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2024 Preview: Hades 2 has Godlike expectations to meet
Players love Hades. Who on earth would be stupid enough to make a sequel?
Supergiant is an absolute Rolls Royce of a developer. The team behind Bastion, Transistor, Pyre, and Hades have gone 4 for 4 on excellent games that have each developed a huge cult following.
However, even Supergiant couldn’t have predicted the outpouring of love and obsession that accompanied 2020’s Hades. The reveal trailer for the game’s sequel, which debuted at The Game Awards in 2022 caused a pop akin to Stone Cold Steve Austin coming out at Wrestlemania. Players love Hades. Who on earth would be stupid enough to make a sequel?
Supergiant has bucketloads of the rarest commodity in gaming, player trust. The sequel, which like the original, will launch in Early Access will again give players an inside look into the game’s development, allowing them to play the same opening levels over and over, to shape the game’s balance, and feel like they’re part of the process.
That sense of involvement is usually a double-edged sword in gaming wherein players feel like developers must bend to their will regardless of their request. The access to developers has never been greater, but that’s also led to a massive increase in the amount of abuse received by the people making games, even if the decision that’s so vexed the player has nothing to do with them.
Part of what has made Supergiant such a popular developer, and Hades such a breakout hit, was that incredibly transparent connection felt through early access. This only increased following the release of Noclip’s Developing Hell documentary series, which showed an inside look at the creation of the game from initial announcement at The Game Awards all the way to winning the myriad of Game of the Year awards picked up by the game.
Hades 2 takes place after the events of the first game, with the player facing off against Chronos, the Titan of Time. You’ll play as Melinoe, the sister of Zagreus, the first game’s protagonist. From the trailer, which is the only real information we have about the game, it will also feature Hecate, Moros, Apollo, Nemesis, and Dora, with Hades and Zeus returning from the first game.
The trailer shows off similar gameplay to the original, but that’s no bad thing. The vast amount of potential loadouts means that you could replay Hades again today and have a totally different experience than you did yor first hundred times through the game. Now that the pantheon of Gods that will help you through the underworld has expanded, so too will the different abilities and skills they’ll grant you along the way.
What’s yet to be seen is if the game will retain the structure of a select group of weapons which can be selected from at the start of a run, or if this will change. If there’s a small criticism of the first game is that some of the weapons were comically overpowered compared to others, meaning the incentive to choose one of the less popular weapons wasn’t really there. If that can be solved, and new weapons introduced, then we’d happily play through another 200 runs through the underworld with Melinoe.
The thing that will make or break Hades 2 is something that we won’t get to see until players get their hands on it, and that’s the relationship with the game’s side characters. Half of the appeal of Hades was the way that after every run you would have new strands of dialogue with characters, your relationship would change with them as you fought them, and more about Zagreus’ backstory was revealed. We have to imagine this will be the case again in Hades 2, introducing a whole new pantheon of Gods to ship with each other and draw fan art of.
Hades 2 has a huge task on its hands living up to the first game, but we trust Supergiant to be the ones to pull it off. There’s a reason that in 2020, we awarded it developer of the year. It’s shown a consistent commitment to extremely high quality, extensive post-launch support, and transparency with players, something that earns it a huge amount of cashe with its fan base. We probably won’t get a release of the full game until 2025, but in summer 2024 when the early access period starts, we, alongside millions of other fans, will be ready to jump back into hell.
