Can you even escape from Hades?
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It also helps that rather than repeat the same few lines, each NPC will only initiate a conversation with you once or so per run. This also forces dialogue to unfold little by little instead of in one long binge.
Endlessly repeated lines can kill immersion.
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I'll move the goalposts to match what I was trying to say: each voice-acted character has hundreds of unique lines, specific to dozens of situations. The characters are much deeper than any other game I've played.
Skyrim might have it beaten on time if you lay all the clips end-to-end, but most characters are very shallow, with nowhere near as many unique lines (and often sharing lines between bit roles).
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@error said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
I'll move the goalposts to match what I was trying to say: each voice-acted character has hundreds of unique lines, specific to dozens of situations. The characters are much deeper than any other game I've played.
Skyrim might have it beaten on time if you lay all the clips end-to-end, but most characters are very shallow, with nowhere near as many unique lines (and often sharing lines between bit roles).
Skyrim also has the same voice actor for several different characters, which makes it feel even more shallow.
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@error said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
I'll move the goalposts to match what I was trying to say: each voice-acted character has hundreds of unique lines, specific to dozens of situations.
How many playthroughs have you done? 12, you say? How many lines you get from each NPC each time around? 5? 10?
Don't get me wrong. I don't doubt dialogues are well done in this game. But these numbers are just a bit too high to be realistic.
The characters are much deeper than any other game I've played.
Maybe, maybe not. Character depth is awfully subjective thing except when it's egregiously bad. And when we only look at the games you have played - something I don't know and don't have any chance of guessing right - it's even harder to say whether Hades is exceptionally good at it or not (especially since I haven't played Hades myself).
But I can list quite a few games that have very well developed characters with hidden depth. Psychonauts. Spec Ops: The Line. Undertale. Phoenix Wright series. Morrowind (although only some of them). Some GTA games too.
One thing is for certain - Greek gods are almost all evil and treacherous while pretending to be virtuous, so character depth is pretty much guaranteed to some extent in every game that has them.
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@Gąska said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
How many playthroughs have you done? 12, you say?
Over 100, 12 of which I beat the last boss. Most deaths are to him, by far
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@Gąska said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
How many playthroughs have you done? 12, you say? How many lines you get from each NPC each time around? 5? 10?
He
said a couple posts upreiterated while I was writing this post, 100+ runs, 12 full runs (escape from Hades). I haven't done nearly that many, but I can confirm that there is a shitload of context-sensitive dialogue. For example, when you get killed, usually Zagreus will make a comment about the specific enemy and situation after being transported back to the hub world, and Hypnos will say a few lines about it, also relevant to whatever just happened. Depending on what gods you run into during you run, and the order in which you see them, they'll say different things, sometimes about the previous gods you've encountered. The game is full of stuff like that.
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@hungrier I don't doubt that the game is great and they've put a lot of effort to make every playthrough feel unique. But I doubt they've put as much effort as @error says. It just doesn't make sense logistically. Why would any game studio record 5000 lines when an average player will only hear 200 of them? Do you know how much it costs to record voices? Especially with real, hired, professional voice actors (which I presume is the case here because the few snippets I heard don't sound like an amateur's work)?
But of course feelz > realz, and the hard facts don't really matter for enjoyment. It's just, it irks me when people make up bullshit quantitative facts when it's not even necessary to mention them at all - especially when what they made up is easily proven wrong.
PS just to be a jerk, I'll point out that a player who's just playing for fun and isn't actively looking for repeated dialogue lines, isn't the best source on how much the dialogue lines repeat.
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@Gąska I don't think either @error or myself is writing a textbook about the number of lines in this game, but as you yourself mentioned, there are studios who will go to that much effort and cost. Skyrim has 10000 voiced characters all saying the "arrow to the knee" line over and over. Driver SF has some ridiculous amount of unique recorded dialogue, a lot of which will be missed by most players. I don't know if it's literally true that Hades has thousands of unique lines per character or whatever quantitative threshold, but they've put a lot of effort into it and it shows.
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@hungrier said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
Skyrim has 10000 voiced characters all saying the "arrow to the knee" line over and over.
And an average player hears most of them within a single playthrough. Except for the imperial/stormcloak war, there's very little content in Skyrim that will be seen by one player but likely missed by another. The polar opposite of Hades.
Driver SF has some ridiculous amount of unique recorded dialogue, a lot of which will be missed by most players.
Allegedly. All the same caveats apply as with Hades. It doesn't have to be ridiculously many, only enough to feel like ridiculously many to the player who only hears any of these lines 5 or 6 times every hour of gameplay. Developers know this, so it would be really weird if they actually blew most of their budget on recording hundreds of lines of never-heard dialogue.
I don't know if it's literally true that Hades has thousands of unique lines per character or whatever quantitative threshold
I don't know either, and neither does @error. And what makes his claims especially stupid is that regardless of how many lines there are exactly - or even the order of magnitude - it's still undisputable that...
they've put a lot of effort into it and it shows.
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Just FYI the devs have made an infographic about the voice lines, to just kinda shut down the confusion I'll post it here...
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@Gąska said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
And an average player hears most of them within a single playthrough. Except for the imperial/stormcloak war, there's very little content in Skyrim that will be seen by one player but likely missed by another. The polar opposite of Hades.
It depends on what you count as a playthrough. If you pick it up and die to the first enemy, that's technically one run. Then you get bounced to the hub world and you can screw around for a bit or go again. If you make it to the last boss and win, that's also a single run and as previously mentioned, you only get to see the credits after a few of these.
One run can range from minutes up to the better part of an hour, compared to one multi-hour playthrough of Skyrim. If you take that as a playthrough then obviously you won't get Skyrim levels of dialogue, but Hades is a rogue-like so a big part of the experience is playing it over and over. In that case, a full playthrough could be everything you do until you beat the last boss for the first time, or until you get credits, or the super-duper double secret last ending, or 100% of lines of voice dialogue heard.
Hades, as posted above, has 300k words, which is a bit higher than the figure I've seen for Driver SF: 270k. I couldn't easily find the number for Skyrim; maybe it's in the same range.
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@hungrier there also aren't really that many voiced characters, especially compared to something open-world like Skyrim, which makes it easier to spend that budget on more lines
I haven't played it yet but a bunch of friends stream playthroughs of it...
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@hungrier according to this:
Fallout 4 has 111k lines, which is more than Skyrim and Fallout 3 combined - so each would have about 50k, or maybe F3 had 30k and Skyrim had 70k or something. But that's lines, not words. It also gives a number for Witcher 3 - 450k words.
These are all games that take between 50 and 100 hours to complete ONCE, and a significant part of gameplay is spent doing nothing but listening to dialogues. In contrast, in both Hades and Driver the dialogues are a very tiny part of gameplay, time-wise - and yet, they have half as much lines.
There are two possible explanations. Either developers of Driver actually produced enough dialogue for their racing game to fill a 30-hour RPG game, spending at least million bucks on voice actors alone. Or something's wrong with those reported numbers.
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@Gąska I think the answer is that there is a lot of dialog in Hades and Driver, but not as much in total as in some of the other games listed. But since Hades feels like a short game, its use of dialog feels dense and sophisticated.
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@dkf but that's the thing, the numbers suggest there IS as much dialogue.
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Anyway, now that we've figured out the mystery of the word count, I've also made some progress:
- I beat the minotaur, both mid-boss and the actual boss fight with Theseus. Shortly after that, in the next area I got poisoned to death by some rats.
- I got a fishing rod, which is not something I was expecting. So far I've successfully fished one creature, but still don't know what effect, if any, that has on the game.
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@hungrier said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
I beat the minotaur, both mid-boss and the actual boss fight with Theseus. Shortly after that, in the next area I got poisoned to death by some rats.
Wow. I've only died between Theseus and the super sekrit (should be obvious) final boss once or twice. The poison is a PITA, but there's a reusable fountain in each room that cures it instantly. You'll probably want to stand next to it whenever you can.
You'll get a healing fountain when you find the key to advance; not a full heal unless you have a perk to that effect.@hungrier said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
I got a fishing rod, which is not something I was expecting. So far I've successfully fished one creature, but still don't know what effect, if any, that has on the game.
I love the fishing game! You take the fish to the chef in the lounge and he'll give you a reward based on the rarity of your catch (anything from a few gems or a key, to a diamond).
They don't really explain the mechanics of the game so I will tell you... Push the button exactly once when the bobber sinks. There will sometimes be up to 3 "fake out" rumbles. If you press it on a fakeout, or if you wait too long after a real bite, then you miss your chance. There's a splash sound effect and the bobber should completely submerge on a real bite.
Look for a shiny spot in the water and/or a bell sound effect after clearing a room. (There are a few very similar chimes.)
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@error said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
The poison is a PITA, but there's a reusable fountain in each room that cures it instantly.
I had figured that out from previous rooms, but between the rats, traps and the screen being full of all sorts of garbage I couldn't find it in that room. Not that it likely would've helped too much, since it was counting down single digits of HP already.
fishing info
I'll try going to the chef after my current run (first one with the fishing rod; I suspended it to get back to "work")
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@hungrier said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
I suspended it to get back to "work"
The format of the game actually makes it great for the Switch. Each encounter is a few minutes of furious action, followed by a peaceful room transition, which is a great time to put the machine to sleep
and get off the toilet.
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@error said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
I'm really impressed that after twelve escapes and seeing the "real" ending, there's still fresh voice-acted context-sensitive dialogue!
This game has by far the most written/spoken content I've ever seen in a game. It manages to be very witty throughout, and it never gets stale.
Time to hunt for the epilogue!
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Status: I made it to the totally un-obvious boss, Redacted. I got pretty close
but not quite good enough to pwn him on my first try.
Also, from earlier in the same run:
I totally could've death defied that, but computer said no
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@pie_flavor welcome back! Hope you're not too depressed with all the snarky mentions!
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@hungrier said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
I got pretty close
but not quite good enough to pwn him on my first try.
Good job! You almost made it to the second phase.
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@Gąska How can I be, when NodeBB is too retarded to even show me them?
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@pie_flavor In fact, I've only ever been mentioned twice in history!
https://i.imgur.com/FYqbidK.png
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@pie_flavor you forgot to edit out the notification count too.
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@Gąska oh, those are all followed threads and @obeselymorbid bumping.
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@pie_flavor ah, I didn't noticed you filtered by mentions only (in fact, I didn't even know you could do that). Anyway, it seems like notifications get vaporized after 7 days? Good to know.
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@Gąska oh to be back on discourse again...
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@pie_flavor said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
@Gąska oh to be back on discourse again...
And people think I'm the deviant.
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@Gąska said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
Anyway, it seems like notifications get vaporized after 7 days? Good to know.
It's like those auto-close topics that self-delete after a while Jeff was talking about. Keeps the forum running smooth!
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I guess this goes in this thread?
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Heat level 5
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I just got killed... by Charon.
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@error so you're like, double-dead now?
Edit: suddenly the Dark Souls "you died" screen started bothering me.
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@error oh yea that happens apparently
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@Gąska said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
@error so you're like, double-dead now?
Edit: suddenly the Dark Souls "you died" screen started bothering me.
Well, Zagreus is
3/4thsa purebred (I consulted the mythology of his parents) god, so I don't think I'd describe him as dead - even after he dies.Edit: oh geez, there's a bit where Dionysus tells you to tell the bard Orpheus that you're both the same person as a jest - apparently this is a reference to some scholars IRL thinking that
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@error Flagged for unmarked spoilers about academic bickering
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Status: I should've got the Darker Thirst instead of unlocking the admin chamber. At least now I'll have a permanent reminder of how badly I got owned, both in each of my runs and in my spending decision.
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@hungrier It's a poor choice of priorities, but you'll need the chamber if you want to finish out the sidequests for each supporting character.
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So, other than the praise about exceptionally much voice dialogue and @error playing it 24/7 because he’s snowed in while Ted Cruz is busy lassoing the sun back from Cancun... is the game worth getting?
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@topspin If you like Supergiant Games (previously known for Bastion, Transistor and Pyre) and/or roguelikes, you'll probably have a great time. Check out some gameplay footage if you're not sure.
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@hungrier Update: Looking at the list of predictions, I realized that I still hadn't done the contractor one with four diamonds as a reward, and I had a shitload of gems. So rather than trading for it (which I probably wouldn't have had enough for), I knocked off a few cosmetic upgrades and now I've got darker thirst.
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@hungrier said in Can you even escape from Hades?:
@hungrier Update: Looking at the list of predictions, I realized that I still hadn't done the contractor one with four diamonds as a reward, and I had a shitload of gems. So rather than trading for it (which I probably wouldn't have had enough for), I knocked off a few cosmetic upgrades and now I've got darker thirst.
You can always trade up for the valuable items. There are sooo many things to buy, the list will just keep growing. I don't think I'll ever be able to buy it all.
10 gems = 1 key
5 keys = 1 nectar = 50 gems
1 diamond = 10 nectar = 500 gems
1 ambrosia = 2 diamonds = 20 nectar = 1000 gems
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@error I know, that's why I mentioned it. But rather than spend 1000 gems (which I don't have) for two diamonds, instead I spent like 150 on random crap and got four.
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Run #32 was pretty good and I got to the 2nd phase of the
Redactedfight
but ultimately didn't make it
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Me looking for fishing spots after clearing a room:
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@hungrier The rarest and most valuable fish spawn on the surface. I've seen 3 fishing spots in the final boss room, but only survived to fish one of them.
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Status: "Beat" the mid-stage minotaur while equipped with a couple Demeter boons, and as the fight ended and he walked off, he was still taking damage from the chill effect.
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Status: I think Chaos just called me a spaz
