of writing irreconcilable value conflicts between allies who must remain or become such. Unlike say Bioware, which had this ability and lost it to the woke mind-virus, Supergiant never had it.

In Hades 1 the central plot with Zagreus, Hades, and Persephone is well done, and the epilogue with the Olympians and some of the subplots are serviceable. But every subplot which touches a value conflict completely disintegrates. You have the choice to give Sisyphus a reprieve; Thanatos will give Zagreus one segment of catty gay dialogue but will never force Zagreus to understand what Sisyphus did to deserve Tartarus, even if Sisyphus is nice to Zagreus now. (The only thing Sisyphus has to say for himself is "I wasn't a good king :'( let's not talk about it".) The Nyx vs Dusa subplot starts off with real disappointment and anger that Nyx, Zagreus' adoptive mother and one of his first allies, is trying to separate Zagreus from a friend she believes to be beneath him. Then comes the twist ending: she fired and rehired Dusa to teach her the importance of PTO. She wouldn't really be mean to the help! No disappointment needed! We'll all look back on this and laugh! Never mind that none of Nyx's prior dialogue in the subplot makes sense in this light.

Pyre's basic premise begs for characters who have to learn how to work together even if they hate each other. Thus, until Hades 2 it suffered the worst from this lacuna in Supergiant's skill. The only Nightwings that start off hating each other are Jodariel and Pamitha, and while getting them to work together isn't instant, once they agree to, it never comes up again. And no one, not even Jodariel (a military officer and Hedwyn's adoptive mother) has a single line of dialogue about Hedwyn getting his brothers-in-arms killed by deserting his lookout post to chase Harp cloaca. (I have to wonder if this was some holdover from drafts where the Nightwings actually had committed moral crimes and not only legal crimes, since he's the only one like this. The more horrifying possibility is that Supergiant can't conceive of his desertion as a moral crime because military bad / he didn't mean for them to die, don't be mean to him / twu interspecies wuv. The fanbase certainly seems to have the same blind spots.)

Bastion and Transistor made it seem like Supergiant was good at writing characters and atmosphere, because they do not feature this type of conflict. In Bastion Zulf has a tragic story and starts out cordial, but he's not required by gameplay or prior characterisation to remain an ally, so he (rightfully) becomes an enemy halfway through, and you're not forced to save him when the time comes. If you do, Rucks expresses reservations, but since he lets you choose the ending button it's in-character for him to defer to you at that time, and reconciliation, if any, all occurs post-game.

So, come Hades 2, there was no way they could ever write a satisfying conclusion to "Save your family from Chronos, a terrible father/grandfather" and "Your family are terrible gods and they were terrible to your friends specifically". The roguelite format doesn't help, but I think they were just never up to it.
 
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