How about 22cans
Yup. The excitement comes from giving it to Mikey, then the realization hits that their plan seems doomed to failure.
There’s a clean save speedrun category, and people do, in fact.
Wow. Such wisdom. Will you teach me more about life, with or without the capital L?
Yeah you and me both, brother. But I’m starting to get a little back into action games (after all, I loved the arcades as a kid — I just didn’t have enough money to get good at them) and now tend to do more thinky gaming on a board with others. I think imma try Spelunky next.
Those are people that already have playing experience, but I guess that actually proves the original point of not needing meta-progression, duh.
This concept might be invalidated if some expert can win a clean run of Rogue Legacy though.
This line sold me.
-Tom
Spelunky is not for you. I mean it this time. Seriously. Spelunky isn’t even for me.
-Tom
Korb on music and Jen Zee on art are, for my money, superstar talents operating at the height of their powers right now, in an environment that really lets them show what they can do with every new game. I don’t love every single thing Supergiant has made, but I love that they’ve kept the core team together for a decade now and everyone seems to be happy and making great stuff.
Touche. Or Toucahe.
Hades was my game of the year last year, when it was in beta. Now it’s done it again. Say what you will about early access, or whether that’s “fair” or not, but I’ve never felt the desire to do that before. This game is special. Buy it.
OK, since we’re talking about Hades and not breakfast cereals, I have a question. I’ve been casually playing off and on since launch on the Switch, and I’ve seen hints here and there (i.e., RSS feed headlines for gaming sites) that there a more “optimal” builds. Things to focus on to improve your play. Maybe something to do with the dashing ability I don’t use anywhere near enough?
Is this the kind of game where I need to research build trees and optimal metagame carryover effects, or can I just muddle through and have a reasonable chance of semi-success? I’m not actually looking to finish this thing. Just feel competent.
You can muddle through. It just takes practice. But remember:
ABD
Always Be Dashing
Oh, I am. And I’m damn charming as well. Possibly even debonair.
Jump into the main thread for the game here, it’s been super active lately and we’ve been talking about these things! Generally though I would say that you can win at the base difficulty with each weapon in a lot of ways as you grab the various meta-progressions, and then as you crank up the difficulty later on you want to have some combination of more thoughtful builds and/or improved playing skill. All of which will mostly come naturally as you figure things out: there is no reason to visit a wiki unless you want to.
This presupposes that one is capable of or interested in getting better/gud :P
I’m alllll about meta-progression that slowly turns me into a roving god of death.
Or god of lightning. Or love. Whatever I’m focusing on in a given run.
This is actually one of the myriad speedrun categories for this game! I think the WR is around 20 minutes game-time.
edit: oh shit the thread got like 30 new posts in it while I was playing D&D and not finishing this post. I’m sure someone already said so.
There aren’t many choices you can make on Boons in the game that’ll make a given build worse unless you already have a particular build setup. So, in that vein, yeah, muddling through will get you decently far, especially after you snag good mirror upgrades and keepsakes that improve longevity and effectiveness.
That said, for sure, there are a handful of “builds” that just feel like they put the game onto easy mode. They might get balanced out at some point. Studying this stuff via wikis and the game subreddit or whatever is totally a valid way to come in a little better-prepared to kick ass. But even a relative gaming nooblet like myself managed to figure out some good one-two punches just playing runs normally.
Wasn’t there talk about a Switch patch to improve performance? Is that happening? Has it already happened and frame drops are still noticeable to very noticeable (depending on who you go by)?
They responded to a question about improving Switch performance on their AMA, but it was very vague. Something like ‘we definitely might do that’. It hasn’t happened yet.
This is beautiful and gave me a delightful laugh right when I needed one. Thank you.
This talk about metaprogression being at odds with WANG nature of Roguelike genre misses that Hades is innovative in that regard too.
There is a progression system that gives you flat bonuses (darkness and gems improve your character and give you additional useful rooms in the dungeon) but they’re balanced by self-imposed challenges. I think you can complete the main story without ever going there, but to progress through weapon upgrades and individual characters storylines you need items you only get for your first victory over bosses on specific difficulty level with a specific weapon. So if you want more of that ambrosia or titan blood to make your weapons stronger you have to add punishment to your run. Like deadlier traps or more enemies or stronger versions of boss fights. It’s brilliant, really. I remember something similar being in RPGs as far as Fable 1 but I rarely see things like that implemented well. Dead Cells is a similar game, but it just has plain difficulty levels not unlike Diablo 2.
I wonder if he should try a smarter game, like maybe some strategy game or a wargame if he can handle it.