A brief look into the design of Hades (Design)

Let me begin with saying that I am not the target audience for this game. Purely single-player games never really struck home with me and I'm not the type of player to fully appreciate an excellent story.

Even so, I absolutely loved this game. Behind the quirky characters and surprisingly detailed plot is a game filled to the brim with content. So even when I didn't completely connect with certain aspects of the game, other features filled in the gaps to create a wonderful experience.

I want to highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses of Hades and why certain design choices worked better than others.

The boon system

As you progress through a given run of the game, you're given "boons" from the Greek gods which enhance your abilities. Zeus might give you a lighting effect while Athena offers you a shield. As you progress, you build up an inventory of these abilities which leads to the game having tons of variation between runs.

An example of the boons

This idea is hardly novel - most roguelikes have systems like this. Varying the player's abilities and stats on a run-by-run basis keeps each playthrough fresh and exciting. But just because it is inspired by other games doesn't mean it has to feel bland. The developers took an idea that we know works, fitted it to their game, and made something awesome. I don't think there is any shame in that, and I don't think developers should be afraid of taking heavy inspiration from other games.

That being said, the boon system isn't perfect. In particular, I think the system lends itself to the player picking the same boons over and over whenever they can.

I found very quickly that my playstyle worked much better with certain boons. For example, I found that the boon from Athena enhancing my cast was extremely strong for my playstyle. And because I wanted to keep progressing through the game, I found myself picking it over and over again.

It's entirely possible that my perception of the power levels of these boons was wrong - but it doesn't matter. What I perceive to be the strongest is the only thing that matters. Since it's a single-player game, my experience is the only thing I have to base my choices on. And if I think a certain boon is stronger than another, then it is stronger.

That is to say, for single-player games, perception is everything. Some of the boons in Hades don't make their worth as apparent as others, which leads to them getting picked a lot less. Dionysus's boons come to mind. They deal DoT (damage over time), which means that even though the total damage over the course of a fight is very high, their perceived value is very low.

An easy way to increase the perceived value of Dionysus's boons would be to add an additional damage counter that kept a running total of the damage from the DoT.

Some of Dionysus's boons

So even though I'm sure the developers did a fantastic job balancing the actual power of the boons, they didn't do a great job balancing their perceived power. This led to less diversity between runs than what was possible.

The bosses

Although at first I struggled with all of the chambers, it wasn't long before the bosses were the only real challenge in the game. The intermediate stages where you fight waves of enemies weren't boring, per se, but they didn't pose much of a challenge.

The final boss fight

Because of this, when selecting my abilities, weapons and boons, I was largely focused on single-target damage. This amplified the issue I described before. Boons that focused on AOE (area of effect) damage just weren't useful past the first 10 hours, and I found myself choosing the same boons over and over again pretty fast.

I think the bosses could have been designed a bit better to combat this. Introducing a large number of smaller enemies (that actually posed a threat) would help amplify the strength of lesser-used boons. Another solution would be to add in more mini-bosses that focused on large swarms of foes.

The pace

The final thing I want to mention is the pace of the game. Pace isn't the first thing most developers think about. It's not the sort of thing to draw a crowd. You can't make the front page of reddit showcasing how well-structured your game is. However, what pace can do is keep a skeptical party (like myself) interested throughout the entire game.

Hades does this by tickling the players interests with hints at what comes next. Right off the bat, you're shown 6 "slots" for weapons, but only given access to one. This practically guaranteed that I would give the game a couple hours (often the hardest challenge for a game) to unlock all the weapons.

The hidden weapons. Some are locked, others invisible. I was dying to know what all the weapons were.

It didn't stop there. There's a mirror you can interact with to enhance your character, but it doesn't show all the upgrades immediately. It first shows you four options, but more are unlocked by playing the game (they are invisible before you do this).

The mirror showing the first four upgrades. Notice how the four upgrades don't come anywhere close to filling the UI. This makes the player think there might be more...

Each of the weapons has three base upgrades (already urging you to play further to try them out), plus a fourth hidden one! I didn't get my first hidden upgrade until 50+ hours into the game!

This is what I think Hades does best. It is constantly teasing you of something to come and then rewarding you when you arrive with an awesome piece of content.

The backbone of this system is the insane amount of content in the game. Many games try to keep their players coming back by teasing future content, but fail because the gap between payoffs is far too large. They stretch out content over dozens of hours of gameplay and leave the player feeling hopeless when they see the next reward is a week away. Mobile base-building games such as Clash of Clans are good examples of this trend.

You also have to be sure that players know there is content ahead of them. You want to avoid the player quitting because they think they are "done" prematurely at all costs. That is what is so important about the "teasing" mechanic built into so many aspects of Hades. I always knew there was something on the horizon.

Conclusion

Hopefully some of these points have been useful to you. Hades is a great game to analyze from a game design standpoint, and it will always hold an impressive slot in my heart as one of the only single-player games that kept my interest for more than 5 hours.