You're also implying that Supergiant just doesn't test their difficulty options because they're customizable, which is flat-out wrong.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
So, as I mentioned, I'm deaf and can only hear from one ear. This whole discussion feels like if I showed up and started arguing that games shouldn't let you toggle from stereo to mono sound because they should just "know" what sound settings people need while also pointing out that I had a subpar experience because they had stereo on by default even though I could've changed it to mono if I wanted just because I "wanted the true game experience".
On one hand, I get it. I would love to know what the stereo sound experience would be like, and surely game designers put tons of hours into designing the best soundscapes possible for their games. But I also know that if I leave it on, I will literally not hear anything that happens in half the game, and the rest will be distorted due to lack of dimensionality.
In retrospect I think I understand the line of thinking much more clearly now, because the argument boils down to "game designers shouldn't allow players to do X because people suck at gauging X", and after reading through the discussion I think the latter half of that logic, at least, holds true from this specific perspective.
I'm super confused as to how someone can play Hades for 146 hours and not make progression in the story unless you didn't engage with a core mechanic, like not talking to characters or giving Ambrosia.
Edit:
I'm also super duper confused how someone can argue on one hand that being able to control the difficulty of a game is bad but also getting frustrated that they can't make progress in the story of a game because they can't beat higher difficulties.
Hades also automatically increases your damage resistance - up to 80% - the more you die. So if the argument is that the game should magically auto-balance itself for the player (or have the impossible dream of being balanced for all players at all times) then Hades does that, too. You can play the game with literally 5x the effective health of a "normal" run, which when coupled with other benefits makes it pretty easy to complete without forcing you to always be frame-perfect for every fight.
I legitimately do not understand the arguments being made here. I'm not trying to be difficult, but I'm struggling to find something coherent.
You're completely missing the point. The problem is not that higher difficulties are too challenging, or that anything in the game is too challenging.
I died over a hundred times in Spelunky 2 before I won once. And even after getting good enough to win at all, I'll still often die dozens of times between one win and the next. I love Spelunky 2.
There are roguelikes I love which I have never won, and may never win in my lifetime.
In this genre, I have the most fun, and am most engaged, if I'm losing most of the time. If I find that I'm winning most of my runs in a roguelike, then I feel like the game has been solved and I get bored with it and move on.
When a video game likes Hades gets designed, there are design decisions that have to get made about how the target audience is going to interact with it and how much friction they're expected to face. How many times do we expect the average player do die before their first win? What do we expect their win rate to be after their first win? How do we keep players engaged when they're losing all the time at the start? How do we keep players engaged when they're winning a lot later on?
And the decision that was made is, okay, at the start you're losing every game. We keep the player engaged by giving them Darkness on these losing runs, which they spend at the Mirror to power up their character. Eventually, the combination of persistent power-ups and improved familiarity and skill hits a threshold where they can kill Hades. This probably takes 15-30 attempts. Past this point, you're expected to be strong enough to win most of your runs. We'll keep that engaging by drip-feeding you Titan's Blood to slowly unlock new weapons as long as you keep your win rate high. You'll be pushed into varying up your weapon to keep the unlocks flowing, so your wins feel more varied. You'll have to slowly add Heat as you go to keep you from out scaling the game TOO hard.
Those post-game design decisions don't work for me, because I don't WANT to be winning most of my runs. I want to be losing a lot. And the heat system theoretically lets me tune the difficulty in order to get the higher-friction experience that I want, but that doesn't change the fact that the incentive structures they built into the game don't support that play style; they were built to support a low-friction, high-win-rate environment. So if I use high Heat to play how I want, my lizard brain experiences constant FOMO thinking about all the cool weapons I'm supposed to be getting but I'm not because I'm playing the game in a way it wasn't really designed for. But if I give into my lizard brain and play at a lower Heat level to get the endorphins from unlocking cool stuff at the rate the designers intended, the runs aren't engaging I'm bored senseless by the grind. It's lose-lose. I don't have fun regardless of what I do with the difficulty tuning I have available.
This is what we mean when we say just adding customizable difficulty levels to every game doesn't automatically lead to good outcomes for all players. If some people are bad at the mechanics and also want a low-friction experience, and other people are very good at the mechanics and also want a much higher-friction experience even after adjusting for skill, it's extremely difficult to satisfy both of them, especially given limited development resources. Eventually some design decision is going to be made that works for one camp but not the other, or some incentive structure will push players to one setting over another, or some other kind of brain-spider will goad players into picking a setting that isn't actually the optimal one for their needs. But then sometimes a game will show up with a design sensibility that says, "Fuck it, game's hard, friction's high, the difficulty is what it is, everything we made is designed around it," and it'll end up being a really cool and fun and memorable experience for some people in a way which can't be replicated by making an easy-ish game that's tuned around normal difficulty and then slapping a "make it slightly harder" dial on it at the end of development.
Wyvern on
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
I can appreciate the psychological factors at play when you talk about self-tuning difficulty vs. some kind of external force dictating the difficulty at you. I will aboslutely not argue that there is an experiential difference for many, if not most, people when that is the case.
But I'm not sure there is a solution to that problem other than designing a game that caters to only a specific subset of people who somehow fit within the Venn diagram of difficulty and skill.
Here's a question: If Hades had turned on God Mode by default, or included some kind of similar "hidden" scaling mechanism for player difficulty/skill, would that solve the problem? Let's throw in that you don't even (and never will) know of its existence. Would the game now be fundamentally "fixed" from that perspective, or is there something else that is needed to be done?
It's pretty tough to design a game that suits everyone's tastes. I think the heat system in Hades does a pretty great job, personally, but it's definitely not perfect. Wyvern's post perfectly describes the issue, but I think it would be difficult to solve that problem without making the game worse for a different subset of people.
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
I mean, to solve Wyvern's problem you would just give commensurate rewards for skipping to higher heat levels. Of course those players who do so would find the game shorter than others who didn't skip heat levels, but it's not necessarily a huge detriment to the game's reception. Personally I'd patch in the ability to skip to higher heat around 3 months after release if only to avoid getting "game's too short" review bombs during the initial sales phase.
I can appreciate the psychological factors at play when you talk about self-tuning difficulty vs. some kind of external force dictating the difficulty at you. I will aboslutely not argue that there is an experiential difference for many, if not most, people when that is the case.
But I'm not sure there is a solution to that problem other than designing a game that caters to only a specific subset of people who somehow fit within the Venn diagram of difficulty and skill.
Here's a question: If Hades had turned on God Mode by default, or included some kind of similar "hidden" scaling mechanism for player difficulty/skill, would that solve the problem? Let's throw in that you don't even (and never will) know of its existence. Would the game now be fundamentally "fixed" from that perspective, or is there something else that is needed to be done?
To a certain extent, my argument is that there isn't really a problem to fix.
Hades was designed to be pretty easy. It has extremely broad appeal among people who like relatively easily games and don't have the patience for more challenging roguelikes. This is fine!
Spelunky was designed to be really hard. It has deep appeal among a somewhat niche category of players who like the challenge and don't necessarily find easier games compelling. This, too, is fine!
It's normal and healthy for the industry to contain multiple different design sensibilities which produces different kinds of games which appeal to different groups of people. What I push back against is the idea that every game has to be built around the need to try to scale the difficulty for every possible player, and that designing or enjoying games that are supposed to be difficult is some kind of moral failing. So I don't really like the argument that Hades is the final word on how difficulty should be handled in all games, because it really doesn't work for everybody.
I mean, to solve Wyvern's problem you would just give commensurate rewards for skipping to higher heat levels. Of course those players who do so would find the game shorter than others who didn't skip heat levels, but it's not necessarily a huge detriment to the game's reception. Personally I'd patch in the ability to skip to higher heat around 3 months after release if only to avoid getting "game's too short" review bombs during the initial sales phase.
I get that this is a thought experiment and all but Hades is their highest selling and possibly highest reviewed game of all time so it's not like they were facing the problem of those kinds of review bombs in the first place
I mean, to solve Wyvern's problem you would just give commensurate rewards for skipping to higher heat levels. Of course those players who do so would find the game shorter than others who didn't skip heat levels, but it's not necessarily a huge detriment to the game's reception. Personally I'd patch in the ability to skip to higher heat around 3 months after release if only to avoid getting "game's too short" review bombs during the initial sales phase.
Yeah, that would make the game better for me personally. But if the game was actually made like that, I can bet good money there'd be a bunch of people who would say, "oh, it's taking forever to unlock stuff, but I could get it so fast if I just crank up the heat 20 levels and win once", and then they either slam their heads against it for ten hours without making any progress and quit, or they luck out and do it and then get bored because there's nothing left for them to unlock and they need constant unlocks to stay interested.
At some point, you've gotta just make a call on who your target audience is and optimize the experience for them specifically. And that being the case, the best way to have the most broadly-inclusive industry you can is to have diversity in how games are designed and who they appeal to, so everyone can find games they enjoy. If you go crazy trying to make every game appeal to every person, you're going to homogenize a lot of cool stuff out of the market and end up with players who can't enjoy anything that's actually being made.
I mean, to solve Wyvern's problem you would just give commensurate rewards for skipping to higher heat levels. Of course those players who do so would find the game shorter than others who didn't skip heat levels, but it's not necessarily a huge detriment to the game's reception. Personally I'd patch in the ability to skip to higher heat around 3 months after release if only to avoid getting "game's too short" review bombs during the initial sales phase.
Not saying this is a bad solution, but it does have its drawbacks. There would absolutely be people who attempt to skip ahead just because they want more rewards, start failing as a result, and have a bad time because of it.
You're also implying that Supergiant just doesn't test their difficulty options because they're customizable, which is flat-out wrong.
I have no idea how you're getting that from my posts. They do! I participated in that testing! That I don't like the difficulty system as it exists, and that I think it has negative outcomes that aren't great is in no way equivalent to me implying that they don't test this.
The closest I've said is that I think it produces muddied feedback. Which is true, because unless feedback is linked to runs where you can see which modifiers were turned on/off, you are going to get feedback that's less than clear.
Enjoying the challenge of games and preferring having a Dev designed and tested increasing difficulty than a pick your poison approach are not opposed.
Since you are contrasting the current system with a "Dev designed and tested" one it sounds like you are saying the current system is not well-tested. But I get that this is not your intent.
The Heat system is hugely appealing to me as part of the game's puzzle. Way more fun for me than something like Slay the Spire or Balatro's approaches, where the game just gets harder on a linear path. That's fine, but I was extremely engaged by finding combinations of parameters that work well. No system is going to please everyone, but this one was nigh perfect for me and motivated me to get through the epilogue. Three times, in fact!
The blend of character and player skill progression is just my jam.
Okay, that makes more sense. Obviously the heat system was tested. I was intending to contrast a curated, developer tuned difficulty as opposed to the player picking modifiers - where the whole system has been tested, but it's up to the player to identity combinations.
Balatro and StS are good contrast points on the flaws and strengths of the linear difficulty, I think. Both get a lot harder, but StS is a lot more transformative in it's difficulty, due to the AI changes (and eventually, the double boss at the end of act 3), all of which contribute to different deck pressures
Balatro just mostly takes stuff away - though Eternal and the upcoming perishable cards are good transformative options.
Transformative difficulty is probably my favourite kind, though I do think raw stat increases can be good - you just have to mix em up enough so it's creating transformative difficulty - that is, forcing you to consider solutions for multiple problems, as opposed to being able to simply brute force past any change.
Stuff like X enemies gain a 1-hit shield can be really good here, as long as solutions like wide aoe or quick chip damage attacks remain easily accessible. Likewise, introducing a tough enemy in a swarm of chaff can create really fun tensions. Even more so if you shake things up so some tough + chaff, the chaff are the danger that needs to go down, while in others the chaff serve as distractions and it's the toughie who's gotta be broken.
Hades 2 looks great. Dunno when I'll pick it up, early access is tempting but... I really enjoyed the first on Switch (of course, by the time it's done it'll be Switch 2 time probably but)
literally the only thing I want in the new game is for god mode to be actually dynamic and not just only upwards on every death. that kills experimental builds and causes a sharp cliff for someone that starts succeeding a few times and decides to turn it off back to normal difficulty. I literally had a better learning curve restarting a fresh file without god mode at all and just failing for a while until a few things went right.
I'm happy they seem to have nailed the feel of combat and movement just as well this time around, but it still managed to feel fairly different. Throughts on Zone 1-3 and their bosses below.
I enjoyed the Hecate fight, but the Scylla fight is perfection. The music is amazing, and the flavour is hilarious. She just wants to play music... and kill you! Gonna be fun to see how the extreme measures equivalent of the fight looks like. Only got to cerberus once and he seemed a bit less fun, which is fitting I guess since you gotta punch a good boy . As for the zones it's interesting to see how they mix it up. Erebus is pretty vanilla with no real obstacles outside the enemies, Oceanus has a lot of traps in some rooms, especially one configuration where there was barely any space to move outside the traps. The Mourning Fields seemed pretty harmless until I actually had to fight and it turned out the brambles hurt and the slimes slow you so all the enemies can destroy you :P.
And even in the same engine it feels pretty different due to Melinoes moveset. Her dodge being on a longer cd, but leading into a sprint still feels weird. Even using the swords she doesn't feel quite as aggressive as Zagreus, but that's probably just me not being used to the enemies and having the upgrades I had towards the end of the first game. It does feel like there are alot of enemies that want to punish being in melee, and want to make you use your ranged options. But since ranged attacks with mp barely tickle it still rewards ways to get in and melee even those. So far it feels like mp regen is insanely important since mp using attacks do a ton of damage, and the runs I have got it have been way more stable than the ones without. Blessingwise it's hard to judge what I enjoy most so far. Pretty much all of them seem to be powerful and most have some fun gimmick. Knockbacks don't feel as impactful as in Hades 1, but they only really popped off lategame once you had some synergies going so will be fun to see how it works once I can reliably get through to at least the fourth zone.
So far i'm fucking terrible at this. Not sure if i'm just failing to read the tells correctly or what's going on, just taking a lot of chip damage. Haven't made it past the first boss yet, boo =(
Overall it feels a lot more dangerous than the first game. The key for me was remembering to use my mana each room, it regens every time you enter a new one. The mana using attacks do a *lot* more damage than regular ones while also being aoe.
Mels base cast is also a lot more important than Zags, I use it constantly to make sure I am not getting mobbed.
And finally the Dodge cd means you can't play quite as in your face as you could with Zag. Gotta use casts and mp skills to control and thin out enemy groups.
Trying to stave off buying into the early access for 2 by returning to Hades 1 for epilogue stuff. Cleared my first return run (I've never used God mode, to this point and still haven't switched it on) in... 2 years? more? with a pretty laughably bad bow build, somehow. I feel both that I want to get rehooked on this, and also that I shouldn't, as that one run was enough to utterly tenderize my thumb, this game is kind of brutal on the hands and controller.
My build, for you to stare at the car crash
Bow with Chiron aspect (I actually really like this one). Hammer upgrades: Piercing Volley and Concentrated Volley. This would be kind of good if I could really lock in some damage boons but uhh
Common rarity Drunken Strike (Hangover) on primary attack
Blue Rarity Drunken Flourish (Hangover) on secondary attack (at the VERY end of the run, added Peer Pressure (spreading Hangover)... just in time to fight Hades with nothing to spread it to)
Purple (Epic) Rarity Electric Shot (Zeus lighting) on cast (the first boon of the run, it all went downhill from here) (+ Jolted, but only on the final floor)
Blue Tidal Dash (eventually + damage to bosses added to this)
Athena Bronze Skin and Sure Footing (Defense against attacks and traps), common rarity, naturally. Proud Bearing added on the last floor (partial Call meter at the start of fights). Also Athena Call.
Hermes Quick Recovery and Greater Evasion
Epic After Party (recover to 50% at the end of encounters)
The good: Obviously, it makes up for its horrible lack of damage with every survival effect they insisted on feeding me. Investing in room rerolls is starting to pay off, as I had a surprisingly large amount of them.
The bad: Extremely low DPS, I ate three Death Defiances SLOWLY chipping Hades down. I lost health basically all the time, but After Party kept me generally pretty healthy, the Epic version makes a big difference and I consistently went after more total health as I quickly saw how they weren't going to give me damage basically at all. Aside from After Party, my boons were also very low level AND low rarity. I only got to see Sisyphus, every other friendly encounter was absent on this run, to add insult to injury.
Not surprising, but it's very fun. I did four or five runs last night and I was able to beat the second area once. That second boss fight:
Still getting used to it, but I keep finding myself dodging into those AoE attacks during the Sirens and taking unnecessary damage
The staff is probably my favorite weapon at the moment, very straight forward and works well. I used the blades once and I thought I'd like them more but, to be fair, I had some not so great blessings to synchronize with them. The flames have a very interesting playstyle that takes some getting used to.
As for God blessings, some standouts:
Hestia has a blessing, Glowing Coal if I remember correctly, which turns the cast into a fireball projectile which explodes and then does the binding AoE. It's super dope to be able to shoot the cast. Runner up goes to Zeus who lets you place it nearby and then blast enemies with lightning. I think you need her base cast buff (Scorch on enemies in cast), and then she can offer it later in the run.
Zeus' sprint is fun, though I wish it had just a smidge more range on the activation
Hestia's sprint is okay, but it's absolutely hilariously strong against the mini boss in Act 1 (the root thingy). Thing gets roasted hard.
I love the Hephaestus boon that periodically adds a strong AOE to your regular attacks. I think it's called Anvil Ring. You can always tell when it goes off because it goes BONG! and everything dies. Then you can get the one that adds the Vent status to whatever gets hit, which is like the old Ares status effect, a delayed big hit. But now you can tell from the affliction icon when it's gonna go off, which is a nice QoL upgrade.
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On one hand, I get it. I would love to know what the stereo sound experience would be like, and surely game designers put tons of hours into designing the best soundscapes possible for their games. But I also know that if I leave it on, I will literally not hear anything that happens in half the game, and the rest will be distorted due to lack of dimensionality.
In retrospect I think I understand the line of thinking much more clearly now, because the argument boils down to "game designers shouldn't allow players to do X because people suck at gauging X", and after reading through the discussion I think the latter half of that logic, at least, holds true from this specific perspective.
I died over a hundred times in Spelunky 2 before I won once. And even after getting good enough to win at all, I'll still often die dozens of times between one win and the next. I love Spelunky 2.
There are roguelikes I love which I have never won, and may never win in my lifetime.
In this genre, I have the most fun, and am most engaged, if I'm losing most of the time. If I find that I'm winning most of my runs in a roguelike, then I feel like the game has been solved and I get bored with it and move on.
When a video game likes Hades gets designed, there are design decisions that have to get made about how the target audience is going to interact with it and how much friction they're expected to face. How many times do we expect the average player do die before their first win? What do we expect their win rate to be after their first win? How do we keep players engaged when they're losing all the time at the start? How do we keep players engaged when they're winning a lot later on?
And the decision that was made is, okay, at the start you're losing every game. We keep the player engaged by giving them Darkness on these losing runs, which they spend at the Mirror to power up their character. Eventually, the combination of persistent power-ups and improved familiarity and skill hits a threshold where they can kill Hades. This probably takes 15-30 attempts. Past this point, you're expected to be strong enough to win most of your runs. We'll keep that engaging by drip-feeding you Titan's Blood to slowly unlock new weapons as long as you keep your win rate high. You'll be pushed into varying up your weapon to keep the unlocks flowing, so your wins feel more varied. You'll have to slowly add Heat as you go to keep you from out scaling the game TOO hard.
Those post-game design decisions don't work for me, because I don't WANT to be winning most of my runs. I want to be losing a lot. And the heat system theoretically lets me tune the difficulty in order to get the higher-friction experience that I want, but that doesn't change the fact that the incentive structures they built into the game don't support that play style; they were built to support a low-friction, high-win-rate environment. So if I use high Heat to play how I want, my lizard brain experiences constant FOMO thinking about all the cool weapons I'm supposed to be getting but I'm not because I'm playing the game in a way it wasn't really designed for. But if I give into my lizard brain and play at a lower Heat level to get the endorphins from unlocking cool stuff at the rate the designers intended, the runs aren't engaging I'm bored senseless by the grind. It's lose-lose. I don't have fun regardless of what I do with the difficulty tuning I have available.
This is what we mean when we say just adding customizable difficulty levels to every game doesn't automatically lead to good outcomes for all players. If some people are bad at the mechanics and also want a low-friction experience, and other people are very good at the mechanics and also want a much higher-friction experience even after adjusting for skill, it's extremely difficult to satisfy both of them, especially given limited development resources. Eventually some design decision is going to be made that works for one camp but not the other, or some incentive structure will push players to one setting over another, or some other kind of brain-spider will goad players into picking a setting that isn't actually the optimal one for their needs. But then sometimes a game will show up with a design sensibility that says, "Fuck it, game's hard, friction's high, the difficulty is what it is, everything we made is designed around it," and it'll end up being a really cool and fun and memorable experience for some people in a way which can't be replicated by making an easy-ish game that's tuned around normal difficulty and then slapping a "make it slightly harder" dial on it at the end of development.
But I'm not sure there is a solution to that problem other than designing a game that caters to only a specific subset of people who somehow fit within the Venn diagram of difficulty and skill.
Here's a question: If Hades had turned on God Mode by default, or included some kind of similar "hidden" scaling mechanism for player difficulty/skill, would that solve the problem? Let's throw in that you don't even (and never will) know of its existence. Would the game now be fundamentally "fixed" from that perspective, or is there something else that is needed to be done?
To a certain extent, my argument is that there isn't really a problem to fix.
Hades was designed to be pretty easy. It has extremely broad appeal among people who like relatively easily games and don't have the patience for more challenging roguelikes. This is fine!
Spelunky was designed to be really hard. It has deep appeal among a somewhat niche category of players who like the challenge and don't necessarily find easier games compelling. This, too, is fine!
It's normal and healthy for the industry to contain multiple different design sensibilities which produces different kinds of games which appeal to different groups of people. What I push back against is the idea that every game has to be built around the need to try to scale the difficulty for every possible player, and that designing or enjoying games that are supposed to be difficult is some kind of moral failing. So I don't really like the argument that Hades is the final word on how difficulty should be handled in all games, because it really doesn't work for everybody.
I get that this is a thought experiment and all but Hades is their highest selling and possibly highest reviewed game of all time so it's not like they were facing the problem of those kinds of review bombs in the first place
At some point, you've gotta just make a call on who your target audience is and optimize the experience for them specifically. And that being the case, the best way to have the most broadly-inclusive industry you can is to have diversity in how games are designed and who they appeal to, so everyone can find games they enjoy. If you go crazy trying to make every game appeal to every person, you're going to homogenize a lot of cool stuff out of the market and end up with players who can't enjoy anything that's actually being made.
Not saying this is a bad solution, but it does have its drawbacks. There would absolutely be people who attempt to skip ahead just because they want more rewards, start failing as a result, and have a bad time because of it.
I have no idea how you're getting that from my posts. They do! I participated in that testing! That I don't like the difficulty system as it exists, and that I think it has negative outcomes that aren't great is in no way equivalent to me implying that they don't test this.
The closest I've said is that I think it produces muddied feedback. Which is true, because unless feedback is linked to runs where you can see which modifiers were turned on/off, you are going to get feedback that's less than clear.
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The Heat system is hugely appealing to me as part of the game's puzzle. Way more fun for me than something like Slay the Spire or Balatro's approaches, where the game just gets harder on a linear path. That's fine, but I was extremely engaged by finding combinations of parameters that work well. No system is going to please everyone, but this one was nigh perfect for me and motivated me to get through the epilogue. Three times, in fact!
The blend of character and player skill progression is just my jam.
Balatro and StS are good contrast points on the flaws and strengths of the linear difficulty, I think. Both get a lot harder, but StS is a lot more transformative in it's difficulty, due to the AI changes (and eventually, the double boss at the end of act 3), all of which contribute to different deck pressures
Balatro just mostly takes stuff away - though Eternal and the upcoming perishable cards are good transformative options.
Transformative difficulty is probably my favourite kind, though I do think raw stat increases can be good - you just have to mix em up enough so it's creating transformative difficulty - that is, forcing you to consider solutions for multiple problems, as opposed to being able to simply brute force past any change.
Stuff like X enemies gain a 1-hit shield can be really good here, as long as solutions like wide aoe or quick chip damage attacks remain easily accessible. Likewise, introducing a tough enemy in a swarm of chaff can create really fun tensions. Even more so if you shake things up so some tough + chaff, the chaff are the danger that needs to go down, while in others the chaff serve as distractions and it's the toughie who's gotta be broken.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Did someone mention Hades 2 or something??!
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
Her default starting weapon is a staff but the technical test also had hand scythes as a second weapon.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
Edit: yep, EA is available.
And even in the same engine it feels pretty different due to Melinoes moveset. Her dodge being on a longer cd, but leading into a sprint still feels weird. Even using the swords she doesn't feel quite as aggressive as Zagreus, but that's probably just me not being used to the enemies and having the upgrades I had towards the end of the first game. It does feel like there are alot of enemies that want to punish being in melee, and want to make you use your ranged options. But since ranged attacks with mp barely tickle it still rewards ways to get in and melee even those. So far it feels like mp regen is insanely important since mp using attacks do a ton of damage, and the runs I have got it have been way more stable than the ones without. Blessingwise it's hard to judge what I enjoy most so far. Pretty much all of them seem to be powerful and most have some fun gimmick. Knockbacks don't feel as impactful as in Hades 1, but they only really popped off lategame once you had some synergies going so will be fun to see how it works once I can reliably get through to at least the fourth zone.
I only lost to the first boss the first time, and I've won ever since. But I can't make much progress in the second area.
Anyway I love it so far. Melinoe's magic system is interesting; I'm digging it.
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Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Mels base cast is also a lot more important than Zags, I use it constantly to make sure I am not getting mobbed.
And finally the Dodge cd means you can't play quite as in your face as you could with Zag. Gotta use casts and mp skills to control and thin out enemy groups.
Which is to be expected from a
My build, for you to stare at the car crash
Common rarity Drunken Strike (Hangover) on primary attack
Blue Rarity Drunken Flourish (Hangover) on secondary attack (at the VERY end of the run, added Peer Pressure (spreading Hangover)... just in time to fight Hades with nothing to spread it to)
Purple (Epic) Rarity Electric Shot (Zeus lighting) on cast (the first boon of the run, it all went downhill from here) (+ Jolted, but only on the final floor)
Blue Tidal Dash (eventually + damage to bosses added to this)
Athena Bronze Skin and Sure Footing (Defense against attacks and traps), common rarity, naturally. Proud Bearing added on the last floor (partial Call meter at the start of fights). Also Athena Call.
Hermes Quick Recovery and Greater Evasion
Epic After Party (recover to 50% at the end of encounters)
The good: Obviously, it makes up for its horrible lack of damage with every survival effect they insisted on feeding me. Investing in room rerolls is starting to pay off, as I had a surprisingly large amount of them.
The bad: Extremely low DPS, I ate three Death Defiances SLOWLY chipping Hades down. I lost health basically all the time, but After Party kept me generally pretty healthy, the Epic version makes a big difference and I consistently went after more total health as I quickly saw how they weren't going to give me damage basically at all. Aside from After Party, my boons were also very low level AND low rarity. I only got to see Sisyphus, every other friendly encounter was absent on this run, to add insult to injury.
The second boss is a lot tougher. I've failed twice now but I think I have the third now that I know the low health strategy.
The overall boss battle though? *chef's kiss*
And it can't be said enough times that the second boss is perfection when it comes to design and theme.
It does seem to have dead zones, but that's fun to play around, it's area is huge
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The staff is probably my favorite weapon at the moment, very straight forward and works well. I used the blades once and I thought I'd like them more but, to be fair, I had some not so great blessings to synchronize with them. The flames have a very interesting playstyle that takes some getting used to.
As for God blessings, some standouts:
Zeus' sprint is fun, though I wish it had just a smidge more range on the activation
Hestia's sprint is okay, but it's absolutely hilariously strong against the mini boss in Act 1 (the root thingy). Thing gets roasted hard.
If there's one thing I'm never dubious of when it comes to Supergiant releases, it's design and theme.