“I wish Supergiant would get the roguelite bug out of their system and make sequels to Bastion and then Transistor finally.”
Was what I typed in our group chat. The three of us are mid to late 30s with me being the oldest by 3 months.
To say it went over like a brick balloon would be an understatement. So, I wanted to see if fellow game players had thoughts on it. Am I crazy? Do you agree?
All 4 games are great. And I do enjoy the one and done deal of the first 2. I don’t mind finishing a game in a few hours. If anything, that’s actually a bonus nowadays. Most games I stop halfway and never finish.
However, if you were to just focus on finishing the main story and consider that enough, I think you could finish Hades just as quickly. So to me Hades is just the same kind of game but with more replayability.
tbh, I loved SuperGiant’s themes and aesthetics, but not their gameplay. So often early games of Bastion and Transistor felt squishy, or like I was playing underwater - the response loop from button push to effect on screen seemed laggy. Tried both on various platforms, never really got past that feeling. lovely soundtracks tho
Bastion is a 6/10 beat-em-up with 10/10 art, music, and voice acting. I enjoyed that game a lot (and still listen to the soundtrack on road trips), but boy does the atmosphere carry the weight of an otherwise average game.
Pretty forgivable since it was their first effort. Hades feels nice and crisp while keeping all the other points strong, too.
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Bastion was just not my cup of tea. Somehow the fighting felt too chaotic for me. I mean, it felt like it was just button mashing, no matter how much I tried to have some tactic for it.
Not saying it is a bad game, I can see why people like it. But from that point of view, no, I don’t need another Bastion.
And to be honest I had the same feeling when I played Hades. I felt more like I was dependent upon getting certain modifiers and weapons together otherwise I just was not going to make any progress. And I don’t think that’s a critique of the game itself it’s 100% in my abilities to play that sort of game. And from a personal taste standpoint my personal taste go towards bastion and transistor.
Part of the appeal of Hades for me is how it forces you to learn how to fight with different combinations of weapons and modifiers, as well as how differently those weapons play.
different people like different things, sounds like your friends like rougish games.
I enjoyed bastion, it was probably my favorite game of its year. I don’t care enough about hades to even give it the time of day, no matter how hot they made zagreus. With few exceptions, I don’t really like rougish games. The few that I do like I’d rather they be long form rpgs so that I can have a build long enough to enjoy it for a while.
That said, studios should be allowed to make the games they want to make. Forcing them to do art against their will results in bad art.
Just for a bit of clarification I’m not talking about forcing them to do anything This is simply from a consumer standpoint, my wish I guess.
Hades did straight numbers, not a shocker they’d go for another. Couldn’t see Transistor or Bastion getting sequels, (Or Pyre but… lol Pyre.) and more importantly, I’d rather they tell new stories.
I enjoyed Bastion and Transistor.
I also preferred Hades to either.
I loved Bastion and Transistor and wished for sequels for both. But SG clearly seemed to prefer to not make sequels for its games all these years; to my knowledge, it has never made one. I’m not sure what or who changed at the company, but Hades 2 is an anomaly.
Has anyone interviewed someone at SG to ask sequel questions? If not, maybe someone will once H2 gets closer to officially shipping.
I honestly preferred no sequls, everytime something new. I haven’t played pyre and hades 2. While I liked hades, I was a bit sad when I heard hades 2, instead of something new.
I’m not an expert, but money (sales) is probably the reason. How many of their previous games sold vs Hades.
Also, maybe it’s a bit cynnical to think of it this way, but hades 2 would require much less effort compared to making something new and it will churn sales as the first one has been a success. Additionally, they probably already had good idea and materials for additions to hades. So why not make hades 2 out of them. Maybe after that they will work on something new.
There can be a tricky balance between building sequels or something new. Sometimes there is more you can do in a world, and people enjoy returning to worlds when there is good reason to.
I think the recent Doom reboot trilogy is a masterclass example. Not everyone enjoys each game, people often have different favorites. But the point is they’re all Doom and yet id Software did something unique with each one. New mechanics, new ways to play, pushing boundaries of what came before.
Of course, with Greek mythology, there is plenty more source material to explore and build on in a setting like Hades. They certainly hit a great formula to do it, and The People® were clamoring for it. But with SG’s established preferences for going after new ideas instead of sequels, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them do something else after Hades 2. Or who knows, maybe they’ll be able to grow enough to work on multiple games at once. That could come with its own challenges, but plenty of studios have done it.
Hades 2 is still in early access, leading me to believe they want to fine tune it and move on
I agree, but mostly because I dislike roguelikes. They get too repetitive and turn into a slog, and the success of your runs is often entirely dependent on which items you find.
I’d much rather have a tight, concise game with handmade maps. IME, roguelikes just pull the old NES/SNES trick of “well we can’t fit more data on the game cart, so just make the game harder to force players to replay it over and over again. That will artificially inflate the game length.”
Bastion and Transistor don’t need sequels, but I do wish they’d stop with the roguelikes.
Thats really not what roguelikes are. They wouldnt be one of the most popular genres ever if the base was laziness. Its more like being able to focus fully on the mechaincs/gameplay instead of spending countless hours designing worlds that either end up feeling repetitive anyway or you need to spend another few chunks of countless hours to make it feel good.
Besides, Hades is by faaaaaar their most successful game, it would be objectively stupid not to keep going with that at least for a while.
I dislike roguelikes and soulslikes. It feels like that cuts out the vast majority of indie games being made nowadays.
Be careful what you wish for, they could start making Vampire Survivor likes!
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Maybe they should, the genre has potential, just look at Deep Rock Survivor
I think I’m kind of done with Supergiant regardless. In both Bastion and Transistor, it felt like they had two out of three components to their gameplay loop but were missing something to prevent it from feeling repetitive; despite short runtimes, both very much did feel repetitive. I didn’t even try Pyre, and I have little faith it would be for me. I do love roguelikes and can enjoy -lites from time to time as well, and Hades got a lot of buzz. However, I actually quite disliked worlds 3 and 4, and the level generation is among the worst I’ve seen in the genre. I get the sense that Hades is probably most responsible for people who claim they want “handcrafted levels” as opposed to procedural generation, because perhaps those people haven’t seen it done well if they’ve only ever played Hades, a game with level generation so monotonous that the voice actor will call out a room we all recognize.
To be honest, I get what you’re saying here although I’ve played all their games. I think of the bunch I disliked Bastion the most. It felt like an empty PSX game. I liked Transistor, but the catch is that it needed to be played pretty much surrounding their pause-the-battle technique which was okay but it really kind of sucks to me whenever I have any game use this technique. I would have much rather it had been a full turn-based game. I like turn-based games though. There is some viking game that plays like a janky-table top where it’s semi-turnbased and it was absolutely awful for it.
Mind you, I like Transistor due to its story. Which I think is the same reason why I liked Pyre. The setting, it was quite nice and if I could remove the mini-games from the game I would. Hades, I liked because they took characters the size of tic-tacs and turned them into three-dimensional beings. That was quite nice. They played on a lot of anime tropes. The gameplay was good, but it was a bit too challenging for me. I dropped it relatively early due to this. I pretty much sit in the same camp now. I wondered if maybe I had aged out of their target audience but I will probably never play one of their games again. It’s just not my bag.
Hades was really hard for me too, and I played upwards of 100+ runs before beating [redacted], and another bunch before finally turning on God mode, where I think I got up to about 20% damage reduction before it stabilized.
At this point I want to push the story forward (I’m in the epilogue) but I’ve already played so much I need to wait more for the battling to be fun again.
I have absolutely no idea how you did it! My hands gave out. I mean I was literally hurting. I said no game should be physically hurting me if it’s not DDR and I am not poorly stomping my way through the rhythm =P! So yeah, I stopped playing. That’s when I decided to reach out, because I couldn’t imagine I was the only one with this issue. More power to you if you stuck with it. Get that gold for the both of us =)
I never finished bastion but I really liked it. I should replay it
You really should.
I didn’t move Bastion or Transistor, they never clicked for me but I loved Hades.
To be honest, I think they only made a sequel to Hades because it was so popular. I actually quite like that they create new universes every game. I also like the core gameplay of Pyre (not so much the mini-games) unlike most people. It sort of feels like Ballmasterz turned into a super cereal game to me. It probably inspired the show, which ever came first.
I watched this video a while back. Apparently, they were looking to develop a universe that they could make a sequel in. They ended up with Hades.
I sadly have little interest in watching things about Hades as because I am so burnt out from asking for accessibility assistance (I actually think I did it multiple times in case they didn’t catch it) and I am just frustrated with them as a whole and this post reignited it. But I am glad that they got what they wanted because Greek mythology is expansive. I think someone else will be happy about it. I just think I realized I feel relatively “done” with the company as a whole =/!
Nah I think they do pansexual roguelikes best. More hot roguelike characters please. Especially if they’re anthros like Asterius. :3
To be honest, I felt like Hades was like GOOFILY sexual. But I get why it works for most people. I just was like…wut!? People are horny for Hades folks, including my sibby. So like, it works. I just don’t play games for that kind of stuff is all. I also liked their art more when it was air-brushy over the hard comic lines. Which is kind of crazy, because I like comic book art. It’s just like…too much for me. My sibby grabbed Hades 2 and I can’t bring myself to play it.
Also they’re assholes of accessibility. It’s so hard to play Hades because outside of the gauntlets you’ve gotta mash buttons to get through the whole damn thing. I know I am not the only one who’s written to them about this, but they never gave a shit about it. I figured I was pretty much done with them because I have had such positive responses from so many indie developers on accessibility options. Which I think to be absolutely honest, should be a standard for games with larger budgets. Which they for sure had, as far as indie games go. eh.
That was a rant and a half.
Accessibility options are woefully limited in most games. All I personally need is a UI scaling option for larger fonts on the TV vs a monitor, but most of the games I play, the only options in there are for changing the color palette of the UI if you have 1 of 2 or 3 types of colorblindness and that’s it. Even though I am not in need of them, I do like seeing a metric fuckton of options in every single tab as I am a firm believer in more options is always better than fewer already, and this is doubly so for helping people with disabilities get some assistance to experience the game as close to intended as possible.
My partner has a rare type of colorblindness that makes certain comfy games completely unplayable. I wanna scream at the screen, because I wish that it were easier in this life to make things more accessible for all people in general. I sit in the same camp with you, the more the merrier when it comes to support. I get sad when I open a game, and I see nothing (cause the first thing I do is always check the options). I tend to not buy games with certain things like flashy effects, qtes, or a need for fast reflects. As you can tell, I’m not PVE-er =P!
I also have a rare type of colorblindness, and it sucks when certain parts of a game are seemingly locked behind color perception. Like, if there’s going to be a reflex mechanic that necessitates a distinction between two colors, please let me customize those two colors in the options. And don’t limit it to deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia; just let me choose the fucking colors. Some games do it right, but most just assume everyone can perceive colors the same way
I am not sure if you even keep playing games like that but often it’s those ones that end up having to get returned. Which is such a bummer, because it so easily could be solved. Most times when you reach out to the company though (or devs, which ever) unless it’s a really small team they will typically ignore your requests. Any time I have had accessibility requests, without hesitation smaller teams have implemented them almost immediately. Likewise they’ve asked if there is anything else that I might need. I know we’re getting better at accommodating people, but there are still people who believe you can just “get gud” and work through these problems. When in actuality, they game-ending experiences. Which really sucks. Thanks for sharing by the by =)
I’m with you on wishing they’ll move on after Hades 2, but I don’t want sequels to Transistor and Bastion. I’d prefer they make something new again.
But really I can’t blame Supergiant for playing it safe because the last time they tried to make something truly unique it bombed hard (Pyre).
They’re obviously a developer that I would be interested in anything new that they put out. But both bastion and transistor were two of my all-time favorites from the indie scene. And I would really and truly love to revisit both of those worlds in a sequel.
Agreed on this. They’re just so good at making new interesting things that it feels like a bit of a shame to waste time on sequels. I even really enjoyed Pyre, despite it being generally considered the weakest of their games; it was such an interesting setting and premise.
Bastion and Transistor both had very satisfying conclusions to their stories and revisiting either doesn’t feel necessary.
