Releasing a game in early access puts a lot of developers in a strange balancing act where players are more forgiving because development clearly isn’t finished, but the launch has to really step the game up past what players have seen. Few developers have taken as full advantage of this type of strategy as Supergiant Games with Hades, which first entered early access on the Epic Games Store back in 2018.
In a recent interview with Game Rant, Supergiant Creative Director Greg Kasavin commented on this type of development process and where the decision to make the game Early Access stemmed from. Given the stellar reception that this title has enjoyed, it would appear that Hades certainly did manage to make the best of what Supergiant intended when putting the game into the hands of players so early on.
As a part of the same interview where Kasavin revealed his favorite weapon aspect in Hades, the developer was also asked about what led Supergiant to taking on such a new type of game, such as the rogue-like elements. Apparently, the decision to make the game early access was one of the first aspects of development that Supergiant locked in when initially brainstorming the next game before the Greek mythology had even been established. Kasavin’s explanation as to why was quite simple:
With Hades, we identified that we wanted to make an Early Access game first and foremost, to see what we could build in partnership with our community.
From how well Hades has been received by critics and fans, this focus on community input clearly had the intended effect of ensuring that the game would be a real crowd-pleaser. The game was clearly already pretty far along in development when it entered early access, as far as getting the fundamentals of combat, upgrades, and collective progress put together. Still, the last two years were able to give Supergiant a number of new perspectives on the title’s development that likely wouldn’t have been possible without putting it in the hands of the community and asking for feedback. That’s not to say there weren’t challenges, though; indeed, Kasavin would go on to say,
Development of this game was filled with unique challenges for our team! We’ve never created a game in Early Access before, and that profoundly affected many aspects of how we worked. The rogue-like structure was also very new for us. Our previous games are for the most part quite tightly scripted, and we would pore over every detail in each scene. With Hades, we needed to embrace the randomness integral to this style of game, and accept that this game was going to be so big that none of us would ever see everything possible that can happen in it. That shift of mindset was scary and exciting! I think we found a good middle ground between that rogue-like sense of randomness and the narrative-driven, crafted feel of our past games.
Early access, however, isn’t always such a boon for developers, as player expectations can lead to some titles launching with persisting bugs that the community may have overlooked, hoping they would be fixed before release. While Hades did launch with a few issues, it has joined Supergiant’s roster of games with the amount of polish that players would expect from any title releasing without the early access labeling.
Hades is available now for PC and Switch.
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