“Mythology, by its nature, is told and retold”: Hades 2 dev on changing its controversial ending

Last year, Hades 2 left early access, and Mark liked it! He did note, however, that its ending was potentially going to end up polarising, and with the accuracy of The Fates, this came to pass: Supergiant changed the game’s true ending a month after its 1.0 launch because enough people didn’t like it. This didn’t land with universal praise either, for a myriad of reasons, but it stuck, and in a recent interview, the developer’s creative director Greg Kasavin shared his thoughts regarding the process of making such a change.

Explaining to GamesRadar that while “in general, people loved” the roguelike, some “weren’t happy with how it ended,” and “they made that clear.” So in turn, Supergiant “pursued the same process that we had all along, essentially, which is to consider what we can do, consider the feedback, ask ourselves, ‘Are there ways that we can address some of this feedback to improve the experience for people who are unhappy without making it worse for people who are happy?'”

Kasavin goes on to explain that the team questioned whether they could retain the “soul” of the thing they had made, and where they could stay true to what they had envisioned, while still addressing the criticism. He does believe that “some of those players appreciated the changes,” and that the new ending is ultimately “better than before.” But he had some further words on ideas around story being a static thing.

“There’s something about story that seems immutable, right? It’s like, you can make balance changes or whatever, but you can’t change a story. But the truth is, during early access, we’re iterating on all parts of the game. We’re iterating on individual conversations. We’re adjusting dialog here and there. We’re adding conversations where there are gaps between certain parts of the story. So in that respect, it’s really just the same process that we used all along, but it was sort of as spotlighted [as it was] because it happened to be the true ending of the game, and one of the main things that we added in version 1.0.”

He even noted he felt it was appropriate for Hades 2 to make such a change, given the whole mythological inspirations it takes. “Mythology, by its nature, is told and retold. There are retellings of things. I try to think back, how were these classic myths from thousands of years ago, how were they distributed? They weren’t, you know, distributed on Steam. They were told and retold by storytellers.”

In principal, I agree with the idea that story should be malleable. I think games are even quite good at this, in that that way you and I get from point A to point B will likely be largely different, assuming there’s enough freedom. But to me, changing the ending is more akin to fixing it into place, to say “don’t worry, we’ve told the story correctly now,” which I admit is not a particularly generous reading. I think I ultimately feel concern with this onus towards always responding to feedback, always having to make some kind of change. Death by a thousand cuts, or by a thousand updates. Not sure I have an answer on this one. Uh, Zagreus is hot? Yeah, that’ll do.