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Hades 2 developers decided to turn a bug into a feature after one of the roguelike's characters made an unexpected move.
This article contains minor character spoilers for Hades 2.
In Hades 2, you might sometimes be met on your adventures by Nemesis, known in greek myth as the personification of jealousy and the anger of the gods. Nem, who is keen to prove herself as superior to protagonist Melinoë, will occasionally strike out on her own attempt to overthrow Chronos, and sometimes you'll cross paths with her in a random encounter. After that, Nemesis will disappear further towards her goal, but as game director Greg Kasavin recalls, developer Supergiant was forced to react to a move that they didn't expect Nemesis to make.
"There was a bug where Nemesis just ran into a Chaos Gate," Kasavin explains to Edge magazine. While Melinoë tends to move through each encounter through a door at the end of the arena, sometimes, a gate will spawn in the floor, allowing her to slip between realms, speaking to the entity that sits at the creation of the universe. While Mel can dive between dimensions with relative ease, that's not something that Nem is supposed to be able to do.
"My immediate impulse was: 'no, let's disallow that'," Kasavin admits. "The story does not account for Nemesis going into Chaos. But then we were like, 'wait a minute, that's awesome'." Buoyed by the rule of cool, Kasavin turned that bug into a narrative feature in the game, not only allowing Nemesis to enter chaos, but allowing her, Melinoë, and Chaos themselves to acknowledge it with new voice lines.
"Every so often, we're surprised by the dynamism of these systems and then have to amke that decision of, like, should this even be allowed. Can we do the work to support this properly? As much as possible, we try to leave it and have it feel supported by the world of the game. These examples sometimes take time to merge, and to respond to. But that's the fun part of the process."
The likelihood of encountering Nemesis in the same room as a Chaos Gate seems very low, and the chance that she then chooses to enter that gate are even lower, given the other routes out of each encounter. But accounting for all those possibilities can help make a game very special - I'm reminded of Baldur's Gate 3, if nothing else. There's still some way to go before Hades 2 gets its full release, but the depth of systems on display here is testament to something extremely good on the horizon.
Playing Hades 2 in Early Access is the best way to experience Supergiant's evolving roguelike.
