Supergiant Games itself does not yet know if it’s going to make Hades 2. Or any sort of direct follow-up to the critically and commercially successful rogue-lite game set in the Greek underworld, going by any name, really.
“We don’t know,” Greg Kasavin tells NME when we ask him if Hades will be a ‘one-and-done’ deal like Supergiant’s previous titles Bastion, Transistor and Pyre.
“We have never known in the past what comes next. We never plan our next game until we’re done with the one that we’re currently working on. And I think part of the reason is that there’s a little superstition around that for our team because we want to make sure that we’re fully committed to the thing that we’re currently working on instead of, you know, counting our chickens before they hatch.”
But Supergiant’s reticence to start on a new game whilst it’s still putting the spit and polish on the Xbox and PlayStation versions of Hades (launching August 13) isn’t purely down to studio superstition.
“So much of what informs our future games comes from our experience of working on the games before,” explains Kasavin. “Hades is very directly and significantly inspired by our third game, Pyre, which if you’re familiar with it is very, very different from Hades in most respects. So I can say whatever we do next will be heavily informed by our work experience with Hades – but that doesn’t guarantee much of anything about the form it’ll take.”
So if you were hoping for another game following the events of the quick-witted, hot-heeled firebrand that is Zagreus, don’t hold your breath. But it’s not all bad news for anyone that’s fallen in love with gaming’s own bisexual prince of darkness: the team that brought him and his unconventional family of gods and goddesses together isn’t planning on disbanding any time soon.
“What we know for sure is we want to stick together as a team and keep making games for as long as we can, and for as long as we have such a generous audience around that enjoys our work and lets us keep making them.”
Kasavin tells us that Supergiant will continue doing what it’s done to date – retaining elements of past games that have worked, rather than discarding everything and starting again wholesale – when it comes to putting its next project together.
“Hades still ended up being very different from our previous games, though players that know our past works may be able to see the connective tissue. We will want to build on what we’ve learned, even if it’s in a very indirect way.
“The atmosphere of our games, the way that the narrative and the play experience interacts and is harmonious, the focus on character-driven narratives, the attention to the artwork and the music… They are things that will remain. The way we let you play how you desire to play, without shoe-horning you into one style… Those are all things that we’ve cared about in every one of our projects and, I imagine, we’ll continue to care about that, with whatever we proceed to do.”
Hades will be available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and PS5 on August 13. And if you’re an Xbox Game Pass subscriber, you’ll be able to play the game on day one.
The Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 versions run at 4K at a target 60 frames per second, whereas the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of Hades run at 1080p at a target 60 frames per second.
