The design of Hades

Hades is a rogue-lite with a heavy focus on its narrative compared to other rogue-lites, but it is still a rogue-lite, and as such certain expectations still remains. Core parts of the rogue-lite experience is in my opinion either excellent challenging gameplay, or/and the very high gameplay variety. Hades is average in terms of challenging gameplay and variety. If you don’t mind average gameplay, Hades can provide that, but with a high degree of polish and a unique narrative that sets it apart from other rogue-lites. Hades seems to be aware that it is only average at gameplay. It tries to be an accessible rogue-lite instead, and it succeeds at that. Hades is likely the most mass market rogue-lite that exists with the broadest possible appeal. However, it does not make the game a good rogue-lite. The game is competently put together and is a good game for the target audience.

This article will discuss the gameplay design of Hades first and foremost. The fundamental problem with Hades is in my opinion that the gameplay is incredible repetitive and tedious. There are a lot of reasons for this, and some of the most important reasons are the following:

• You get boons at a slow rate.
• You get a weapon upgrade in the first level and a weapon upgrade in the third level, and that is it.
• You get useless rooms with gems, darkness and keys that provides no in-run variation.
• You are heavily incentivised to get the five basic boons first to make more rare boons and duo boons more likely to appear. Which means it takes more time to get to interesting combinations as you spend a lot of time getting basic upgrades.
• The player is often left spamming a single ability during the entire run due to how boon upgrades and weapons often overload a single ability and makes every other ability useless in comparison. (Does not happen every run, but it is a frequent experience, especially at the earlier levels)
• Due to the slow rate of boons and weapon upgrades the early levels feel very similar because you usually have the same basic attack patterns available with very minor modifications.
• The entire combat loop is centred around the dodge – use best attack – dodge – use best attack, and repeat. It gets stale quickly.
• Difficulty is usually determined by the stats of the enemies, which means more repeated attacks are necessary to kill them.

DIFFICULTY, PUNISHMENT AND THE CHALLENGING EXPERIENCE

Hades provides an interesting opportunity to showcase the differences between difficulty, punishment of the player and the challenging experience and how these elements interact with each other. I believe that most players are interested in a challenging experience, that is the experience of accomplishment when you overcoming a challenge. I think the feeling you get when you overcome a difficult, but shallow game is an equally shallow feeling of accomplishment. When you begin to think about it, you realise that the entire challenge was just fake bullshit created by mechanics to make games more difficult and punishing without adding any substance. It is like winning the race, and realising that the entire race was rigged, it leaves a sour taste in the mouth. However if you don’t realise that the race is rigged, then the experience is great. The point with this analogy is that I think a good challenging experience can only be created through good gameplay, and not through illusions and tricks.
A good challenging experience relies on the game having mechanics to punish the player. The player needs to lose in some manner, the threat of losing needs to feel real. If you are too skilled you might never be punished, and that is the role of difficulty, to ensure that players are punished when they should be. At the same time, the game cannot be to difficult or the player will never overcome the punishing mechanics. When you succeed while trying to overcome the punishing mechanics the result is a great experience of accomplishment of having overcome a challenge.
The following sections will discuss how Hades handles punishment and difficult before discussing how these elements provide a lacking challenging experience. While a good challenging experience do exist for a lot of people, it is in large part based on illusion and tricks.

PUNISHMENT
In order for a challenging experience to be good the player needs to lose, or at least believe that losing is a real option. A challenging experience only appears by having the potential to lose. You need to have a challenge to overcome in order for a challenging experience to work. The important thing about punishing mechanics is that they feel fair. It is far too common in games that mechanics exists for the sole purpose of making the player lose, while disregarding how fair or balanced it feels to lose to the mechanics. Think of first person shooter campaigns where you round a corner and instantly die to a rocket launcher in your face, you have no way of avoiding it because you need to be aware of it. The only purpose is to kill the player, but it is not a fair way to kill the player. Generally speaking anytime you have to lose to something before you can overcome the challenge, the challenge is often not fair. Losing is just something you need to do in order to progress, but you don’t overcome any challenge at all.

Let us first go over how Hades punishes the player in a good way.

• You take damage when you are hit by any attacks you could have dodged.

That is it, this is the single punishing mechanic the game needs. This is mostly how you lose in Hades when you reach the late game. Generally speaking Hades punishes the player in a good way most of the time. How does Hades then punish the player in a bad way? In a way that feels unfair to lose to?

• You take damage when you are hit by an attack it feels impossible to have dodged.
• You take damage when you are hit by an attack you did not even see, also known as visual clutter.

The problem Hades has with visual clutter is very real. The overlapping effects of your own attacks and boons together with a lot of enemies, projectiles and flashing abilities means it is incredible hard to differentiate between the different aspects of the game in the moment. This effect is the biggest when you reach a new location with new effects and enemies. You get used to the visual clutter and begin to predict enemy attacks instead of reacting to it with reflexes. You can’t always react to things because too many effects are stacked on top of each other to clearly convey what is happening. They are not a major issue once you have played the game a fair bit, but they do force you to know instead of seeing and reacting. To illustrate the problem with visual clutter and a bad punishment mechanic here is a non exhaustive list I compiled while I did a couple of runs. None of these are large issues by themselves, but when you add them together they have a noticeable effect on the game:

• Your call makes bombards the screen with effects creating a smoke screen where you can’t see shit.
• The underworld region’s name will show up when entering a new region hiding enemies behind the name of the region.
• Ash clouds on level 2 hides enemies.
• Poseidon’s dash creates a large visual effect.
• The furies boss fight has an ability that applies a dark overlay with a lot of smoke particles making it hard to see.
• Demeter visuals in the third boss fight seems to appear out of nowhere. The visual effects are not noticeable until you take damage, or know how Demeter works in this fight and move preemptively.
• Enemies can be hidden behind pillars and objects without showing up clearly.
• The butterflies on level three blends in with the overall visuals of the level, and takes a while to get used to.
• Enemy bomb blasts are a huge visual effect that hides what is behind the explosion.
• Hades laser hides the exploding waves that travel outwards.

For the abilities and damage you feel like you could not have dodged is directly tied to the boons, the weapons and the overall stats of your character. If you have high enough stats you should be able to overcome most enemies without taking damage. Without high enough stats and with the wrong combinations of weapons and boons some fights and feels borderline impossible to avoid damage in (only on some runs, and not always). Here are a couple of examples I noticed during my runs, which mostly happens due to low stats:

• The poison on level four alongside the traps gets worse and worse the slower you kill the enemies. More and more of the ground gets covered in poison, which means the dodging gets impossible eventually. Having low stats means that you reach this level of having borderline un-dodgeable damage much faster.
• During level two, one of the mini-bosses are projectile spamming enemies. These enemies are borderline impossible to avoid taking damage for when you don’t have deflect or a weapon that attacks fast enough to clear the spam. Having only a single dash is also very punishing here. Most of this issue comes from the early game prior to stats and upgrades being a thing.

DIFFICULTY
There are several ways one can create difficulty in a game. In the context of Hades difficulty is usually created through enemy mechanics and enemy-player stat balance. Most of the difficulty in Hades is balanced around its stats, and the combat mechanics are pretty simple. There is of course a relationship between stats and mechanics. If certain mechanics do no damage then you don’t need to learn it, and if certain mechanics do a lot, you need to respect it more. Both the player and the enemies are quite simple in how their mechanics actually work. Let us discuss the mechanics of Hades from an in-game combat perspective briefly.
The player can use a normal attack, special attack, a cast, a call and a dash in addition to the standard wasd movement. Some weapons allow you to use a charge attack, and you can also attack while dashing. In practice you will frequently use a single ability, and maybe two, in addition to the dash. There is very little thought that goes into using either the call or cast, you use them on cooldown most of the time. Using the normal attack or special attack is usually determined by the RNG of the run and the weapon you use, but you will frequently spam the highest damage ability in combination with the dash. The player mechanics are thereby pretty simple and shallow at their core. The modifiers you get does not fundamentally change the loop of “best attack” – “dash” – “cast” – “cast” – “dash” – “call” – “best attack” – “dash” – “best attack” – “dash” – “best attack” – “dash”. It does not matter if your boons shoot electricity or pushes enemies back with water, the fundamental loop is the same. Occasionally the game offers you boons that causes attacks to synergize which each other, but this is quite a rare thing to happen. At best you usually get one that deflects which means that it is meaningful to use a low damaging normal attack sometimes to get that extra god effect, but a lot of the time you just use the highest DPS available to you.
The enemy mechanics are usually projectiles, charge up melee attacks, regular melee attacks, laser attacks, exploding the ground, poison, ground damage from traps and some variations of these. You can also get extra effects on the enemies with the pact of punishment that creates a few more mechanics, but the enemies are also quite simple in terms of their design. Even the bosses have quite a limited range of attack patterns.
This simplicity in mechanics for both the player and the enemies means that most of the difficulty will not be directly tied to the mechanics for more skilled players. There is very rarely a need to think about how you interact with enemies, you can just turn your brain off and mash buttons. Most of the time you don’t need to use attacks in a specific order, or think about enemy weakness or favourable god combinations. The game is mostly a DPS check, how much damage can you do, and how quickly can you do the damage. In short Hades does not have a lot of difficulty attached directly to its mechanics. It has some, and for lower skilled players these mechanics will be hard to overcome.

Hades is a game that uses stat based difficulty as the primary way to balance the game’s difficulty. By having enemies that do high damage you need to dodge the enemy attacks. By having enemies that have high health, you need to hit them a lot or get higher stats to overcome them. This last bit is where the entire challenge of Hades lies, and is another one of my big issues with the combat in the game. If you are good enough mechanically you will brute force the game by hitting the enemies over and over and over again until they die. You do this while you are stuck with what is essentially a shallow and repetitive combat system. This means that while you can say that the game is difficult, it is very tedious and repetitive in how it is difficult. Repetition is the difficulty in essence.
Hades does however allow you to increase your stats by knowing how to manipulate the god boons, your talents, the keepsakes, the heat penalties in combination with the chosen weapon. The bow attack is quite bad with Zeus because it attacks very slowly, the fists are very good because they attack quickly. There is in other words “incorrect” and “correct” builds in the game that significantly shapes how much damage you do. Knowing what boons and upgrades are good with each of the weapons is a key part of the stat based difficulty in Hades. You can overcome a lot of these stats by out of combat knowledge and game manipulation. If you know how the game-systems work, you can target certain boons you want for a certain weapon. This reduces the stat-based difficulty based on your game-knowledge, but does crucially not require mechanical skill to use that knowledge.

The pact of punishment allows the player to choose which stats they want to increase or decrease to tune the difficulty to their liking. This is a very good system for controlling player difficulty. You can choose which stats you increase, some of them might make the mechanics more challenging to overcome. There is also a strategy aspect to the pact of punishment that makes it less punishing if you use synergistic penalties. This is again based on out of combat game-knowledge as a way to reduce difficulty while you also increase the mechanical skill needed to overcome the enemies.

THE CHALLENGING EXPERIENCE
Challenging games should provide a challenge that feels good to overcome, but also a challenge that feels okay to lose to. It can be frustrating because of your own lack of skills, but it does not feel like the game fucks you over because it wants you to lose. Challenging experiences are always the best when the player has the highest amount of agency. In Hades you have two primary challenges, you have the mechanical moment to moment combat, and you have the overarching strategy of the build you want to create.

The balance of the game is pretty good when you learn the interactions between the different boons, weapons, stats and so forth. There is real complexity and a real sense of challenge that the builds can provide in Hades. The challenge is almost like optimising a city in a city-builder. It is there, albeit I don’t think it is incredible impressive in terms of challenge it provides. It can be fun when you feel a sense of accomplishment at understanding the game’s systems and managing to manipulate the boons to your liking.

The second challenging experience is what most people would expect from a rogue-lite, which I think Hades does quite poorly, and that is the moment to moment gameplay. While it is fluid, it is shallow and repetitive. When you lose, it is mostly due to “stat-based difficulty”, and usually does not feel great. Mechanical skill is really the only thing that the moment to moment gameplay checks, but it assumes that the player is fine with a high degree of repetition in order to overcome this challenge. This is what I call “boring the player to death”, and some people do like this sort of experience, but I don’t think it is good design. It is very simple to create by just manipulating numbers to be high and low. It is difficult, but does not provide a good challenging experience for a long time.

The Progression

The progression system in Hades is either created for new and bad players that need a lot of time to learn the game, or the system is created to pad out the game. It does not really matter. Most people that describe themselves as gamers will find this system to effectively pad out the length of the game. It is absurdly slow, while at the same time being absurdly powerful. This is not a good combination.
It feels like the developers of Hades created a base game in terms of how the gameplay works. The game feels designed around having every upgrade available to you. It feels like the developers cut off part of the core gameplay elements and put the elements behind a progression system. Unlike most other games where you start with the base game, in Hades it feels like you need to unlock the base game through a ridiculous grind. Some very obvious examples, but by no means an exhaustive list:

• Death defiance is a key part of the game and it takes many hours to get to this point.
• The cast is essentially useless before you upgrade it with mirror talents
• A lot of boons function around making the player tankier, but the player takes so much damage initially that these boons are meaningless, and stats are needed to create a base level that these boons are designed around. It turns out that 30% damage reduction on 1500 health is significantly better than 30% damage reduction on 50 health. (This is likely the level of difference in real health due to upgrades, bit on that later)
• You unlock a lot of dungeon features through gems that feels integral to the game such as healing fountains and infernal troves.
• The adamant rail base attack is useless prior to you getting your hands on an upgraded weapon through titan blood that increases its ammo from 12 to 24.

1. Fountain chamber in each of the regions alongside the upgrades to how much they heal (gem based upgrade)
2. Infernal Trove in each region and their upgrades (gem based upgrade) (Adds 150 coins, darkness or health that you can win)
3. Urns give a chance of 15 gold (gem based) (Likely several hundred extra gold every run)
4. 50% backstab damage or 75% first strike damage (Mirror)
5. 3+ Health every room or 30% darkness (Mirror) (Remember that this combines well with infernal troves, etc)
6. Death defiance, 150% extra health or 30% extra health if you die every chamber (Mirror)
7. One extra Dash or 50% damage and dodge if timed well (Mirror) (Keep in mind that dash is the most powerful ability you have)
8. 50% damage if gemstone is stuck in foe, or -30% speed and damage from foe (Mirror)
9. 2 + cast or 3 second regeneration for cast (Mirror)
10. Start with 100 gold or get 15% of total on clearing a region (Mirror)
11. 50+ Health or 25% damage when above 80% health (Mirror)
12. 40% damage against foes afflicted by 2 status curses or 5% damage for each different boon you have (Mirror) (This is at the end game essentially 25% damage flat with 5 different gods (4x + Hermes))
13. 20% extra chance for epic boon or 10% extra chance for legendary or duo (Mirror) (Keep in mind that epic often means double damage or health in some cases (or more))
14. 8 Dice to fix random rooms or 4 dice to fix boon RNG (Mirrors) (Helps manage RNG)

Let us be conservative and see how much base health we obtain at minimum if we want to use the upgrades for that. 50+ health from upgrade 11 for 100 health, 150% extra base health from death defiance to 250 health. We have used two upgrades and now have 5 times the base health, with one of those upgrades scaling with obtained max health in the dungeon. We can probably add a couple hundred health from the gem based upgrades from fountains, infernal troves and urns. We can probably add a couple hundred from the dash upgrades as well. Then we have the 30% healing form darkness, that is likely at least 50 health each run. I don’t think it is terribly conservative to claim that effective health gains from permanent upgrades are at the low end around leaves you at an effective base health of about 700 health. That is 14 times the amount of health, health that scales significantly better with the in-dungeon upgrades and boons. That is an insane amount of health increase. Keeping in mind that we can run a similar operation for effective damage to reduce the time you spend in an encounter, and thereby reduce the damage you take it is even higher than 14. In most runs I would assume you would sit on an effective increase in health in the region of 30 times your original durability.
Before death defiance the health increase in the dungeon is typically 25 max health, after you upgrade to death defiance the same upgrade in effect gives 62.5 health (an value increase of 150%). The max 50+ health also makes healing in the dungeon much easier to use as you don’t hit the max health as easily anymore, making healing effects more effective. There are boons that reduce enemies attacks strength or reduces your damage taken, I believe 30% and 7.5% are the base numbers here. If you have an effective 1500 health instead of 250 health that means that the percentage means so much more at the end of the game. 30% of 1500 is 450 health, and 30% of 250 is 75 health, you likely gain 6 times more value from the same boon based on increased stats from permanent upgrades in this example. The numbers are not that important, but the effect is. The stat increases are ridiculously powerful, and probably more so than people realise.
Keep in mind that I have not even added the keepsakes or weapon upgrades to this calculation, and these further increase the power of the player. A significant portion of these stats give more value the more base health you have, and they all combine with each other to push the real player health far above what you think it is in-game. You actually have 50 health when you start, but at the end game you are more likely to be closer to several orders of magnitude higher than that. Exactly how much is hard to determine, but it could be 10, 20, 30, 40 times higher, or even more if you have a run that depends on tank stats.
I am not going to list the keepsakes or the weapons, but they are similarly very very powerful in terms of raw stats.

Now that we understand how the progression system work we can ask what the effect of implementing a progression system in this manner is? The effect of this progression system on the player is directly tied to the skill level of the player. This system is incredible good for newer, casual or players that are generally speaking not very good at mechanically demanding rogue-lites that also finds them overwhelming in terms of complexity. If this is the case the progression system will allow the player to be heavily carried by the progression system while also progressing the complexity of the game at a slow enough rate that they can keep up.
Another effect of these very large stat increases is that they are not always entirelyobvious in their strength. I would wager that most people are surprised by just how much the strength increases when you actually begin to do the math. I think this is by design. I think the developers wants to hide how much the progression does to create a slight illusion of skill for the players. While the players skills are not irrelevant, the progression system allows the player to feel like their own skills progresses more than they do in reality. I think that this skill illusion is one of the things that Hades accomplishes with its progression system that no other rogue-lite I have played manages to do. It creatures a genuine illusion of skill and achievement for the players who do not realise how broken the stat progression is. What does it matter if the feeling of accomplishment is based on real achievements or imaginary ones? It does not, the experience is the same. I think this illusion is why the progression rate is what it is.

This effect is not present for better players who are able to see through the illusion and understands how powerful these stats are. It is very apparentif you are good enough to reach levels where you take an insane amount of damage and deal very little that the stats are very important in terms of how quickly you progress or how far you manage to get. Instead the elitist gamers will be left with a feeling of a dreadfully slow progression system that sucks the life out of the game. This is the experience for me, and is especially apparent between 5 – 15 hours into the game. After that you have unlocked enough of the core gameplay that it begins to feel better, and more akin to the designed experience.

A SMALL NOTE ON RNG
Hades does have an issue with RNG, but most of that issue comes from its reliance on stat-based difficulty-scaling. The effect of this reliance is that sometimes the players will roll really poorly or really well and either struggle immensely or slaughter their way to victory with ease. If you get a taste of the really good RNG and never see it for 20 hours while the progression system works it can be a terrible experience, and really show the player how reliant the game is on stats. It is possible to break the illusion of skill that Hades can provide to a lot of players by showing how impactful stats are.
The RNG is at its worst during the middle portions of the game. You have understood the basic mechanics of the game but still need to unlock more permanent upgrades to get to core parts of the game. At this point RNG has an enormous influence on how far you get, and it frequently feels frustrating and unfair when the RNG is not on your side. You feel like you get close to beating the game when you roll reasonably well, and it feels like a grind to get to that RNG roll in addition to the grind that already exists for the permanent progression. The mid game of Hades is as a result by far and away the worst aspect of the game, and the combination of RNG and slow permanent progression is the source of this.
The more heat modifiers you turn on, the more RNG you need to win. Purely based on the fact that the game becomes timed, and no matter how skilled you are there is a damage cap based on the stats you have. The sheer amount of enemies and the time limit creates a need for good RNG at the super high end of the game. RNG is usually fine below 32 heat at the very least in my opinion, depending a bit on what modifiers you use. The late game as a whole is not as RNG based as the mid game of the game.

WHAT MAKES HADES SO POPULAR?
The combat mechanics and movement are incredibly polished. The game’s presentation is excellent. The game has an interesting narrative if you don’t mind the gameplay. The gameplay has variety, especially when it comes to its weapons. Hades challenges the player to overcome the opposing enemies, and does provide a real challenge for most players. At the same time, you will never get stuck at a low level unable to progress due to the incredible power of the progression system. Even if your skill in the game grows very slowly you will still progress through the levels at a faster pace than you might have done in other rogue-lites because skill matters less in Hades. The progression system will allow you to progress even though your skill level remains the same. This allows most players to get an experience of what a rogue-lite experience can be, and you add the excellent polish, the narrative and a good presentation and you have a very appealing game to most people.

HADES FOR ELITISTS AND HOW TO FIX IT FOR US
I have higher standards and demands of games than most other people, and as such I find Hades to be lacking in depth where it counts, in the gameplay. I can still enjoy Hades, but the enjoyment usually lasts for 10 minutes before I get bored of the repetitive game-loop. Can the game be “fixed” for elitist gamers? The following changes would have increased my own enjoyment of the game, and likely provided a better overall experience for similarly minded gamers. I think most of these can be implemented without ruining the game for unskilled new players.

• Increase the bloody progression rate, of darkness especially, and reduce the cost of talents in the mirror of night by at least 5 times. If they are concerned about this progressing the game too quickly for newer players all they have to do is make the darkness gain at every new level significantly higher. That means that the progression rate is directly tied to skill in a much greater extent.
• Alternatively set every aspect of darkness in the mirror of night at maximum once you unlock it and have the sun-side be unlockable. It is fine to unlock alternatives slowly, but it is not okay to unlock core upgrades and gameplay elements slowly.
• Give the players access to a weapon upgrade and 3 boons at the start of every run to kick-start the variety the game can offer. They can even tie this into an upgrade or unlock in such a way to prevent this from overwhelming new players. This would increase the variety of the game drastically.
• Separate the keepsakes into god keepsakes and other keepsakes, but remove the bonus from the god keepsakes. I want the ability to control the RNG and be able to experiment and build freely. It is annoying to have to game the system and sacrifice other fun keepsakes to make the RNG more bearable.
• Alternatively give the players the knowledge of which gods will arrive in the given run. This will allow the player to pick the weapon, talents and punishments to suit the gods. You can always add an option to turn this knowledge of to create a blind rim if that is of interest. Giving the player this knowledge gives the ability to plan. People already do this by giving up runs once they know which gods appear due to how the seed system work. There is no reason to not give out this information before the run even starts.

The end, thank you for reading. I hope you found some of it interesting if you stuck around for so long. The read should have been about 30 minutes.